Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 1 of 5

In just two short years, Frieze has quickly become the gold standard for art fairs in New York. Its soaring white tent offers the best visitor experience by far, with an abundance of bright airy light and wider aisles that lessen the feeling of being cramped into an endless rabbit warren. While too much time in any fair can generate sensory fatigue, a wandering amble through the booths at Frieze is about as good as it gets for all-in-one smorgasbord fair going.

Photography-wise, Frieze offers an almost perfect foil to the AIPAD photography fair. While there isn’t a single photography specialist booth on the map here, photographs are on display in abundance, with work on view from the top contemporary art galleries and lesser known venues from all over the world. For those interested in photography, Frieze becomes like a kind of treasure hunt, where each booth needs to be scoured for photographs that might be hiding somewhere. Since the photographs are not isolated out in a special section, they are seen in the messy, chaotic context of everything else that is going on in contemporary art, which provides some refreshing juxtapositions and unexpected visual connections. It’s an energetic, exciting slice of the medium.

This report is divided into five sections of image highlights. I have consciously avoided selecting works that have recently been on view in New York gallery shows or that I have already reviewed in another context, instead opting for fresh images new to the market or surprising finds from the past. Gallery names/links are followed by the artist/photographer name, the price of the work (in a dizzying array of currencies), and some notes and comments as appropriate. The booths are organized in my path through the fair, beginning at the South entrance.

GB Agency (here): Robert Breer, $91500. This work was made up of Kodachrome film strips laid between sheets of Plexiglas. It’s a jittering, almost blinking, series of fragments of Breer’s paintings.

Freymond-Guth Fine Arts (here): Stefan Burger, $4500. Sculptural still life assemblages, with an echo of Elad Lassry’s matchy-matchy colors and frames.

Victoria Miro (here): Alex Hartley, $30000. A diptych of rocky cave dwellings, with the surface of the print built up and carved out to provide selected areas of hand-crafted three dimensionality.

Galeria Fortes Vilaça (here): Mauro Restiffe, $2700. A layered geometric composition of wood inlay, wall molding, and linear white pipes.

303 Gallery (here): Collier Schorr, $26000. New work by Schorr, and no, I haven’t mistakenly rotated the image – it’s intensely vertical, almost like a crucifixion.

Galerie Mezzanin (here): Gerald Domenig, $7000. Conceptual exercises in formal balance and unexpected optical illusion.

Lisson Gallery (here): Richard Wentworth, £5500. A complex combination of found textures from his series of Occasional Geometries. Notice the print has been nailed to the supporting board (underneath a deep custom wood frame), giving it a more physical presence.

Galerie Martin Janda (here): Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, $10500. A scanned book image, with areas of angled distortion and pixelized colored squares. This was the only piece of glitch photography I saw in the entire fair, which was a bit of a surprise.

David Zwirner (here): Thomas Ruff, $2800 each (open editions). This booth was a solo sampler of Thomas Ruff, with mini rooms of the new photograms and blurred nudes, and selected works from other parts of his career (substrat, mars, interiors, large portraits, etc.) hung on side walls. I continue to find his early 1980s portraits to be among his best work.

Alison Jacques Gallery (here): Birgit Jürgenssen, $60000. Feminist social critique with an edge of almost Surreal dark humor.

Continue to Part 2 here.

Photography in the 2013 Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Part 2 of 2

Part 1 of this two-part Pulse report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Michael Hoppen Gallery (here): Sohei Nishino, $16500. This booth was a solo show of Nishino’s incredibly detailed bird’s eye maps of major cities. Each one (Berlin below) is stitched together from hundreds of individual images, mixing landmarks, everyday buildings, streets, and rivers into a dense tapestry of shifting dimensions.

Black Square Gallery (here): Pablo Lehmann, $2800. This work was a photograph that had been Xacto knifed into a thin scrim of words, casting patterned shadows on the mat behind, playing with the physicality of the print.

Zemack Contemporary Art (here): Yuval Yairi, $9000. This work (actually a self-portrait) is a digital composite of hundreds of images, bending the dimensions of the room into an unreal spatial panorama.

Eric Firestone Gallery (here): John Messinger, $15000. While the buzz in this booth was around the monumental color portraits of Warhol, Basquiat and Haring by Tseng Kwong Chi, Messinger’s gridded color abstraction of floating computer monitor blurs on the outside wall was more compelling.

