Stevenson (here): Frida Orupabo’s collaged works continue to gather art world momentum. This 2022 work from the Nigerian Norwegian artist feels filled with the tension of being unseen, the clothing constricting the figure while the face looks out with resignation. Priced at €38000.

Stevenson (here): As seen in this image from her recent “Æther” series, Mame-Diarra Niang’s photographs continue to get more and more ethereal and diffused. The French photographer has often used expressive blur and distortion to explore the nature of memory (especially as applied to Black bodies), and this image pushes further toward misty abstraction, with flared halos and washed out colors. Priced at €11800.

Stevenson (here): This 2024 collage by the Dutch artist Viviane Sassen was tucked back in the corner of this booth, out of the way and encouraging a more up-close encounter. An extension of her “Cadavre Exquis” series, it plays with body parts and natural patterns in a more overtly Surrealist mode. Priced at €9500.

La Patinore Royale Bach (here): The British photographer Stephen Gill’s projects always seem to have a unique edge of conceptual cleverness. In this work from “The Pillar” (from 2015-2019), Gill planted a wooden post in his yard and captured birds (with an automated shutter) as they landed on it. His results are something akin to improvised bird selfies, with two birds fighting for squawking dominance in this particular picture. Priced at €4800.

La Patinore Royale Bach (here): This 2020 collage by Carmen Winant comes from her “Togethering” series. In it, a connected cycle unfolds, from water, to the female nude body in nature, and ultimately to dangling skeletons in a protective huddle, with birth, life, and death linked into a resonant progression. Priced at €11500.

Bruce Silverstein (here): While this booth was brimming with vintage rarities, this 2024 landscape by the German photographer Elger Esser provided some 21st century energy. Printed on copper plate, the image glowed with burnished warmth, the village of Bages in southern France reflected in the nearby water with subtle grandeur. While Esser’s aesthetic approach may seem patiently retrograde, he continues to challenge the landscape genre in gracefully thoughtful ways. Priced at €29000.

Fraenkel (here): This booth was a tightly edited retrospective survey of the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto, glancing across various bodies of work, many of which would easily merit a spot in any 21st century photographic canon. The Japanese photographer’s most recent series “Brush Impressions” goes cameraless, using wide strokes of chemical fixer on paper to create unique calligraphic abstractions. This oval gesture evokes the moon, while a second work across the booth had a more pinkish tint created with solarization. The works harken back to serene ink drawings from centuries past, re-considered with a contemporary photographic twist. Priced at $60000.

Les Filles du Calvaire (here): While Todd Hido’s well known series “House Hunting” started back in the 1990s, this image was made in 2018, bringing the project into the present. Interior glow (as generally seen from nighttime windows) activates the images, with this composition further enlivened by the snowpack, the parked car, and the glorious purple sky. Priced at €5800.

Les Filles du Calvaire (here): The Belgian artist Katrien de Blauwer continues to mine the photocollage genre for intriguingly pared down outcomes. In her newest series “Old Sweater Gets New Uses”, she creates two-part collages of women in empty rooms, leaving each scene with a sense of balanced mystery. Priced at €1800 each.

Les Filles du Calvaire (here): Kourtney Roy’s 2024 project “Last Paradise” takes us on a surreal journey to the Adriatic coast during the off season. Set amid deserted beach cabins and empty resorts, stylized models pose with desperate abandon, creating an exhausted end-of-times mood. Priced at €5900.

Mariane Ibrahim (here): Lorraine O’Grady’s newest artistic persona “The Knight, or Lancela Palm-and-Steel” made her first appearance at the artist’s 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum (reviewed here). Mixing Renaissance armor with tropical plants (alluding to her Jamaican heritage), the concealed figure fights invisible foes and deconstructs multiple facets of Black identity. Priced at $45000.

Edwynn Houk (here): This 2024 work finds the French photographer Valérie Belin continuing to explore the densely packed co-mingling of faces and snippets from comic books, this time in the tactile form of the heliogravure. This process choice amplifies the grittiness of the halftone printed comic remnants, giving the resulting black-and-white compositions more of a textural newsprint feel. The graphic elements and balloon dialogues seem to fade in and out, like competing voices and imperatives bouncing around in the head of the central figure. Priced at €16000.

