Photography Highlights from the ADAA Art Show 2024

After pre-checking the exhibitor list for this year’s ADAA Art Show, I made my way to the Park Avenue Armory with some degree of photo trepidation. There were no photography specialist galleries included in the fair this year, so there were no guarantees in the offing – whatever photography I might find would come in the booths of the broader contemporary and modern art galleries. But as I walked in, the very first works I encountered, right square in the entry area, were a handsome solo presentation of the photographs of Tina Barney, at Kasmin Gallery’s booth. Barney has a career retrospective on now at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (here), so this small sampler felt like an altogether appropriate way to connect to that larger exhibition.

So my inbound photography fears were immediately allayed, at least temporarily. But as I continued my rounds through the booths, sadly that flush of excitement slowly ebbed away, with only a handful of additional booths showing photography, however broadly defined. To be fair, this was what I had anticipated, but after that promising first encounter, my expectations had been recalibrated, perhaps a little too high.

What follows below is an altogether 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.

Kasmin Gallery (here): “The Graham Cracker Box” is a Tina Barney classic from 1983, capturing an interlocked mix of resonant details, including a tennis outfit and wine glass, a teenager on the phone, and three bored kids (one with a rope bracelet). A visual symphony in white, it captures an essence of relaxed summertime chaos. Priced at $65000, for the last available print of this image.

Krakow Witkin Gallery (here): In 1977, Cindy Sherman made a series of 12 self-portraits in various costumes, each with her hands extended. She then cut out the figures and connected them together in a chain (like paper dolls), slowly moving from light to dark. This booth featured three of the original portraits, this one on the white end of the scale. Priced at $16000.

Berggruen Gallery (here): This booth was a solo presentation of large scale floral collages by Jane Hammond. Set against a shiny silver backdrop and featuring an Arthur Ashe silver trophy as a vase, the bouquet gathers photographic blossoms as well as a few hand painted stems, creating a swirling interplay of colors and forms. There’s even a Venus fly trap in the middle, to give the arrangement a little bite. Priced at $20000.

Galerie Lelong & Co. (here): This Michelle Stuart grid of images (from 2020) finds its roots in cosmic creation, jumping from micro to macro and back again, including a few fragmented images of her own seed-based artworks. Galaxies and explosions give way to spackled enlargements, connecting visual patterns across vast differences in scale. Priced at $90000.

Peter Freeman, Inc. (here): This booth featured a solo presentation of works by the Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović, ranging from photography to collage, painting, and sculpture. This conceptual work from 1977 finds the artist tracing the lines of his body with a black mask (always in the same centered compositional location), creating a progression of isolated movements and masked “faces”. Priced at $18000.

Venus Over Manhattan (here): This booth was a solo show of paintings by Seth Becker, which normally wouldn’t have entirely attracted my attention. But the installation included a series of photo postcards from the early 1900s, each one loosely paired with one of the paintings. The postcards were drawn from the artist’s own collection, and their inclusion offers both a flash of potential inspiration as well as a broader idea of the artist as a collector. This particular image was surreally mystifying, with what looks like silhouetted figures and bodies caught in the branches of the tree. NFS.

Perrotin (here). In her artistic practice, Leslie Hewitt has often mixed photography and sculpture, never allowing herself to be limited by one medium or the other. She is likely best known for the stacked images from her “Riffs on Real Time” series, in which personal snapshots are layered together with book plates, magazine tearsheets, and other printed ephemera, and then methodically arranged on the wood-planked floor of her studio. In recent years, Hewitt has drained the color out of those setups, matching black and white versions of the arrangements with darkroom-crafted color blocks that connect to some of the colors which have been removed. In this booth, it’s clear she’s moved even further of late, leaving behind the source photographs entirely and playing with the spatial balance of various color blocks. The works are photographic at heart, but entirely sculptural in their physicality and presence. Priced at $24000.

Our reports on the photographs found at previous ADAA Art Shows can be found here: 2023 (here), 2022 (here), 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: Cindy Sherman, Jane Hammond, Leslie Hewitt, Michelle Stuart, Mladen Stilinović, Tina Barney, Berggruen Gallery, Galerie Lelong & Co., Galerie Perrotin, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Krakow Witkin Gallery, Peter Freeman, Inc., Venus Over Manhattan, ADAA Art Show

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