Art Miami got knocked about in its hometown with the arrival there of Basel Miami Beach, finally making its peace with the invader rather as the Anglos did with the Saxons. But now they’ve gone Viking and have invaded the shores of New York, occupying the very pier dominated by the Armory Fair a couple of months ago in a bid to give Frieze a run for its money. As in Miami so in New York, this fair is a less classy affair than its rival but seems like a more friendly shopping environment for the middle class millionaire. Pier 94 is a visually noisier environment than Randalls Island: there isn’t the savvy, curatorial division into subsections of the British fair, and booths can seems stacked high in contrast to the almost museum-feel of Frieze. You get galleries at Art Miami from places where you don’t imagine they have taste and it turns out they indeed perhaps don’t. But you do get serious players who bring materials we need to see and then proceed to display them with panache: a wall of Chatal Joffe, for instance, at Galerie Forsblom, from Helsinki, provided a salon hang of smaller, earlier pieces that complements the British artist’s stunning new show, in Chelsea, at Cheim & Read. Scandinavian galleries abound at this fair: Wetterling Gallery, for instance, from Stockholm, displayed several sumptuous, mesmerizingly layered photographic works by Doug and Mike Starn near the entrance to the fair; the Starn brothers were also to be seen at London gallery HackelBury Fine Art with one of their anti-hierarchical treescapes of the kind that greet commuters at their masterful South Ferry subway station. DAVID COHEN
Doug and Mike Starn, Structure of Thought 26, 2001-2013 MIS and Lysonic inkjet prints on Thai mulberry, gampi and tissue papers with wax, encaustic and varnish, 57-3/4 x 84 inches, Edition of three. © Doug & Mike Starn Artists Rights Society (ARS) / Courtesy HackelBury Fine Art, London
Art Miami New York at Pier 94, May 14-17, Saturday 12-8PM, Sunday 12-6PM