Frieze New York opens next week on Randall's Island, and although we're still a bit scarred from last year (remember that heat ?) we're looking forward to seeing what's new this time around. It's safe to say we'll see a lot of the same ol' same ol' in the main sections—tried and true market darlings. Where we're more likely to discover up-and-comers is in the Frame section, which features solo presentations by younger, more emerging galleries. For many of the younger artists in this section, next week will be their first foray into fair exhibiting. Meanwhile, some galleries are using the opportunity to present more historical works by artists who could use a jumpstart in their decades-long career. Before you head to the fair, here is some background information about some of the artists you'll see in the Frame section, and what to expect from the booths.
SARAH FAUX
Booth F1
Capsule, Shanghai
Sarah Faux,
I'd be a shitty girlfriend
(2019), oil on canvas, and
Loomer
(2019), dye and acrylic on cut canvas. Image courtesy of the artist and gallery.
Considering the art world’s current preoccupation with colorful figurative painting, Capsule’s presentation of Sarah Faux’s corporeal forms comes as no surprise. The booth will showcase a mix of the two mediums that Faux typically toggles between: oil paintings stretched on canvas featuring fragmented female bodies, and colored cut canvas adhered directly to the wall, collage-like representations of body parts and plants. Faux received her MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art in 2015, and has since staged solo exhibitions at Stems Gallery in Brussles, Theirry Goldberg in New York, Cuevas Tilleard also in New York, and Capsule Shainghai, the three-year old gallery set in a 1930’s garden house that hosts Faux’s work at Frieze.
GINTAUTAS TIRMAKAS
Galeria PM8, Vigo, Spain
Gintautas Trimakas,
Torsas
(1995). Image courtesy of the gallery and artist.
One of the few historic presentations in this section of the fair, PM8’s booth presents a 1995 project by Lithuanian photographer Gintautas Trimakas that hasn’t been shown outside of Lithuania for over 20 years. The group of more than 80 photographs feature women, mostly students and employees of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, cropped from the neck to the knees, offering a collective understanding of Lithuanian women a few years after the country became independent from the Soviets, according to the gallery.
RICARDO BASBAUM
Booth F13
Galeria Jaqueline Martins
Ricardo Basbaum,
êxtase & exercísio (verde)
(2018). Image courtesy of the artist and gallery.
The installation “systema-cinema: ecstasy & exercise” by Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum is installed in Galeria Jaquiline Martins’ booth at Frieze… and it isn’t. A private residence in São Paulo will simultaneously host an identical duplicate of the Frieze installation; the two are linked by cameras and screens that transmit footage, in real-time, to the sister location. Viewers are invited to interact with the objects being filmed: a silicone sculpture, a series of printed writings, and a notepad with which viewers can use to add their own messages, notes, and drawings. “In this way, handling the object becomes a performative act in relation to a distant recipient or audience, accompanied by the voyeuristic possibility of observing the action performed at the other location,” according to the gallery. Since the late 1980s, Basbaum has been creating work that integrates “sensorial experiences, sociability, and language,” which has been shown in institutions like the Tate Modern in London, Documenta XII in Kassel, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, the São Paulo’s Biennial, among others.
SANOU OUMAR
Gordon Robichaux, New York
Sanou Oumar,
Untitled
(2019). Image courtesy of the artist and gallery.
Gordon Robichaux will offer 11 kaleidoscope-like pen-on-paper works by Sanou Oumar. Born in Burkina Faso, West Africa, Oumar moved to the U.S. in 2015 to seek asylum, and currently lives in the Bronx in New York. With an interest in architecture, the draftsman’s approach to art making is systematic and repetitious, and yet his outcomes seem almost mystic or cosmic, referencing the aesthetic of mandalas, particularly with his circle-in-a-square abstraction.
ANTHONY IACONO
Marinaro, New York
Anthony Iacono,
Hotline (Study)
, 2019. Image courtesy of the gallery and artist.
