Salon Zürcher is to fair weeks what New Hampshire is to primary elections. Armory Week 2017 kicks off Monday with the 16th edition of this boutique fair, an early bird special that hands the keys to Zürcher’s Bleecker Street premises to six galleries from Paris, Brussels, Oslo, Provincetown (MA) and Hangzhou, China, whose Inna Art Space’s booth is pictured here.

Tuesday, February 28: Moving Image New York at The Tunnel, 269 11th Avenue

Jefferson Pinder’s Afro-Cosmonaut/Alien (White Noise) is, according to his gallery, Curator’s Office of Bathesda, Md., “an escapist video narrative that ends in destruction when the protagonist plummets back to Earth after a mystical space journey. Like the doomed Icarus of Ancient Greek myth, the epic fall comes after reaching a brilliant zenith that is both mesmerizing and lethal. This white-faced Butoh-inspired performance is a crude metaphor of the civil rights legacy. Taking cues from experimental films, Pinder plants himself within the work, asking the viewers to watch the images of propulsion and power.”

Wednesday, March 1: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

Spring/Break was the most anarchic and exuberant of the fairs back in the days when it was staged in the old USPS administrative offices – a David Lynch-like time-capsule of New Deal bureacracy. Now Spring/Break has been given a break in the form of two floors of a glass and steel high-rise 22 stories above Times Square. But there is no corresponding corporateness in the resulting display. The organizing principle remains: each room has its own curators who sometimes include the exhibiting artists themselves. It was gratifying for artcritical to see some of its own writers among the curators. Eric Sutphin, for instance, has brought together an inspired coupling of New York School painter Rosemarie Beck, who was active from the 1950s onwards with classically sourced, abstractly composed multi-figure compositions, and contemporary mannerist, Angela Dufresne, with her swirling, voluptuous, cinematic scenes. Each display has a neat little office of its own, with spectacular views of the midtown skyline. Too spectacular, sometimes, as it can overwhelm what’s on view. Inspired, therefore, was the decision to hang works in the blinds-drawn windows in one mini show, Thing Gap Method, selected by artcritical writer Megan Liu Kincheloe and featuring Sophia Flood, Sascha Ingber, Kelly McCafferty, Sarah Tortora and Kincheloe herself, whose Dice (2017) is pictured here. DAVID COHEN

Thursday, March 2: The Armory Show at Piers 92 & 94

It’s a good year for texture. Well, so is any year probably, and a good year for anything else if all you want to do is scatter evidence for some such glib hunch amidst the labyrinth that is the city’s biggest art fair, conceptual bread crumbs, so to speak, to trace your way back to the front door. But as the first piece to grab my eye was a fabric work by Jayson Musson at Philadelphia’s Fleisher-Ollman texture became my trail. Next stop, a cunningly camp “salon” for Florine Stettheimer, presented by Jeffrey Deitch, showing latter-day acolytes of the society heiress pioneer of the American avant garde where a 1990s shlock horror wedding cake of impasto by the unjustly forgotten Thomas Trosch abstractly emulated Florine’s Harlem beach scene that presides over the display. From there it was texture everywhere, whether the geological encrustations of Bosco Sodi, preponderant in the fair and to be seen, for instance, at Galeria Hilario Galguera of Mexico City, Blain Southern and Paul Kasmin; the very 1950s-looking sculpted netted grids of Michelle Grabner at James Cohan; or the painterly reliefs of Miguel Barcelo at Thaddeus Ropac. The tactility can even manifest vicariously, as in the Vik Muniz Isis print of a strangely mottled version of Picasso’s The Dreamer, at Edwin Houk. Haptic experiences grounded the gaze amidst the accelerating flow of spectacle. DAVID COHEN

Featured item from The Armory Show 2017: Mernet Larsen at Various Small Fires

Various Small Fires, the Los Angeles gallery, has a solo show of preparatory sketches by Tampa, Florida-based painter Mernet Larsen in the Presents section of The Armory Show 2017. Larsen, who also has a work on view at James Cohan Gallery’s booth at the same fair, has only recently come into her own since retiring from a distinguished career in art education, memories of which pervade her frequent return to the motif of the faculty meeting. Rooted in an earlier abstract practice as well as explorations of Japanese prints, Larsen’s jocular imagery thinly disguises her fascination with unconventional perspective systems. She pursues radical spatial solutions that eschew conventional single-point perspective in favor of parallel perspective, reverse perspective and eccentric, seemingly improvised but in fact rigorous fusions of different systems within the same work. By destabilizing the location of the viewer, sometimes indeed to the point of inducing vertigo, she forces us to know, rather than merely see, the situation. DAVID COHEN

