Spring is known in New York City for its abundance of art and design fairs. The centerpiece of this month-long artistic showcase is the Frieze Art Fair taking place on Randall’s Island (a short ferry ride from the Upper East Side and Midtown Manhattan) Thursday, May 2-Sunday, May 5.
Returning for its eighth year, the fair showcases some of the best in contemporary art. We spoke with several industry players at the VIP preview to find out what people are gravitating towards this year. "It’s one of my favorite New Yrok City fairs," says Casey Fremont, executive director of the Art Production Fund, which is dedicated to commissioning and producing ambitious public art projects. "The energy is so great, and the art feels fresh and interesting. And of course...the food!" Fremont cited Derrick Adams’ "Beauty World" at Vigo Gallery and how the Nick Cave was installed at Jack Shainman as some of her favorites from the first day.
"This year’s Frieze seemed absent the thematic fog of political outrage that hung over last year’s fair, and that, coupled with the absence of 2018’s heat wave, made the endless corridors feel really inviting," says Kate Bellin of art advisory firm Kate Bellin Contemporary. "This space—both literal and metaphoric—allowed me to focus on how craft-driven much of the art felt. Everyone’s making ceramics, textiles…and so much of the work had a straight-from-the-studio feel." Here are some of the insiders' must-see works on display.
"This year’s Frieze seemed absent the thematic fog of political outrage that hung over last year’s fair, and that, coupled with the absence of 2018’s heat wave, made the endless corridors feel really inviting," says Kate Bellin of art advisory firm Kate Bellin Contemporary. "This space—both literal and metaphoric—allowed me to focus on how craft-driven much of the art felt. Everyone’s making ceramics, textiles…and so much of the work had a straight-from-the-studio feel." Here are some of the insiders' must-see works on display.
The life-sized MTA bus installation by Red Grooms on view at Marlborough Gallery's booth in the Spotlight section of the fair garnered a lot of attention at the VIP day (it was last displayed at the gallery in 1995). You can board this immersive 22-foot installation (fabricated from leather, foam, wood and textiles) and sit with straphangers (seen here). It's Instagram bait, but a good one. The Spotlight section of the fair, overseen by Laura Hoptman (The Drawing Center's executive director), highlights solo presentations of 20th century artists who haven't gotten the credit they might deserve.
Devan Shimoyama's hooded sweatshirt made of silk flowers, beads and rhinestones on fabric mounted on the wall at Kavi Gupta's booth got a lot of looks. "My favorite booth hands down was Kavi Gupta," says cultural consultant Bettina Prentice. "I kept coming back again and again to the Devan Shimoyama work they were showing. It is a beautiful piece but that hooded sweatshirt also symbolizes a roadside memorial and radiates with pain and loss."
We've seen a lot of work by Yayoi Kusama at every fair over the last few years (not to mention museum and gallery exhibitions) but "Narcissus Garden" at Victoria Miro's booth managed to stop us in our tracks. The installation of mirrored spheres on the floor of the fair, first exhibited in 1966 at the Venice Biennale, create an expansive reflective field. Chris Ofili's "to take and to give" (2012), the artist's largest watercolor on canvas (9 meters) to date is inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and features female nymphs who blend into a waterfall, which envelops them.
303 Gallery showed two recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Sam Falls (who's had his work exhibited at institutions like the Hammer Museum): "Untitled (Serrano Garden, 2)" (2019), a glazed ceramic mounted on a honeycomb panel framed in brass, and "Calyx" (2019), a ceramic and steel sculpture. "In Falls’ ceramic tondo (as well as the staircase-shaped indoor-outdoor sculpture ), you can see the way the artist takes flora from wherever he is working and burns it into the piece, leaving behind the trace of that organic material, then fusing the piece together like tile," says Bellin. "It will be exciting to see how he creates a work that bridges the gap between media for his forthcoming project for the High Line."
