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

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

Galleri Nicolai Wallner (here): Joachim Koester, $8000. In a fair full of bright, shiny things, Koester's all white snowscapes stood out in quiet, nuanced, contrarian defiance.

ProjecteSD (here): Jochen Lempert, €7000. A simple, well executed exercise in dappled light, leafy shadow, and shimmering all over movement.

Altman Siegel (here): Sara VanDerBeek, $16000. While VanDerBeek's Metro Pictures show is already in my review queue, this elegant tilted sculptural interpretation isn't part of that exhibit. The skewed frame aligns with the angles of the arms and offsets the verticality of the subject.

Sprüth Magers (here): Thomas Demand, €75000. Indoor plants in fancy modern planters for a windowless office are already an odd creation, but when they are abstracted even further into cut-paper constructions by Demand, controlled nature becomes even more artificial.

Team Gallery (here): Ryan McGinley, $50000. This whole booth was filled with recent large scale McGinley nudes, with young men and women in various states of falling, lying, and running around. This nighttime mix of fire and water is certainly dramatic and full of exuberance, like some secret ritual.

Alexander Gray Associates (here): Lorraine O'Grady, $25000. Up-close hair becomes an undulating textural landscape.

Murray Guy (here): Zoe Leonard, $25000. This booth had a selection of mid-1990s animal images by Leonard, taken during a multi-year stay in Alaska. While the animals were hunted by the artist, the images have the feel of taxidermy or staged diorama, but with an edge of rawness.

White Cube (here): Jeff Wall, $450000. This was the only work by Wall I saw at Frieze, a small backyard study of poppies and scrubby greenery.

Sfeir-Semler Gallery (here): Walid Raad, $25000. Images of minimal paintings hung in white, formless, galleries, the corollary of Louise Lawler, where context tells us nothing.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 4 of 5

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

Sikkema-Jenkins & Co. (here): Vik Muniz, $75000. Muniz' take on Courbet's Stone Breakers, using his recent follow-the-ideas, rebus-like scraps of magazines approach.

Paul Kasmin Gallery (here): David LaChapelle, $65000. A glowing model gas station in a nighttime jungle.

Reena Spaulings Fine Art (here): K8 Hardy, $10000. Two fashion handbags sliced apart and glued back together in a mismatched hybrid. Shown on a lightbox for added brightness.

Galerija Gregor Podnar (here): Attila Csörgö, €8000. An intricate mirrored structure, used to capture the falling trajectory of a lighted die. The result is both a sculpture of movement and an illusionistic multi-angle view.

Wallspace (here): Daniel Gordon, $10000. These Gordon still lifes were among my favorite works at the fair. They erupt in a riot of color and pattern, with layers of photographs collaged into a multi-dimensional installation and then flattened back into a single plane. They take ideas begun in previous smaller still life works and boldly extend them into much more complicated constructions and compositions.

Jack Shainman Gallery (here): Richard Mosse, $20000. These cotton candy Mosse landscapes have become an art fair staple, but there always seems to be a new one to catch my eye.

Almine Rech Gallery (here): Taryn Simon, $35000. Simon's archival investigations have turned to photographs of collections of images around a certain word or theme (in this case "wealth", perfect for an art fair). I was more intrigued by the underlying system of sorting/choosing than the actual end results, and maybe that was the point.

Stephen Friedman Gallery (here): Rivane Neuenschwander, $12000. Talcum power and water constructions that recreate the swirling look of oil spills.

Kadel Willborn (here): Barbara Kasten, $25000. The architectural patterns of World Financial Center, doused in candy colored light and repeated via mirrors, 1980s abstraction gone wild.

Art: Concept (here): Geert Goiris, $32700. The wailing girl in the newspaper clipping is an ominous, almost traumatic partner for this dead bird.

Continue to Part 5 here.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 5

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

Alfonso Artiaco (here): Darren Almond, $38000. A densely layered, fluttering mass of Tibetan prayer flags.