Friday, March 3: VOLTA NY at Pier 90, 12th Avenue @ 50th Street

Ruth Hardinger’s striking Volta display at David&Scheweitzer Contemporary draws together disparate forces: the artist’s passionate environmental activism, her longstanding affinity with Mesoamerican culture, and historically informed, critically sharpened investigations of working methods. These are all felt in works such works as Bundle of Rights, a sculpture in plaster and rope, and Reading the Clouds, a tapestry collaboration with Mexican weavers, seen at the Piers. Meanwhile, back at the rancheros, that is to say 56 Bogart Street, the same gallery presents an ongoing retrospective overview of Hardinger work in different media. There are tapestries, a calendar, hanging works in paper and assembled sculptures. Obsessive-compulsive minimalist hatch drawings worked on varyingly rough and smooth surfaces are installed in a grid that conforms to the Golden Rule. Dating from the 1970s, this work manages to resonate with a recent, altogether more robust and spontaneous cast concrete and found slate sculptural arrangement. What binds these efforts across the decades is the humble yet inventive presentness of their maker. DAVID COHEN

Saturday, March 4: The Art Show at Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue @ 66th Street

The New York art fair scene can be confusing to the uninitiated: the most prominent fair, The Armory Show, takes place at a convention center on the Hudson while the Park Avenue Armory hosts an unrelated fair of its own, The Art Show by the Art Dealer’s Association of America. The work shown in the actual armory tends to be more conservative than the offerings of most of the other fairs, but there can be some surprises. PPOW’s booth this year is devoted to the work of Betty Tompkins, an artist who has been painting portraits of the pudendum for over forty years. Today she is best known for her colossal coital canvases, but her smaller works on paper, such as “Censored Grid #1” from 1974, provide a more intimate view of an intimate act. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Independent (Art Fair) at Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street

Memo to Independent Art Fair, organizers and exhibitors alike: Enough already, put up some labels.

In the early days of the Basel Art Fair (the real one, in Basel, Switzerland) galleries would get an official reprimand from the all-powerful committee if the labels didn’t include prices. Dealers complained that having to ask was an icebreaker with collectors. But to have to ask who the artist is – never mind the title, medium, date? This is elitist, pretentious and anti-intellectual. To the innocent “general public” this says, this isn’t for you folks. To professionals it is impertinent and irritating, putting one in the humiliating position of asking when you half-know and gobbling up precious time in doing so. For new, unknown artists with foreign names it is a total downer: who is going to remember it, next time? And for collectors, having to beg for basic information has all the novelty and subtlety of a robo-telecall.

Despite this mishegas. Independent is still one of the most pleasing visitor experiences, thanks in no small measure to the gorgeous venue. My epiphanies on this visit were mostly three-dimensional for some reason: Beverly Buchanan’s shack constructions at Andrew Edlin; a bafflingly kinky saddle mounted on a scaffold “horse” by Magali Reus at London’s Approach; and a dynamically voluptuous bronze by the late Hungarian-born Norwegian sculptor Ervin Løffler, exquisitely installed by Oslo gallery VI, VII with works in dye on canvas by young New Yorker Landon Metz (Photo: Sebastiano Pellion) DAVID COHEN

Sunday, March 5: NADA New York at Skylight Clarkson North, 572 Washington Street

A work by Brenda Goodman presented by Jeff Bailey at NADA, the New Art Dealers Association, 2017 fair. NADA was founded in 2002, launching its first fair that year in Miami. This year sees some changes in its New York outing: the time slot has switched from Frieze Week to Armory Week, and they have a new venue in west Soho. In tune with the self-styled progressive profile of the association, half of ticket sales are to be donated to the ACLU. DAVID COHEN

This year’s iteration of the NADA fair was probably the most visually exhausting of the art fair week group, with dozens of galleries competing for attention in micro-booths that barely allowed one person to stand comfortably inside. Most of the galleries were from around New York but there were some international standouts, such as a selection of digital prints by Chris Dorland, courtesy of Super Dakota gallery from Brussels. Dorland’s glitchy work, made using a broken scanner and printed on eight foot tall aluminum panels, offered something monumental and digital in a fair that leaned towards the modest and traditional. Pictured: Untitled (corporate cannibal), 2017. ROMAN KALINOVSKI

Monday, March 6: Spring/Break Art Show, 4 Times Square

As befits the most youthful of the fairs, Spring/Break has an extra 24 hours of energy and determination than the others: it is the one fair in Fair Week that makes it to the Monday of the next. And here is an artist who knows how to capture zest. Aneta Bartos, whose dad Zbigniew Bartos has a lifetime of competitive bodybuilding behind him. Naturally, it was to her that he would turn, aged 68, to capture his musculature in its last glory. A room of buff, nicely toned father-daughter photographs takes home trophies for audacity and composure. DAVID COHEN

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January 18 through February 22, 2015
348 South 4th Street (between Hooper and Keap streets)
Brooklyn, 347 776 1023

