Photography in the 2103 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.

Photography at Pulse New York 2009

Last Friday, we were able to spend some time at the Pulse New York fair at Pier 40. As always, we were focused entirely on the photography on view, and below you'll find a summary of what we saw in the galleries there. We were a bit tighter on time during our visit to Pulse (compared to the Armory), and so our review is a little less comprehensive (capturing perhaps 80% of the photography shown) and our notes a little less detailed (fewer image titles etc.), but I took a few more pictures, so perhaps it all evens out in the end.

One of the things I liked about Pulse was it seemed a lot less prepackaged. Booths were filled with gallery owners and principals (rather than perfectly dressed "handlers") who were eager to talk about the works on display. The casual atmosphere was altogether more lively and authentic (there is something reassuring about artist labels scrawled in pencil directly on the walls). There was also much more quality photography than I had expected going in, and the work had more energy and life (more unexpected Wows) than the work at the Armory.

For those of you who didn't read the Armory posts, this summary is organized by gallery, with lists of photographers found there, numbers of images in parentheses. Often there will be some additional commentary and pictures nearby. So let's get started...

Ru Arts Gallery: Anna and Jeff Bliumis (4, below). These were images of colorful fake books, placed as walls into various different landscapes and environments, called "Language Barrier". Quite a clever title, and generally memorable pictures. Also Slava Filippov (3).

Space: Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova (6). Farcical satires of porn, reenacted by two clothed women.

Silverlens Gallery: Steve Tirona (5, below) Wacky and playful digital collages of Imelda Marcos.

Galerie Senda: Jordi Bernardo (8), Taj Forer (3), Aitor Ortiz (3), Ola Kolehmainen (1).

Kopeikin Gallery: John Bennett Fitts (6, below). These color images of trees stranded in commercial developments reminded me of some of Lewis Baltz' pictures from New Industrial Parks (which I like, so I liked these). Also Chris Jordan (2) and Lisbeth Eva Rossof (6).

Birch Libralto: Toni Hafkenscheid (4)

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery: Xu Changchang (3, below). Images of crumpled up and flattened out photographs of famous artworks, taking reappropriation in a different direction.

TZR Galerie Kai Bruckner: Jasper de Beijed (8), Ruud van Empel (3)

Jenkins Johnson Gallery: Jeong Mee Yoon (2, below). These are from her Pink and Blue Project, where kids are surrounded by all of their objects of a gender specific color. Since we have a young daughter obsessed with everything pink, these hit home. Also Shelia Pree Bright (4), Lynn Goldsmith (3), and Felicia Meeginson (4).

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts: Carlos Bettancourt (1)

Davidson Contemporary: Neil Hamon (4, below). Black and white reenactments of historical soldiers.

Light & Sie: Wouter de Ruytter (30). A mini retrospective of the artist's work.

Magnan Projects: Ariana Page Russell (2, below). The artist's skin condition allows her to draw elaborate and striking patterns on her body.

Sollertis: Phillipe Perrin and Pierre Joseph (5). Murder scenes.

Randall Scott Gallery: Julia Fullerton-Batten (10, below first). Teenage girls jumping and flying through various interiors. I thought these images captured the chaos of adolescence quite well. Also, Penelope Umbrico (huge wall array, below second). An eye-catching grid of sunsets.

Morgan Lehman: Alix Smith (2)

Rena Bransten Gallery: Uta Barth (4, below). I've always liked Barth's ethereal still lifes. Also Vik Muniz (2).

Gaain Gallery: Vik Muniz (1), Kyungwoo Chun (2) Seton Smith (1)

Richard Levy Gallery: Saara Ekstrom (4, below). Complex floral still lifes. Also Scott Peterman (1).

P.P.O.W. Gallery: Carollee Scheeman (4)

DNA: Tatsumi Orimoto (5). Portraits of the artist's mother (suffering from Alzheimer's) in a wide variety of odd poses. Unsettling, but very good.

Perugi Artecontemporanea: Daimano Nava (cluster of Polaroids and other photographs), Kensuke Koike (12).

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Yancey Richardson Gallery: Sharon Core (3, below). A nice Thiebaud cake study, among others. Also Masao Seto (3), Andrew Moore (1) Pello Irazu (6), and Alex Prager (2).

Galerie Ernst Hilger: Massimo Vitali (2), Anastasia Khoposhilova (2), Spencer Tunick (1)

FTC: Frank Breuer (4, below first). I like Breuer's work, but these seem too similar to images we saw recently by Josef Schulz. Heidi Specker (20, below second). Specker's work focuses on abstract fragments of walls and buildings. Also Sonja Braas (1), Claus Goedicke (1), Dionisio Gonzalez (3), Dunja Evers (3).

Galerie Anita Beckers: Vee Speers (3). Portraits of children, some toting guns.

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Nicholas Metivier Gallery: Edward Burtynsky (2). From his series of Australian minescapes.

Stefan Roepke: Robert Mapplethorpe (2)

Witzenhausen Gallery: Hendrik Kerstens (6, below). Larger than life size portraits in the tradition of Dutch painting.

Jen Bekman Gallery: Beth Dow (10). Platinum landscapes.

Curator's Office: Nicholas and Sheil Pye (5, plus 3 video screens, below). Large portraits of women covered in greens. Reminded me of Archimboldo.

Winkleman Gallery: Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation (installation of stills, video, and work table, below). Sussman is working on a new film, using the failed utpoias in Kazakhstan as a backdrop. Stand alone photographs of Yuri Gagarin's office and an eerie landscape covered with ravens are also available.

While we didn't find anything for our particular collection at Pulse, I came away impressed with the quality and variety of contemporary photography being supported by galleries and collectors around the world. It was a show well worth a visit, perhaps in the end even more satisfying than the sprawling Armory.