Edwynn Houk (here): Sissi Farassat is likely best known for her photographs embroidered with stitching, sequins, or sparkling crystals. In her new series “Revalation”, she pares back that elaborate decorative impulse, interrupting anonymous found photographs with the precise placement of the mat windows. Here she cleaves a woman in two, creating what appears like mismatched halves. Metaphorically, we might see divisions of female identity, split personalities, or aggregations of gaze. Priced at €2500.

Edwynn Houk (here): Looking and reflection populate this collaged relief work by the American artist Ron Norsworthy. Built up using stacked layers of imagery affixed to wood panels, the setting has literal depth and texture, while the central figure uneasily shifts and repeats. Riffing on the myth of Narcissus, the scene wrestles with the complex construction of contemporary Black identity. Priced at $38000.

Howard Greenberg (here): This elemental snowscape by Jungjin Lee comes from her newest series “Unseen”. Made in Iceland in 2024, the landscapes are reduced to texturally calligraphic areas of rich inky black and pure white, in this case encouraging land and sky to merge into one uniform area of meditative whiteness, almost like an erasure. Priced at $17500.

RGR (here): Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s 2019 series “Sacred Geometry” finds the artist inhabiting appropriated images of the ancient rocks of Ingapirca, an Ecuadorean site filled with stone walls and archaeological ruins. In a manner similar to Laurie Simmons’ walking objects, disembodied legs and arms emerge from the collaged rock forms, the ritualistic movements taking the forms of carrying, weighing, and holding. Priced at €6500.

1 Mira Madrid (here): This triptych documents a recent street art intervention by the Spanish artist LUCE. Round holes were made in the awning of a shuttered business, the canvas cutouts then aligned in a sculptural stripe. The physical work is of course activated by light, with cast shadows from the holes temporarily marking the nearby walls as the sun passes overhead. Priced at €12000.

Carlier Gebauer (here): This bright cherry blossom view by the British photographer Paul Graham comes from his recent series “Verdigris”. Up close, the image degrades into elegantly approximate digital blurs and distortions, created by the subtle movement of the wind as captured by multiple high resolution exposures. The series breaks down the obvious clichés of transient floral beauty, crafting a fresh technologically-driven feeling of natural awe. Priced at $30000.

Bigaignon (here): Chris McCaw’s time-based arcs of light across the sky, as seen in this recent image from his ongoing “Sunburn” series, are another novel body of photographic work from the 21st century. This particular example uses the land as an anchor, with the sun traversing across four separate unique prints, the heat of the long exposures literally charring the paper. More examples of his various projects can be found in his 2023 retrospective photobook (reviewed here). Priced at €48000.

Klemm’s (here): This blue cap image by Viktoria Binschtok is part of a new series of works exploring digital semiotics, in the form of an alphabet of Internet slang. For those that might not know, a blue cap emoji signifies a lie, and in Bischtok’s work, she has created her own version of the symbol, complete with a seemingly perfect new hat and a fake background. It’s a clever project rooted in the rapidly evolving waves of contemporary visual communication.
Priced at €12000.

Klemm’s (here): I’ve always been a particular fan of Erica Baum’s dog-eared works, finding their eccentric chance poetry, and their strict formal geometries, consistently enchanting. This 2009 turned page work is no exception, creating an approximation of a conversation that doesn’t quite coalesce. Conceptually sophisticated and visually refined, the series continues to age well. Priced at €4800.

Webber (here): The process behind Peter Tomka’s recent multi-panel black-and-white photographs (from the series “Bachelor Suite”) is worth understanding. The artist’s own images as well as found pictures are projected through a glory hole cut in the artist’s mattress (where his head would normally lay) and through a wall in his apartment, into another room, where they are cast onto photographic paper. The resulting works bear the hallmarks of low resolution digital projection, with tactile gridlines creating a sense of gritty impermanence. The resonance of the crashed barnstormer is perhaps more metaphorical, an risk-taking artist performing stunts that sometimes end badly. Priced at €8500.

Rolf Art (here): It seems fitting to end this report with Roberto Huarcaya’s 30 meter long photogram of the Amazonian jungle (an “Amazonogram”), if only because it’s a contemporary piece that leverages a vintage technology (the photogram) in remarkably ambitious ways. Made in the moonlight, with the help of local Indigenous peoples, the work unspools with layers of leaves, water, insects, and flares of light, creating an enveloping and atmospheric journey into the largely unseen nocturnal world. It’s an immersively rich piece, likely destined for an institution that can display it in all its unruly glory. Priced at €160000.