Mitchel-Innes & Nash (here): Catherine Opie, $50000. This work seems to point to more narrative in Opie's newest portraits. The sisters from Rodarte are her models, with sewn blood and a whisper coming out of the deep darkness.

Marc Foxx (here): Anne Collier, $28000. This front and back diptych of a postcard of a Turkana girl with a camera ("Say cheese before I click") is one of the strongest works I have seen in Collier's ongoing examination of found photographic ephemera. It's kitchy and head-shakingly dated, which is why it is so successful when seen through her rigorously conceptual eyes.

Yvon Lambert (here): Douglas Gordon, individually $2500 to $12000. A salon hanging jumble of textural still life images.

Dvir Gallery (here): Ariel Schlesingler, €10000. The external protective glass on this work is broken to echo the broken glass in the underlying photograph.

Laura Bartlett Gallery (here): Simon Dybbroe Møller, €11000. Five layers of still life electronics, wired together into one witty three dimensional pile.

Taro Nasu (here): Jonathan Monk, €2400. Araki's bondage nudes with the body parts removed, leaving drooping kimonos and empty ropes.

Galleria Raffaella Cortese (here): Barbara Bloom, $15000. Not only is this down-the-hallway photograph optically compelling, check out the wild, three color telescoped mat used to reinforce the color progression.

Jack Hanley Gallery (here): Torbjorn Rødland, $4000. Quirky microphone antics in the scrubby forest.

Goodman Gallery (here): Candice Breitz, $5500 each. In these stills, the artist has inserted herself into a South African soap opera, an oddly out of place white presence among black actors. There is a sense of deliberate randomness here, of being unrelated to the story going on around her, that makes the contrived situations all the more unsettled.

Continue to Part 4 here.

Photography in the 2013 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 2 of 5

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

Miguel Abreu Gallery (here): Eileen Quinlan, $15000. This is a pulsating, attention grabbing color study - the shiny material of the woven rubber yoga mat picks up tiny reflections, dotting the electric yellow green with flecks of textured red.

Andrew Kreps Gallery (here): Roe Ethridge, $16000. There's something unexpectedly off about these red tennis tights (the racquet seems overly big as well). It's an eye-catching example of Ethridge's mix of commercial and fine art aesthetics working together to produce something puzzlingly compelling.

Frith Street Gallery (here): Dayanita Singh, $19400. This work is actually three, housed in a custom wood box with interchangeable slots. The overflowing piles of ledgers are documented in all three images, giving the entire work a richer resonance.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder, £15000. A simple image intervention interrupts this self-portrait, creating a jarring hybrid face..

Maureen Paley (here): Gillian Wearing, £35000. Another in Wearing's ongoing series of self-portraits in the guise of famous photographers, this time peering out from the face of Weegee.

Salon 94 (here): Katy Grannan, $14000. This booth had a powerful wall to wall installation of images from Katy Grannan's new 99 series. Taken along California's Route 99 and set against blistering, eye squinting white backgrounds, the images get close up to a parade of weathered faces and forgotten lives. They recall Dorothea Lange and Richard Avedon's In the American West, mixing unflinching harshness and quiet authenticity.

Cheim & Read (here): Adam Fuss, $60000. While I had seen this same mattress covered with a tangle of writhing black snakes in Fuss' last gallery show, I hadn't seen the snakes replaced by a black female mannequin before; it adds another detail to Fuss' garden/Eve story.

Sean Kelly Gallery (here): James Casebere, $45000. Casebere's picture perfect stage set world given a darker, worn out alter ego, with a moss covered rooftop, a broken fence, and a landscape of barren, lifeless trees.

Galerie Krinzinger (here): Otto Muehl, complete portfolio €150000. This booth was dominated by an edge to edge hanging of images documenting 10 different actions/performances by Muehl - Viennese Actionism captured in raw, transgressive, experimental brashness.

Massimo Minini (here): Luigi Ghirri, $12000. A street scene through an ice cream store window, seen with Ghirri's subtly surreal playfulness.