Hous Projects (here): Haley Jane Samuelson, $3500. I liked the gothic fairy tale uncertainty of this girl clinging to the drooping limb.

Richard Levy Gallery (here): Manjari Sharma, $5450. While I had previously seen Sharma’s ongoing series of Indian deities at a portfolio review, when all done up in gold frames, they are even more eye-poppingly bold and grandly majestic.

Mayer Fine Art (here): Victoria Gaitan, $5000. Bright candy colored whiteness, with an unsettling undercurrent of excess.

Otto Zoo (here): Marjolijn De Wit, $2000. This booth was a solo show of De Wit’s collages of photography and ceramics, pairing landscapes with three-dimensional shards of pottery and industrial materials. The effect is both a clash of natural and man-made and a hard edged sculptural addition to a flat plane.

Taylor De Cordoba (here):  Danielle Nelson Mourning, $5200. I liked the misdirection in this self portrait, allowing the mirror to bend the visible space back in on itself.

FitzRoy Knox (here): Christine Flynn, $4600. The linear geometries of this image are augmented by a series of white striations that create a subtle screened effect over the left side of the image. Covered in a thin sheet of perfect resin, the end result has a physical, object quality.

Identity Art Gallery (here): Kurt Tong, $2500. A tricky tromp l’oeil mix of plastic birdcages, overgrown greenery, and a painted bamboo mural.

 

Photography in the 2013 Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Part 1 of 2

After stepping out of the drenching late morning rain with squelching shoes, I hit the ground running at Pulse yesterday and was surprised to find plenty of noteworthy photography on view. The mix was decidedly new and emerging, with very little vintage work and few marquee names on display. I’ve broken the report into two parts, given the large group of photographs worth talking about.

My approach to fair reporting continues to evolve, and following up on the positive feedback from my recent more image-centric AIPAD summary (here), I have once again opted for less tallying and counting of every last picture, spending more time on image highlights. What you’ll find below is an edited sample of what I found unusual or unexpected, with gallery names/links followed by the artist/photographer name, the price of the work, and some notes as appropriate.

z20 Galleria/Sara Zanin (here): Beatrice Pediconi, €8500. What looks like a misty Donald Sultan smoke ring is actually a diffusing paint in water motion study.

Steven Kasher Gallery (here): Daido Moriyama, $12000. Gritty checkerboard tile turned into a subtly shifting texture exercise.

Nohra Haime Gallery (here): Natalia Arias, $10000. A hybrid concoction of female imagery and transforming butterfly motifs.

Pablo’s Birthday (here): Thorsten Brinkmann, $16200. Elegant portraiture cleverly upended by found object sculptural assemblage.

Adamson Gallery (here): Chuck Close, $25000. The mottled, shifting color background of this daguerreotype silhouette of Kara Walker gives it a mysterious mood.

Galerie Stefan Röpke (here): Aitor Ortiz, $7250. Futuristic wire mesh abstraction, full of waves and overlaps. A bit reminiscent of Moriyama’s legs in mesh tights.

Von Lintel Gallery (here): Amanda Means, $4900. I liked the chance splash technique in this gridded off darkroom abstraction, almost an echo of Chuck Close’s painting approach but reconsidered in a photographic process context. From afar, the work looks like it is fluttering in the wind.

Galeria Habana (here): Liset Castillo, $8500. Sand sculptures that show off smart texture contrast, from smooth molded forms to rough remainder.

Tyler Rollins Fine Art (here): Tracey Moffatt, $10000. Seemingly mundane black and white scenes overlaid with colored stencils implying hidden histories. Deborah Luster has been here already, but the letters add a bold graphic element.

Waltman Ortega Fine Art (here): Rune Guneriussen, $6900 and Aleix Plademunt, $3600. Both of these artists are playing with performative interventions in landscape. Guineriussen’s winding path of man-made lights through the nighttime snow is jarringly magical, while Plademunt’s array of chairs flanking the nuclear power plant seems more confrontationally conceptual.

Continue to Part 2 of this report here.