An up-and-comer worth having on your radar, 28-year-old Anthony Iacono just had his first exhibition with Marinaro a few months ago. Currently an artist in residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, Iacono was recently included in a group show curated by Nikki Maloof and Louis Fratino at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, and has had two solos at P.P.O.W., which brought the artist to Frieze New York last year (the booth, which included works by Iacono and five other artists, was named one of the best booths at Frieze by Artsy.) Iacono’s truncated figures are in fact collages, though they look much more like paintings; the artist first paints smooth gradients on paper before cutting it up to make his graphic compositions.
TAKAHIKO IIMURA
Booth F3
Microscope Gallery, New York
Takahiko Iimura,
Film Installation
, 1974. Photo: Paris, 1974. Image courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery.
Though you're likely to visit art fairs to see new (or at least recent) works by your favorite artists, Microscope’s booth will offer the rare opportunity to see a historic presentation from one of the pioneers of experimental avant garde filmmaking in both Japan and New York. Takahiko Iimura deconstructs the language of video, making often self-reflexive pieces that destabilize the relationship between the viewer and film, subject and filmmaker. “I am concerned with the whole system of video, not just what you see on the screen, but including the camera, monitor, the whole system,” the artist has said. In the case of Microscope’s presentation at Frieze, this conceit is pushed to its limits: Film Installation (1974) simply uses film strips as a material for minimalist sculpture; without light and projection, the film is exposed in its bare elements. This work was first shown in the United States at P.S. 1 in 1979 and hasn’t been exhibited since—though Iimura’s other work was recently featured at the Whitney in “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema & Art, 1905-206,” and in “Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995” at MIT List Gallery in Cambridge and SculptureCenter in New York.
CLAUDIA FONTES
Booth F10
Galería Nora Fisch
Claudia Fontes,
Foreigners
(2019). Image courtesy of the gallery and artist.
Not for the trypophobic, Claudia Fontes’ foot-high ceramic figures a laden with tiny holes; multiple bodies are united together by a pattern of absence. Born in Buenos Aires in 1964, Fontes has spent the last 10 years living in England, where her experience as foreigner is the foundation for her work. With her "Foreigners" series, presented by Galería Nora Fisch at Frieze, “Fontes attempts to ‘denaturalize’ the word ‘foreigner’—a word that she believes has come to be associated with discrimination and negativity in English culture,” according to the press release. Fontes represented Argentina in the 2017 Venice Bienale, and has shown her work at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires and Documenta 13 in Kassel, among others.
NAUFUS RAMÍRES-FIGUEROA
Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City
Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa,
Escamas, Variación #7
, 2019. Image courtesy of the gallery and artist.
Proyectos Ultravioleta presents work by Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, who works across a variety of media, exploring the fraught intersections of form and history through the lens of geopolitical entanglement, often using his own displacement as affective ground for exploration. His work spans science fiction, abstraction, folklore, and unconscious desire, highlighting the tandem precarity and significance of cultural ideology. His current fare on display at Frieze, like the carved wood panel Variacion Aluminios , or Aluminum Variations , introduce a decorative, two-dimensional angle to his practice, one that speaks to a procedural impulse towards world-building that unearths itself through texture. Ramirez-Figueroa has been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and has had solo exhibitions at Casa de America, Madrid, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Gasworks, London, and CAPC musee d’art contemporain, Bordeaux. He lives and works in Berlin and Guatemala City.
OLIVIA ERLANGER
Booth F2
And Now, Dallas
Olivia Erlanger,
Pergusa
(2019). Image courtesy of the artist and gallery.
At the forefront in the running to be the section’s most eye-catching booth, is Olivia Erlanger’s presentation with And Now, a five-year-old gallery in Dallas with a modestly sized roster of five artists. Erlanger was commissioned by the BMW Open Work initiative to create a multi-platform work at Frieze London 2017, and will be returning to this iteration of the fair, with a work that “looks to mythologies around the female hybrid, mermaids, harpies, sirens, and Medusa as a point of inspiration.” Mermaids are collectively thought to be mythological, both sexualized and monstrous; the same can be said of women. Erlanger, based in Brooklyn, has had solo shows with Seventeen Gallery in London, Balice Hertling in New York, What Pipeline in Detroit, Mathew in New York, And Now in Dallas, Human Resources in Los Angeles, and Motherculture also in Los Angeles. This piece is sure to make a splash.
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