Continue to Part 3 here.

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 at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair, Part 3 of 3

This is Part 3 of my review of the photography at the 2012 Frieze New York Art Fair. Part 1 can be found here, along with some background information on the fair and an explanation of the format I'm using for the the booth by booth details. Part 2 can be found here.


Purple Section

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery (here): Barney Kulok (1)

Kaufmann Repetto (here): Shannon Ebner (1). Another entry in the "built to be photographed" category; this large graphic symbol in cinder blocks by Ebner was priced at $12000.

Rampa (here): Huseyin Bahri Alptekin (3)

Galerie Eva Presenhuber (here): Steven Shearer (3), Amy Granat (1). These floral photograms by Granat are reminiscent of similar images made by Kunie Sugiura, although these have been cropped, reoriented, and transformed into a repetitive, high contrast grid. The work was priced at $20000.

Regina Gallery (here): Nikolay Bakharev (5). I've seen a few of these engaging 1970s beach portraits from Bakharev of late, and they're starting to grow on me. They were priced at $3000 each.

Maureen Paley (here): James Welling (2), Wolfgang Tillmans (2), David Salle (1), Gillian Wearing (1). If there was any one photographer whose work was ubiquitous at this fair, it was Wolfgang Tillmans. This was the best image of his that I saw (due to the complex use of color), a new one priced at $57000 and already sold.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art (here): Linder (10)

Galerie Perrotin (here): Sophie Calle (4 diptychs)

Galleria Continua (here): Mona Hatoum (1 Polaroid triptych). A simple idea, well executed - deadpan portraits with hair exploded by static electricity. This unique set of three prints by Hatoum was priced at $30000.

Frith Street Gallery (here): John Riddy (1), Tacita Dean (1 set of 14). Extra large versions of these Dean film strip works were recently on view at the Tate Modern. The set of 14 prints (offset not photographic) was priced at £45500.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (here): Vik Muniz (1). Washington Crossing the Delaware in Muniz' most recent style, a dense collage of magazine scrap imagery. Priced at $45000, and not surprisingly, already sold.

Galerie Bucholz (here): Wolfgang Tillmans (2), Sam Lewitt (1 set of 10). I liked Lewitt's layered NY Times transparencies, algorithmically reconstructed and subtracted to zero. Priced at $18000.

Kukje Gallery (here): Candida Hofer (1), Jenny Holzer (1)

Alison Jacques Gallery (here): Robert Mapplethorpe (3). I had never seen these particular Mapplethorpe florals before. The single blossoms are bathed in ghostly, almost garish, colored light. Priced at $35000.

Sprüth Magers (here): Andreas Gursky (1), Astrid Klein (4 collages), Thomas Demand (1), John Baldessari (1), Cindy Sherman (1). The reason I included this $285000 Baldessari image in this review has nothing to do with the pig, or the hands, or the composition really. What is impossible to see in this installation shot is that the work had surprising depth; the different colored portions are built up in inch thick layers. Yet another example of reimagining photography with sculptural qualities.

Pink Section

Wallspace (here): Daniel Gordon (1), Shannon Ebner (1), John Divola (1). Textures and patterns abound in this new work from Gordon, playing with idea of the sculptural bust, priced at $5800.

Galerie Neu (here): Bernadette Corporation (3), Tom Burr (1)

Galeria Fortes Vilaça (here): Jac Leirner (1)

Victoria Miro (here): Alex Hartley (1), William Eggleston (1), Isaac Julien (1 diptych)

303 Gallery (here): Hans-Peter Feldman (4), Collier Schorr (1), Stephen Shore (1 set of 8). This is an early conceptual series by Shore from the late 1960s (recently reprinted), where he stands and rotates in a circle, the desert background changing in each shot. Probably been done before and since, but still effective. Priced at $25000 for the set.

White Cube (here): Jeff Wall (1), Gilbert & George (1 set of 9)

Galerie Martin Janda (here): Roman Signer (1 set of 5, 1)