Can New York maintain as many artwork gala’s as its calendar presently has? As New York Artwork Week dragged into its second week yesterday, I—and I’m certain I’m not alone—started to marvel. With Frieze and its satellites behind us, this week brings Unbiased and TEFAF New York, which each opened to VIPs Thursday.
With a 1 p.m. start-time, TEFAF, the US iteration of the Dutch truthful in Maastricht, was bustling and crowded by the beginning of its second hour. Maybe that may have extra to do with the truth that aisles have been so slim that navigating them was an impediment in itself, or the truth that TEFAF’s sales space structure feels so intrusive that you simply neglect you’re standing in considered one of New York’s architectural gems, the Drill Corridor of the Park Avenue Armory.
And that doesn’t even start to get us to what’s truly on view. Whereas TEFAF prides itself on presenting objects from antiquity to at the moment in all types—visible arts, design and furnishings, and jewellery—this version appeared lackluster. Add to that the truth that the truthful’s floral preparations, a signature of TEFAF, have been additionally moderately drab, missing within the abundance of tulips that marked the truthful’s arrival in 2016, the place the flowers defied gravity and the champagne and oysters have been flowing. (There have been oysters Thursday however they too lacked the panache of the times of yore.) However because the day drew to an in depth, I did obtain just a few self-reported gross sales reviews from galleries, so there’s that.
Under, the very best of what’s on view on the 2024 version of TEFAF New York, which runs by Tuesday, Might 14.
-
Hughie Lee-Smith at Karma
Picture Credit score: Courtesy Karma Upstairs, New York’s Karma gallery is displaying the vary of artists it has proven up to now a number of years, with distinctive items starting from Gertrude Abercrombie to Reggie Burrows Hodges. However the spotlight is 2 early works (each oil on Masonite) by Hughie Lee-Smith that present the vary of the emotional depth he imbued in his artwork. A pensive nude sits atop a chunk of crimson material, her head in her hand—misplaced in thought towards an inky black-gray background. The opposite reveals a girl in a inexperienced costume set towards a panorama that doesn’t fairly appear to be it’s drawn from actuality, whereas missing the surrealist and existential inflections that may outline the artist’s later work. On the left, discover the curve of a wire snapping from the fence, a precursor to the flitting pink ribbons that recur in a lot of his greatest works.
-
Rebecca Salsbury James at Salon 94
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Salon 94 has on view a number of items, made between the Thirties and ’50s, by underknown modernist Rebecca Salsbury James, who at one level was on the heart of the New York artwork world, married to photographer Paul Strand and mates with Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Salsbury James’s method to modernism centered on utilizing people artwork as a leaping off level and he or she painted primarily nonetheless lifes and different style scenes. However her method was fairly not like anybody else: reverse work on glass. It provides these items a sure rigidity between transparency and opacity that’s unbelievable. My favourite is Seashells on the Sand (ca. 1935) displaying a pink shell cozying as much as a white shell, in entrance of a chunk of driftwood; she devoted the piece to O’Keeffe.
-
Giorgio Morandi and George Ohr at David Zwirner
Picture Credit score: Courtesy David Zwirner David Zwirner has on view a moderately pleasant pairing of the work of Giorgio Morandi and the ceramics of George Ohr. Although working a long time aside and throughout vastly totally different geographies (late Nineteenth-century Mississippi for Ohr and early to mid-Twentieth century Italy for Morandi), Ohr’s otherworldly sculptures improve the cups, jugs, and different vessels that Morandi depicts. The place Morandi paints in muted tones during which the nonetheless lifes generally seem to meld into the background, the types sculpted by Ohr, the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi, are otherworldly, barely misshapen, and deep in coloration. Morandi by no means seemed higher and Ohr is lastly re-emerging into the highlight.
-
Norberto Nicola at Nara Roesler
Picture Credit score: Charles Roussel One of the best abstraction you’ll discover at TEFAF doesn’t make use of oils or acrylics, however is an all-over, knotty feast of intersecting vibrant colours, made out of textiles, made lengthy earlier than fiber skilled its latest resurgence within the artwork world. Norberto Nicola’s Ciranda (2002) is a large number of woven, tufted, and braided pure fibers coloured with pure dyes. Its title borrows its title from a Brazilian youngsters’s dance that’s just like “Ring Across the Rosie.” Nicola, who died in 2007, is well-known in Brazil as a pioneer of textile artwork; his work was the primary fiber-based piece to be ever settle for by the Sao Paulo Biennal. Though the MFA Houston owns a piece by him, he isn’t as well-known within the US, probably because of the truth that his property doesn’t work with an American gallery. (Roesler doesn’t formally symbolize the property however is displaying him at TEFAF as a part of a sales space centered on varied types and interpretations of fiber and hand-crafted work.) I hope this modifications quickly as this work is simply scratching the floor.
-
Chung Chang-Sup at PKM
Picture Credit score: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Made by adhering Tak fiber from Korean mulberry timber to cotton, the work of Chung Chang-Sup, a first-generation member of the Dansaekhwa motion, are texturally wealthy, prizing materiality above all else. On view in Seoul-based gallery PKM’s sales space are three such monochrome examples: an off-white one and two in a shade of patina-bronze inexperienced. Within the white canvas, the Tak fiber is particularly pronounced alongside the sides, showing to border the middle of the canvas, the place extra off-white tones await. Within the bigger of the inexperienced works, the canvas is now divided in two like a diptych, with each the borders and facilities lush within the crumpled tree pulp.