For “LIVE/WORK,” Annette Wehrhahn shows a new series of paintings and other propositions that revisit the indeterminable boundary between the space dedicated to living and the space for work — with the products of each infiltrating each other as equals. Black work boots and heeled pumps sit on a ledge above and in the periphery of paintings, some works insert materials like drop cloth that point back to the conditions of their making, and others include personal effects. Hide (2015) is a shirt with acrylic on canvas. The fabric, suffused with paint, is fixed and flattened with long sleeves outstretched and a jam of wrinkles permanently set. It’s worth noting that Wehrhahn is a founding member of Soloway, and her apartment and studio are on site behind the storefront exhibition space — putting Wehrhahn in the middle of the project that she and her collaborators have successfully built over the past five years, and amplifying the live-work dynamic. On this occasion, the exhibition intentionally extends into Wehrhahn’s domestic space in back where Candles (2014) hangs just inside against a lime green wall above the bed.

Werhahn’s Portable Cave Paintings relate the dimensions of the artist’s body against the work and exhibition space. The paintings are on swaths of unstretched canvas nearly as tall as the space is long, and in the earthy palette of Lascaux or Altamira. On the surface, Wehrhahn has traced her body with oil stick in overlapping seated or reclining configurations — physically marking and zoning the actual space of her body, and denoting presence like chalk outlines or a choreography diagram. The sienna, ochre, and umber oil crayons are rubbed into a waxy fictile residue that reveals tracks of activity, motion, footprints.

Most of the cave paintings are hung vertically from the ceiling, pierced with large metal grommets that liken the thick canvas to hide. Some are strung up on big hooks and another is fished through the rope of a laundry pulley as if it could be moved to alternately obscure the storefront window or the front door. For Wehrhahn, the portability of the paintings suggests a sort of nomadism. Approaching “LIVE/WORK” through the term’s associations with housing classifieds, real estate development, and gentrification, the relation to the figure to space in these works is also reflective of Wehrhahn’s considerations on how spaces like hers and others affect the surrounding neighborhood. Artists inevitably begin the neighborhood transformation that ultimately prices everyone out, and contributing, in some sense, “to our own extinction,” as she describes it.

Wehrhahn chooses to distribute the figurative cave paintings among a series of winsome, abstract, processed-based paintings — perhaps to play with another sort of artificial delineation. Works in this second set are all on roughly octagonal and ovoid-shaped wood panels. Shape with Holes (2015) bleeds matte black over primary blue and green oil paint, topped with shiny black enamel that crinkled as it set. The surface was then drilled with a hole saw — punching out a scatter plot of circular eyes that variously reveal the painted under-layers, the fresh wood beneath, or the wall behind. Table (2014) is coated in white milk paint and marked with similar drilled impressions, but with the addition of functional metal legs attached. Seat (2014) bridges these works with the Portable Cave Paintings by depicting a single chalk-lined seated figure — the aerial tracing of a rear end and legs Indian-style over the middle of the painting. Sitting at the center of the panel, you could form the shape by drawing a circle around yourself — turning at each of the interstices to continue the line. The scale of these works is roughly an arm’s length from the shape’s center, and the other abstract wood paintings, like Candle (2014), take the same scale that Seat seems to personalize.

Exhibiting her abstractions with the cave painting’s silhouettes leaves the trace of the figure on everything. That fugitive quality enables the works, when taken together, to achieve some of that distinctive sense of presence/absence felt when looking at cave art and other ancient cultural material. And ultimately, it’s a pleasurable turn of operations to see someone taking back space through painting. The paintings are a departure from Werhahn’s previous work; bright, acidly colored silkscreen prints with patterns and textures that tangle with simple, contentious conversational phrases. However, the basic operation is familiar as Wehrhahn has a capacity for extracting expressive and convincing results through outwardly simple gestures, and both series seem sprung from the same headlong mixture of psychic intensity and material ease.

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Megan Liu Kincheloe’s ‘Hodler Unfriendly Edit’ (2012) is on view in Kaegan Sparks’ eponymously sparky group show at the Brooklyn non-profit through Sunday, November 11. Also on view, works by Beyza Boyacioglu, Lizzy De Vita, Lanny Jordan Jackson, Daniel J. Wilson, Jonathan Rajewski, Ilene Godofsky, Elizabeth Duffy, Nicholas Warndorf, Ellen Grossman, Francisco Westendarp, Murphy Chang, Jess Levey, JaeWook Lee, Laura Arena, Cheryl Yun, Luke Munn, Ian Addison Hall, Robert Brush, Cassandra Guan and Eddie Hopely.

Prolonged Exposure: A Recession Art Exhibition, November 3 – 11, 2012 at Invisible Dog, 51 Bergen Street, 718 260 8688

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