Auction Results: Photographs, May 7, 2013 @Bonhams New York

The results of Bonhams’ Photographs sale yesterday in New York were generally lackluster. The overall Buy-In rate was more than 35% and the Total Sale Proceeds missed the low end of the estimate range by more than a whisker.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 135
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $843000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $1204500
Total Lots Sold: 86
Total Lots Bought In: 49
Buy In %: 36.30%
Total Sale Proceeds: $674750

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 113
Low Sold: 74
Low Bought In: 39
Buy In %: 34.51%
Total Low Estimate: $633500
Total Low Sold: $393000

Mid Total Lots: 20
Mid Sold: 11
Mid Bought In: 9
Buy In %: 45.00%
Total Mid Estimate: $396000
Total Mid Sold: $201250

High Total Lots: 2
High Sold: 1
High Bought In: 1
Buy In %: 50.00%
Total High Estimate: $175000
Total High Sold: $80500

The top lot by High estimate was lot 27, Edward Weston, Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio, 1902-1952, c1952, estimated at $60000-90000; it was also the top outcome of the sale at $80500.

70.93% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of 4 surprises in this sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate):
Lot 38, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, La buena fama, durmiendo, 1938-1939/1970s, estimated at $5000-7000, sold at $21250 (image at right, bottom, via Bonhams)
Lot 81, Nicholas Nixon, Yazoo City, 1979, estimated at $2000-3000, sold at $6000 (image at right, middle, via Bonhams)
Lot 93, Sebastião Salgado, Man Lying in Oil, Kuwait, 1991, estimated at $3000-5000, sold at $15000 (image at right, top, via Bonhams)
Lot 94, Sebastião Salgado, Greater Buhrman Oil Field, Kuwait, 1991, estimated at $2000-3000, sold at $6875

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Bonhams
580 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Henry Wessel: Incidents @Pace/MacGill

JTF (just the facts): A total of 27 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against yellow and white walls in the main rooms of the gallery. All of the photographs are modern gelatin silver prints, made from undated negatives. Each of the images is sized 12×18 (or reverse) and the prints are uneditioned. There is no photography allowed in the gallery, so the installation shots at right are via the Pace/MacGill website.

Comments/Context: In an art market that actively celebrates the power of the single, wall-dominating artwork, the carefully sequenced series of photographs that functions together as an integrated whole has slowly become something unexpected. While we are of course used to common subjects gathered together in photographic projects, true edited sequences have generally been relegated to books, limited edition portfolios and other special circumstances. Henry Wessel’s new show bucks this prevailing tide, bringing together a selection of unrelated images and placing them in exacting order, creating a kind of visual rhythm not unlike a poem. While each “incident” can stand alone, when seen together, they connect into an elegant linear flow of motifs and ideas.

The first photograph in the series is a kind of invitation, an encouraging participatory gesture to follow the trail of people walking into the park. Soon we encounter a dog, and then observe a man watching the world go by from a bus bench, puzzlingly wearing soccer cleats with his everyday attire. We spin around from his perspective and watch cars go by – dinged doors, angled stoplights, and a station wagon full of kids catching our attention. In a flash, we are inside those same cars, looking out through dark framed windows at boys choking each other or men in suits walking near whitewashed low rise apartments. We get off at a bus top, and back on the street, we notice the shine of a fur collared coat and the squiggled shadow of a stairway railing, only to be further distracted by a series of geometries seen in sidewalk paving, privacy walls, brickwork, and jutting balconies. Shadows and natural greenery pull us onward, only to be interrupted by more rigid man-made lines of fences and window frames. We start to notice the patterns in doorways as we walk along, drawn into scalloped edges, window portholes, and dense horizontal blinds. A topless theater entrance leads to a couple in front of an abandoned stage, and pairs of people bring the wandering journey to a close, with interlocked legs, expansive backs, and a final thigh bruise to put a period on the impressionistic narrative.

While I didn’t resonate with every image in Wessel’s parade of California bright street photography, I was fascinated by the visual hand-offs that were occurring between each picture and its neighbors; there really is a smart connection at every transition. As such, I was less focused on whether any single photograph had been optimized for success, and more on how the whole package had been so perfectly assembled. This show is like an old string of Christmas lights that won’t work unless every bulb is plugged in; each individual light is lively and exciting, but they only really dazzle when they’re all tied together in exacting order.

Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $3300 each. Wessel’s prints have been intermittently available in the secondary markets in recent years, with prices ranging from roughly $3000 to $16000.

 

Auction Previews: Contemporary Art Evening and Day Sales, May 16 and 17, 2013 @Phillips New York

Phillips’ finishes up the Spring Contemporary Art season  in New York with its Evening and Day sales next Thursday and Friday. Gursky, Prince, and Gilbert & George account for the top photographic lots, with a few fresher names at lower prices. All in, there are a total of 34 photographs available across the two sales, with a Total High Estimate for photography of $3980000.

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 0
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $0

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 19
Total Mid Estimate: $480000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 15
Total High Estimate: $3500000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 7, Andreas Gursky, Rhein, 1996, estimated at $1000000-1500000 (image at right, top, via Phillips).

Here’s the very short list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses)

Andreas Gursky (4)
Vik Muniz (3)

Other works of interest include lot 215, Sterling Ruby, Spectrum Series: Trunk, 2003, estimated at $20000-30000 (image at right middle, via Phillips), and lot 226, Elad Lassry, Wall, 2008, estimated at $8000-12000 (image at right, bottom, via Phillips).

The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

Contemporary Art Evening
May 16th

Contemporary Art Day
May 17th

Phillips
450 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Alma Lavenson @Gitterman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against white walls in the jagged single room gallery space. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1928 and 1943. No size or edition information was provided on the checklist; most appeared to be roughly 8×10 or reverse. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Except to aficionados of Bay Area Modernism or rabid f/64 fans, the photographs of Alma Lavenson are likely a complete unknown. Although she exhibited with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and the rest of the f/64 group in the late 1920s and early 1930s, her work has generally been left in the long shadows of her better known colleagues, a singular image popping up now and again to remind us that other forgotten artists were struggling the same aesthetic problems that mark the careers of the recognized masters. Seen together in remarkable depth in this show, Lavenson’s work is an almost a perfect case study in the transition from Pictorialism to Modernism, with strong, well-crafted examples to be seen in each phase of her artistic development.

The earliest images on display in this exhibit find Lavenson at the beginning of the end of Pictorialism, making photographs of the squiggly reflections in the water at Monterey Pier or an angled lineup of rowboats with soft focus lushness, albeit tightened up just a bit from the ethereal dreaminess that characterized much of the work from the period. What changes first is Lavenson’s subject matter – romantic painterly scenes give way to industrial studies: ships, dams, cement factories and mechanical still lifes, seen with an eye for geometry but still executed in textured soft focus. Fast forward a year or two more and the patina of Pictorialism has begun to fade from her palette, being replaced by a keener eye for detail and sharpness. Floral studies, sail rigging, even snow blown against the trunk of an evergreen are now crisp and clear, shadows being used for stark angling rather than misty mood. By the end of the 1930s, Lavenson’s work has moved even closer to that of Walker Evans and Wright Morris, with deserted shacks, door frames, and cannery buildings pared down to sparse formal patterns in unadorned tonal grey.
While Lavenson may have been overlooked by the larger sweep of photographic history, there are flashes of brilliance here that stand up well with comparable work by her peers and contemporaries. A collection of between the wars Modernism would do well to have a surprising Lavenson mixed in among the more famous names.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $10000 and $45000, with most of the works under $25000 and one (the self portrait with camera) marked POR. Lavenson’s work has only been intermittently available in the secondary markets over the past decade; prices have ranged from roughly $2000 to $60000.

 

 

Auction Previews: Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening, Morning, and Afternoon Sales, May 15 and 16, 2013 @Christie’s New York

Christie’s bats second in the Spring Contemporary Art season, with a series of three sales next week. Gursky, Sherman, Prince, Wall, and Baldessari hold the top slots. Overall, there are a total of 57 lots of photography available in the three sales, with a Total High Estimate for photography of $7340000.

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 0
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $0

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 28
Total Mid Estimate: $900000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 29
Total High Estimate: $6440000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 3, Andreas Gursky, Klitschko, 1999, estimated at $800000-1000000 (image at right, top, via Christie’s.)

