Frieze New York at the Shed, in the corporate neighborhood of Chelsea known as Hudson Yards, is the one-stop shop of contemporary art fairs, offering a comprehensive sampling of art from cubism to last week. It won’t blow your mind, but it’s liberally stocked with excellent paintings and, in this edition’s Focus section (curated by Lumi Tan), a surprising number of whimsical little sculptures.
Among 65 exhibiting galleries from 26 countries is a strong Latin American contingent, including a beautiful two-person show at Nara Roesler (D12) of work by the Brazilian artists Jonathas de Andrade and Marcelo Silveira, and a specially installed short film by the Argentine conceptual artist David Lamelas. There are also substantial solos by Virginia Jaramillo (Hales C7) and Akinsanya Kambon (Ortuzar and Marc Selwyn Fine Art B16) and a singularly ridiculous — but not to be missed — pair of Marcel Duchamp potholders (Thaddaeus Ropac A3).
Second Floor
Genesis Belanger’s porcelain and stoneware flowers, fruit and office accessories at Perrotin (B3) adeptly straddle the line between critical irony and sheer, uncritical fun, making them a perfect fit for the curious hybrid of commerce and aesthetics that is the contemporary art fair. Look out for similar work in several nearby booths, including the sculpture series, consisting of small rocks tied to boards, that the Korean artist Seung-tak Lee calls “Godret Stone at Gallery Hyundai (B6) and Ming Fay’s oversize fruit at Kurimanzutto (B1).
At David Zwirner (B12) abstraction is still the prestige art par excellence — and the asset-class art. These four large canvases by Joe Bradley demonstrate why. With their writhing shapes, contorted lines, emotional impasto and major-key primary colors, they take in an enormous range of painterly possibility, dominating sightlines from a distance even as they reward close-up looking.
Fourth Floor
Everything about the Syrian-born painter Anas Albraehe’s lush scenes of ambiguous figures sleeping in clouds, at Mor Charpentier (C9), seems too straightforward. The brushwork is thick but uncomplicated, the colors are jewel-like and slightly dreamy, and the evocative ambiguity of the scenes themselves is as transparent as a children’s book. But somehow all this earnestness flips over into a different kind of sophistication, one that is well complemented by the Colombian artist Nohemi Pérez’s enormous charcoal seascape and tiny embroidered bark of refugees, also on display here.
The gallery Champ Lacombe (F8) is featuring the Catalan artist Antoni Miralda, who, in the mid-1980s, added a Statue of Liberty-style crown to the top of a TriBeCa restaurant and christened it El Internacional. (Locals may remember the siteas El Teddy’s.) For two years, the restaurant was a nexus of downtown Manhattan celebrity and flamboyant, food-related performance art. After it closed, Miralda shifted to a series of processions and performances celebrating the “marriage” of the real Statue of Liberty and Barcelona’s Columbus monument. Drawings, videos and ephemera from Miralda’s studio take you back to a time that may not have been simpler but was definitely more fun.
Almine Rech (D4) may be Frieze’s very Frieziest booth, offering a brisk, blue-chip jaunt through 20th-century art history and into the 21st, from a pair of fine Picassos and an exquisite portrait by Marie Laurencin to a vacuum-formed plastic work by Tom Wesselmann and a glowing pink James Turrell installation. My favorite was a large, asymmetrical, gray-on-gray study of three tulips by the American painter Joe Andoe, titled and dated, with spidery numerals scraped into the surface, “2/24/26.” It’s not easy to make something at once so delicate and so memorable.
General admission tickets are $92 ($38 for students). May 13-17 at the Shed, 545 West 30th Street, Manhattan; 212-463-7488; frieze.com.
