Photography Highlights from the ADAA Art Show 2022

There is something entirely reassuring about the conservative personality of the annual ADAA Art Show. It’s an art fair that feels comfortable in its own skin, opting for calm reserve and measured engagement instead of empty flash and bustle, and its consistency across the years, even with a rotating cast of attending member galleries, has been quite remarkable.

Photography is only ever a subset of what’s on offer, and this year there were presentations of photography (a mix between solo and group shows) to be uncovered in just six booths, with a handful of other single photographic works to be found elsewhere with a bit of digging. So for a photography-focused collector, the fair is an easy going wander, with just enough to material to be unearthed in an hour or two.

What follows below is a brief survey of the photography highlights at this year’s fair, organized in slideshow form. A short discussion of each featured work is provided, along with linked gallery names, artist names, and prices as appropriate/available.

Sprüth Magers (here): This booth was a solo presentation of a single stretched to fit image by Louise Lawler. The work features a brashly blurred version of Jasper Johns’ 1958 painting “Three Flags” (as seen at his recent Whitney retrospective). Bent around the sides of the booth, the image as installed seems to turn in on itself, creating controlled depth and energetic movement. Priced at $175000.

Von Lintel Gallery (here): This 1998 work by Floris Neusüss salvages the torn lead foil capsule that used to wrap a wine bottle and turns it into a subject for clever photogram abstraction. The artist called this series of images ULOs (or unidentified lying objects), each twisted remnant from an evening of drinking transformed into a shifting formal exercise. Priced at $4800.

Von Lintel Gallery (here): Christiane Feser’s illusionistic photographic constructions are always a source of visual wonder. In this work from 2020, a photograph of folded cards arrayed on top of a blue paper ground begins the composition, with cutouts, cut throughs, paper additions, and rephotographed elements intermingled with the primary image, creating a dizzyingly sophisticated three-dimensional mix of surfaces, shadows, and overlaps. Priced at $9700.

Yancey Richardson (here): This 2022 work by Ori Gersht continues his exploration of the explosive properties of flash frozen floral bouquets. What’s new this time is that his split second photographic results have now been further fed through AI systems, which have filled in gaps and tweaked the tiny textures, giving the up close details an eerily synthetic sheen. Priced at $18000.

Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): This 1973 image by Ming Smith elegantly uses contrasting bands of angled light and dark and an encroaching edge of peeling decay to surround a single silhouetted figure striding through the scene. The quiet picture is filled with the implication of movement, almost like a resolute step forward or a leaving behind. Priced at $36000.

Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): This booth was a group presentation of works by female photographers, and this unexpected montage by Barbara Morgan (from 1937) stood out among a selection of more familiar imagery. Morgan combines a look forward down the street and a look down from above, creating a disorienting twist of pedestrians and shadows.

Patron Gallery (here): This pandemic-era image from Melanie Schiff captures the frustrated and uncertain mood of the lockdowns with understated precision. Stuck inside, staring at ourselves, a mirror became a foe; this one is covered with flares, fogs, and droplets of spit, its function emphatically interrupted. Priced at $9500.

Peter Freeman (here): This booth was a solo presentation of the work of Lucy Skaer, mixing sculptural works with photographs of her family home in Cambridge after her father’s death. In this image, her father’s bed and the floorboards underneath it have been carved into pieces, leaving behind the empty beams of the floor. Skaer then used those same pieces to build a reclaimed sculpture, transforming one resonant shape into another. Priced at $3200.

Gallery Wendi Norris (here). While Eva Schlegel may be best known for her blurred visions of anonymous architectural spaces, she’s also applied that same softening aesthetic to various figurative studies of women. Here the forms and gestures of the two women have become fluid, the overlapped fashions creating open-ended ambiguity. Priced at $25000.

Danziger Gallery (here): This recent work by Susan Derges actually recycles an earlier image, salvaging and rescanning a riverbed photogram that was damaged or torn by her earlier process. Here the water turns golden, decorated with shimmering fractures of light and the reaching arms of a delicately curving leafless branch. Priced at $24000.

For those interested in a walk down memory lane, here are a few of our reports on the photographs found at previous ADAA Art Shows : 2021 (here), 2020 (here), 2019 (here), 2018 (here), 2017 (here), 2016 (here), 2015 (here), 2014 (here), and 2013 (here).

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Read more about: Barbara Morgan, Christiane Feser, Eva Schlegel, Floris Neusüss, Louise Lawler, Lucy Skaer, Melanie Schiff, Ming Smith, Ori Gersht, Susan Derges, Danziger Gallery, Gallery Wendi Norris, Howard Greenberg Gallery, Patron Gallery, Peter Freeman, Inc., Sprüth Magers, Von Lintel Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, ADAA Art Show

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