Bitforms (here): This booth featured a selection of six large scale black-and-white photographs of surveillance interventions by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In each picture, the artist’s hand reaches up toward the mounted camera, interrupting views of different locations around Mexico City. The images are both surreally invasive and defiantly performative, like Ai Weiwei’s finger-raised gestures towards world landmarks. Priced at $30000 each.
Hannah Traore Gallery (here): Transwomen from Colombia get dramatic draped treatments in Camila Falquez’s recent works. Here the elongated fabric trails down the stairs like the long tail of a mermaid, its vibrant red color matched by the silk mat of the framing. Priced at $9000.
CalArts (here): Fundraising editions can be a good way for institutions to leverage the demand for the work of their alumni. This collaged edition by Lauren Halsey mixes jumping low riders and palm trees from her native Los Angeles with Egyptian motifs and cosmic starscapes, creating a vibrant tapestry of cultural resonance. Priced at $20000.
Asya Geisberg Gallery (here): This booth was a solo presentation of new works by Rodrigo Valenzuela, mostly white ceramic sculptures set against the backdrop of a glossy black booth, but also a pair of larger photogravures hung in the center. In this work, Valenzuela continues his exploration of anthropomorphic sculptural forms staged in arrangements and assemblages which he then photographs. Gesturally expressive forms curve and interact, seemingly mechanized but also evocatively natural. Priced at $7000.
Galerie Nicholas Robert (here): Gridded aerial squares hover on a field of mirror in this recent work by Anahita Norouzi. The images are drawn from 1930s era mining and archaeological archives from Iran, deliberately mixing economic and cultural imperatives. In person, the work seems to shift and shuffle, bringing the reflection of the viewer into dialogue with the land and its many pasts. Priced at $6000.
Aicon Contemporary (here): In his series “Nothing Happened Here”, the Indigenous photographer Jeremy Dennis stages various white people in scenes where they are impaled with arrows. Here a woman swims in a river (perhaps near the Shinnecock tribesman’s home in Southampton, NY), the invisible histories embedded in the surrounding land literally sticking out of her back. Priced at $5000.
Monique Meloche Gallery (here): In this exuberant three-dimensional photocollage, Ebony G. Patterson tucks the word “destruction” into a swirling mix of natural forms, including flowers, butterflies, and insects. Patterson’s works explore the uneasy tension in the post-colonial garden, where life and loss tussle for dominance. Priced at $50000.
Secrist|Beach (here): Given the 30th anniversary of the Armory Show this year, many galleries decide to reach back to the 1990s to replicate what was new in contemporary art three decades ago. This work by Liliana Porter fits that chronological rewind, cleverly creating an intimate conversation between a woman on a tea pot and an Asian figurine. Priced at $19000.
BANK (here): In the early 1990s, Oliver Herring made a series of knit mylar sculptures (and associated performances) that were inspired by the death of Ethyl Eichelberger and the larger AIDS crisis. This booth resurfaced many of these works, including this photograph documenting a layered tangle of overlapped strips. Priced at $12000.
Poligrafa Obra Gráfica (here): Back in 1998, Vik Muniz made a series of high contrast black-and-white photographs of artificial flowers. Some three decades later, he has returned to this idea, with a new series of floral images that replicate the look of antique watercolor bookplates. Up close, the works faithfully replicate the soft colors and mottled textures of such works, even down to the hand inscribed labels and titles. Priced at $30000 for the “Flora Industrialis” portfolio of 70 prints.
Lyles & King (here): This 2024 work by Chris Dorland is even more densely textured and covered with distorted and manipulated screen grabs than the artist’s previous efforts. The striated gesso provides a tactile substrate for the intensely shifting imagery, layering a futuristic technical world atop a richly physical surface. Priced at $26000.
Dirimart (here): One of my discoveries at this year’s fair was that the famed Turkish film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is also a photographer. This penetrating portrait is part of a decade long series titled “In Another Place”. Here an Indian man with his two children poses on his bicycle in front of an imposingly dark sky, the large formal image framed to mimic the fleeting quality of a Polaroid. Priced at $22000.
Spurs Gallery (here): Silhouetted Chinese architecture drifts through these multiple exposure scroll-like works by Xing Danwen. Made in 1999-2000, the upward views overlap and intermingle, with the stuttering angled procession similar to intermittent looks skyward while on foot. Priced at $30000 for the set of 5 prints.
Spurs Gallery (here): The delicacy of this new work by Ji Zhou is a bit difficult to see. From afar, the work reads as a blank grey square, but up close, intricate floral etchings are revealed in the delicately dusty surface. The backstory of the work has a Buddhist theme, the cycle of life revealing itself in plants reduced to ashes, which then host a new round of drawn natural motifs. Priced at $18000.
Bradley Ertaskiran (here): Jessica Eaton’s new floral arrangements have a kind of amplified surreal intensity that seems to jump from the frame. Eaton long ago mastered the technical aspects of how a camera sees, and has spent much of her artistic career remixing those variables via filtered multiple exposures, rearranged additive color, and other experimental in camera techniques. Her results here have an almost three dimensional quality (in the form of the tiny drop shadows of deliberate misalignment), the impossibly electric colors of the blossoms balanced by the hovering underneath greyness of what looks like solarization or tonal reversal. Priced at $5500.
Bradley Ertaskiran (here): This bold Erin Shirreff composition layers a handful of discrete image enlargements into an integrated sculptural form, where hard cuts and softer halftone edges work together. It’s an elegant three-dimensional photocollage abstraction, well aware of the nested possibilities of physical versus image interaction. Priced at $35000.
Bradley Ertaskiran (here): There are several layers of distortion going on in the 1970s era performance image by Suzy Lake. Tied up, twisted, and elongated, the artist struggles against her bodily binding, the negative then burned to create additional layers of rippled flares. Priced at $37000 (in a modern print).
Weinstein Hammons Gallery (here): These quietly pared down floral still lifes by Alec Soth were likely made in the abandoned house he bought a few years back. There is a meditative quality to these single blossom setups, like controlled compositional tests of intentionally minimal and unbalanced aesthetic options. Priced at $16000 each.
303 Gallery (here): This through-the-door image by Stephen Shore comes from his 2018 series “Details”. It’s a clever visual reversal, the letters hovering in mid air over the sidewalk, the scratched surface of the plastic adding unexpected frontal texture. Priced at $50000.
Proyectos Monclova (here): This layered collage by Tercerunquinto (a collaboration by the Mexican artists Gabriel Cázares and Rolando Flores) turns statues in Mexico City into silhouettes, which are then filled by other statue silhouettes from around the city. The result is a set of forms that refuse to resolve, the shapes and poses somehow familiar but now anonymous. Priced at $15000.
Yancey Richardson Gallery (here): A 1971 image of Kentucky drag queen and trans woman Leigh Angelique provides the visual raw material for this recent work by Alanna Fields. Circular cutouts hover and repeat, creating a sense of amplified attention and fleeting instability. Priced at $14500.
