Stevenson Gallery (here): Viviane Sassen has spent the past few years experimenting with various kinds of overpainting, using the physicality of the gestures to interrupt her already disorienting photographs. This new work successfully experiments with colored ink, the orange stain creeping across the complicated inverted shadow/body composition, echoing the tone of the ground. Priced at €14000.
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (here): Katrien De Blauwer’s collages consistently do so much with so little. Often constructed from just a fragment of one image and a backdrop of old paper or a painted mark, they somehow find grace and nuance in a limited number of compositional variables. This work combines two images and two colored papers, creating a sense of romance and melancholy, perhaps fleeting or unfulfilled. Priced at €1200.
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (here): At first glance, I assumed this image by Noémie Goudal was made using digital tiling, fragmenting the rock form into geometric shards using software. But up close, it becomes clear that the shifting mass was astonishingly constructed with actual mirrors out in the landscape, making it’s dense aggregation of mismatched planes infinitely more fascinating and perplexing. Priced at €8000.
Galerie Karsten Greve (here): This booth is devoted to the work of Lynn Davis and her serene large scale images of architectural and natural wonders. This meditative ice house from Iran tapers gently upward, its layered surface captured in tactile warm tones. Priced at €26000.
Galerie Christophe Gaillard (here): This booth contains a solo presentation of Michel Journiac’s 1974 project 24 Hours in the Life of an Ordinary Woman. In it, Journiac dresses in women’s clothes and performs a variety of mundane domestic tasks, from making dinner, cleaning up, and washing clothes, to putting on makeup and lying in bed. Even when the scenes are staged with a dose of overt awareness, they smartly invert and undermine gender roles. Individual prints priced at €9000.
Loock Galerie (here): Alec Soth’s newest project focuses on portraiture, making pictures of sitters in their home environments. This image recalls the in-between awkwardness of some of Rineke Dijkstra’s best photographs, where tentative uncertainty and confident beauty struggle for dominance. The gauzy textures of the dress, the natural light, and the roominess of the space around her add to the restrained wonder. Priced at $20000.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia (here): This large scale image by Luc Delahaye turns a wearying taxi ride into a pieta. The dramatic pose of the boy is something out of a religious painting, with the arms shielding the eyes, the legs crossed and twisted, and the mother’s hands supporting him. Her downcast expression finishes the solitary scene, with the dusty windows and surrounding seats providing the compositional backdrop. Priced at €43000.
Fraenkel Gallery (here): Adam Fuss’ new flower images were made by sending roses through an etching press that flattens them into piles of ground pigment. Scanned and then printed on gessoed aluminum, the works have the texture of antique specimen albums or watercolors, the watery squished tones spreading beneath the tactile blossoms. Priced at $20000.
Fraenkel Gallery (here): The grouchy offhanded casualness of this early (1965) Lee Friedlander self-portrait provides a confrontational contrast to its careful composition. A double layer of mirrors interrupts the flattened space, while the light bulb and electrical socket unbalance the frame, the whole image coming together in a strange kind of harmony. A 1970s print, priced at $16000.
Taka Ishii Gallery (here): This 1967 female nude study by Kunié Sugiura is more layered than most multiple exposure compositions. Not only do the bodies overlap and intertwine, the tiling effect and flared shadows break the repetitions into discrete pieces. Priced at €12400.
Galerie Tanit (here): This image by Rania Matar is filled with relaxed glamour. Between the lushly painted floral surfaces that bisect the frame, the loose cascade of hair, and the extended arm, it has an enchanted fairy tale feel. Priced at €3900.
Daniel Blau (here): This technical image from NASA’s Orbiter V mission in 1967 constructs the surface of the moon from a series of photo strips. Each perfectly aligned slice is filled with pock marks and craters, the reassembled whole shaded from light to dark. Both artifact and artwork, it represents can-do scientific problem solving at its most quietly inspirational. Priced at €7000.
Galerie Kicken Berlin (here): This 1925 carton abstraction by Jaroslav Rössler is all hard edged geometries. The high contrast black and white shapes are organized in opposing echoes, creating movement and connection across the composition. Seemingly simple, but rich in sophistication. Priced at €60000.
Galerie Kicken Berlin (here): Choked in murky grey mist, this Albert Renger-Patzsch industrial study feels thick and dense. Set against the imposing bulk of a chemical tank, the single electrical tower is featured like a specimen tree, creating a three-way tonal harmony between light, middle, and dark. Priced at €88000.
Galerie Kicken Berlin (here): While the nested circular forms in this Floris Neusüss photogram are altogether mesmerizing, the “how he did it” questions of this image have got me wondering. Straight bright circles are one thing, but these interlocked arcs with sliced areas of opposing tones are quite another. Priced at €4500.
Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): This 1923 Modernist view of the machine shop at the Akeley Camera Company by Paul Strand is all crisp edges and burnished surfaces. The ability to make metal gleam and glow, while infusing the mundane machinery with a sense of industrial romance, is what makes photographs like this one so durbaly sublime. Priced at €78800.
Klemm’s (here): At first glance, I thought this pairing of images by Viktoria Binschtok was simply about overlapping or contemporary image overload, showing us the visual conflicts that can arise between adjacent pictures. But after a few moments, the interrelationships start to present themselves – the vertical alignment of the darks and lights as well as the palm tree and can edge, the echo (both in color and activity) of fire and vaping, and the play of the fragmented graphic lettering. Suddenly, the seemingly random is altogether smartly ordered. Priced at €40000.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): This György Kepes image from the late 1930s is brimming with complexity. A doubled silhouette creates an interior space where geometric circles and lines form a nest of angles, and then those darting rays are further enhanced by red, yellow, and blue gouache. It’s like a mind on overdrive, churning with dynamic energy. Already sold.
Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): In the race to extend photographic printing onto ever more arcane surfaces, Mishka Henner’s new project Landfall may take the prize. Henner has printed color images of 15 swirling hurricanes on the surfaces of vinyl records, each specific American storm accompanied by its own sounds. The boxed set comes with its own turntable and padded carrying case, but the real magic happens when the storms get “played”, their natural rotation mimicked by the spinning record, the howling winds emanating from the setup like mournful cries. Priced at $25000.
Yossi Milo Gallery (here): This early work by Hassan Hajjaj finds him recreating the American flag with soda cans and a photograph. Between the arabic writing on the Coke and Pepsi cans, the covered face, and the stars and stripes veil, he’s transformed the national symbol into an unexpected twist on aspirational association. Priced at €18000.