Here’s the complete list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the sales (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Cindy Sherman (7)
Vik Muniz (6)
Louise Lawler (4)
Barbara Kruger (3)
Richard Prince (3)
Thomas Struth (3)

Other photographs of interest include lot 236, Gerhard Richter, Untitled, 1992, estimated at $35000-45000 (image at right, middle, via Christie’s) and lot 406, Rodney Graham, Welsh Oak #1-7, 1998, estimated at $90000-150000 (image at right, bottom, via Christie’s).

The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening), here (Morning), and here (Afternoon).

Post-War and Contemporary Art (Evening)
May 15th

Post-War and Contemporary Art (Morning)
May 16th

Post-War and Contemporary Art (Afternoon)
May 16th

Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Bill Brandt, Early Prints from the Collection of the Family @Edwynn Houk

JTF (just the facts): A total of 74 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung against beige walls in the entry area, the main gallery space, and the smaller side room. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, made between 1929 and 1966. While no size information was available on the checklist, most of the images were roughly 9×7, with a few slightly larger. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: When a big museum retrospective comes to town, it’s common practice for the relevant galleries to put on companion shows to capitalize on the fresh interest created by the exhibit. While these shows make complete sense from a business perspective, they’re usually not all that noteworthy. But on the heels of the masterful Bill Brandt: Shadow & Light retrospective at the MoMA (here), Edwynn Houk has put on an unexpectedly strong supporting show, gathering together an exemplary group of prints drawn from Brandt family members.

The Houk show is organized in roughly the same manner as the one at MoMA, creating a kind of echo effect if you’ve seen both exhibits. What is so surprising about this gallery show is its comprehensive depth; it’s not just a handful of random prints, but a deep, well-edited selection of standouts. The gallery has been representing the estate for roughly 30 years, and during that time, it stands to reason that many of its great treasures were long ago dispersed. But this show brings to market a new cache of vintage prints that had been stored away by the family. I was particularly astonished by the large group of Brandt nudes assembled here, some 30 prints of interior scenes, high contrast abstractions, and rocky beach distortions. From our own collecting activities, I know how hard it would be to amass such a group in this day and age, so to see them all together outside the confines of a museum was pretty magical. There were even a few images that were new to me (a patterned wallpaper interior nude, a crossed knees beach study), unpublished or lesser known gems that were exciting to encounter for the first time.

So while this is a standard selling show paired with a retrospective, it’s certainly a best of breed example of such an exhibit. It covers all the major projects from his career, with plenty of superlative prints and memorable images. It’s like the Brandt market has received a much needed blood transfusion, with many classic photographs that were thought to be entirely unavailable now floating freely once again.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $18500 and $60000, with most between $25000 and $40000. Brandt’s work is consistently available in the secondary markets, with dozens of prints on offer each year. Recent prices have ranged from $2000 for lesser known works and later prints to more than $90000 for vintage prints of his most iconic images.

 

 

 

Auction Previews: Contemporary Art, Evening and Day Sales, May 14 and 15, 2013 @Sotheby’s New York

Sotheby’s is up first in next week’s Contemporary Art sales in New York, with Evening and Day sales on Tuesday and Wednesday. There are plenty of high end photographs on offer, led by a Koons duratran lightbox with a big estimate ($2500000-3500000). The rest of the top lots (Prince, Sherman, Gursky, Wall et al) are mostly usual suspects. Overall, there are a total of 53 lots of photography on offer, with an impressive Total High Estimate for photography of $10018000.

Here’s the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 0
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $0

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 22
Total Mid Estimate: $618000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 31
Total High Estimate: $9400000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 9, Jeff Koons, The New Jeff Koons, 1980, estimated at $2500000-3500000 (image at right, top, via Sotheby’s).

Here’s the list of photographers represented by three or more lots in the two sales (with the number of lots in parentheses):

David LaChapelle (4)
Vik Muniz (4)
Richard Prince (4)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (3)

Other photographs of interest include lot 57, Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 2001, estimated at $800000-1200000 (image at right, middle, via Sotheby’s) and lot 504, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Chrysler Building, 1997, estimated at $200000-300000 (image at right, bottom, via Sotheby’s.)

The complete lot by lot catalogs can be found here (Evening) and here (Day).

Contemporary Art (Evening)
May 14th

Contemporary Art (Day)
May 15th

Sotheby’s
1334 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021

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