This year Cool Hunting was fortunate enough to have the artist Clay Ketter as our companion at London’s Frieze Art Fair. Ketter is well known for his post-minimalist work…
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To coincide with London’s Frieze Art Week, Lisson Gallery has opened a major exhibition new of work by one of the UK’s greatest living artists, Anish Kapoor. Just when it seemed that Kapoor had reached the limits of the art world’s highest echelons, perhaps quite literally with the Olympic…
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Highlights from and musings on the London fair’s NYC takeover
“I think of our fair as a discovery fair,” explains Frieze co-founder Amanda Sharp. For the first US edition of Frieze Art Fair, Sharp and partner Matthew Slotover have taken over Randall’s Island, a sprawling piece of land at the confluence of NYC’s East and Harlem rivers. What began as a London-based magazine in 1991 soon evolved into a must-see contemporary art event at Regents Park in London. Now in NYC, the massive venue is teeming with curious works from a cast of well-chosen international galleries, with new delights to be had at every booth. Nude mannequin nutcrackers, neon jokes, custom-casted busts, turntable muffs—Frieze NYC is packed with innovative art.
Criticized somewhat for taking place outside of Manhattan, Frieze is worth the free ferry ride to Randall’s Island, thanks to careful consideration of the venue as a destination. The Brooklyn-based architects at SO-IL have designed a 250,000-square foot serpentine tent that encourages visitors to linger and look, building out enough space to really stop and take in the art. When you need a break, there are equally alluring NYC restaurants to choose from, like Roberta’s, Fat Radish, Saint Ambroeus and The Standard Biergarten.
For New York, the fair has special significance; it’s a sign of a rebounding post-recession art market. In terms of timing, Frieze comes on the heels of the recently ended Armory Show, and coincides with the NADA, Verge and Pulse art fairs happening throughout the city. Sharp has lived the past 14 years in New York, and this show is in part her response to gallery owners who have been requesting a New York version of Frieze. Of the 182 galleries showing at Frieze, 46 hail from NYC.
While media attention has hyped the fair to the point that this is now being called “Frieze Week”, we went along for the art. Among the standout galleries were Alfonso Artiaco from Naples, London’s Sadie Coles HQ, Sean Kelly Gallery from NYC and Paris’ Galerie Perrotin. Text art, floor art and neon were all out in full force, and the sprawling collection offered endless examples of new works from the best artists around.
Frieze Art Fair runs through 7 May 2012 with free ferry service running to and from the island. For those who can’t make the fair, head over to Frieze Virtual New York 2012 to browse all of the galleries, artworks and artists. Find more stellar art (and captions for the above pieces) by checking out our slideshow.
Six standout pieces from London’s Frieze Art Fair 2011
Now in its ninth year, the Frieze Art Fair has grown to encompass nearly 1,000 artists and 173 galleries from more than 33 countries under one hangar-like tent. Though organizers have been accused of creating an over-commercialized art supermarket, there is no doubt that Frieze still shows fascinating work.
This year we’ve picked six new glass pieces from a variety of galleries worldwide based on their striking angular elegance and transparent special effects. Part of what made these works so compelling was their ability to occupy their own space while also incorporating the people and art around them, reflecting all the fun of the fair.
Brooklyn-based Nick van Woert caught our attention with his vibrant “Not Yet Titled 7” (2011) on show at the Parisian Yvon Lambert Gallery . These multi-colored building blocks cut a dash through the space, each filled with a different material. Insulation foam, chipped concrete and metal shavings are layered between colorful liquids and gels, all encapsulated in plexi-glass containers, as a sort of deconstructed expression of modern architecture.
Down the aisle at Plan B Gallery, Navid Nuur‘s “Untitled” (2011) is a simple structure of angled mirror and glass reflecting a combination of its fast-paced surroundings against the words “Just Another Edge of Present Understanding.” These complex visuals seem to reflect the multicultural layers of this Netherlands-based, Tehran-born artist showing work with a Romanian gallery.
Carsten Nicolai’s work at Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin also incorporates layers of glass. In this case the three “Batterie Random Dot” (2011) sculptures reflect Nicolai’s own work on the walls rather than that of other artists. The dot patterns printed on the piled-up horizontal glass sheets contrast with the sculptures’ overall rectilinear cube structures, reinforcing Nicolai’s interest in the tension between random and organized patterns. “Many of my works underlie a rule and introduce a model as organizing scheme to recognize chaotic movements,” he explains.
Anri Sala achieves full transparency with his installation “No Window No Cry”(2010). This Albanian artist provides a viewfinder both into the Marian Goodman Gallery and outward to the rest of the fair, creating moments where visitors come face-to-face on either side of the glass to admire this intriguing artwork. Trapped in between the viewers and the layers of glass in a carefully blown bubble is a “modified music box,” which one imagines could make a beautiful sound, if only it could be reached.
Olafur Eliasson expresses the containment of movement in a flash of bright yellow glass at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Eliasson’s “Thinking Sphere” (2011) seems to develop last year’s “Untitled Sphere,” which reflected fragmented yellow light in a black box. Now the structure is reversed, with the light escaping into an external yellow sphere and the mirrored geodesic black box now containing a mysterious energy at its core.
Jeppe Hein‘s, Two-way Mirror Mobile (2011) at Galleri Nicolai Wallner brought the theme of reflection and transparency to its rightful conclusion by the show’s exit, summing up the art world’s sense of watching and being watched. As this Danish artist’s large glass discs rotate on their Calder-like mobile structure visitors can see straight through them, while also seeing reflections of themselves and the surroundings artworks, capturing all of Frieze in a perfect circle.
Fractal sculptures take center stage at London’s biggest art fair
With the resurgence of handmade and traditional craftsmanship consuming the design industry, it came as no surprise that this year’s Frieze Art Fair was filled with beautifully-executed DIY style—from artworks as text to compositions crafted from beads. Juxtaposed against the handmade charm however, an exciting theme of lights and kinetic geometry married art and science for an innovative approach to sculpture.
Olafur Eliasson‘s “Untitled Sphere” (working title) (2010), a dramatic geodesic light sculpture, doubles as a lampshade. Matte black on the outside with yellow foiled mirror triangles inside, the faceted sphere creates infinite reflections of light and images inside the shade. (Pictured above right.)
Next to Eliasson’s piece at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s stand, Tomas Saraceno‘s “Hydrogen Cloud Explosion” (2010), a suspended geometric sculpture of transparent acrylic and tensile strings, seemed to explode outwards in the opposite direction of Eliasson’s heavy glittering imploding shade.
All the reflections created by Bojan Sarcevic‘s transparent deconstructionist sculpture of thin acrylic inside a glass vitrine almost rendered the work invisible. At The Approach Gallery Germaine Kruip cast more spellbinding light around with his “Counter Composition III” (2008), a geometric mirror sculpture that smoothly rotates in different directions, fragmenting the view from all sides.
Less disorienting, Lygia Clark‘s “Desfolhado” (1960) sculpture complements her minimalist geometric collages and urges you to pick up the aluminum-hinged construction and explore its many folding forms. Clark’s work from the ’50s and ’60s seemingly inspired the contemporary fold prints by Iran do Espírito Santo at the Ingelby Gallery, “Twist 6B” and “Twist 6C” (2010).
Florian Slotawa‘s series of white pendant lights, “SG 07” (2010), at the Sies + Höke Gallery, played host to parasitic geometric limbs protruding at strange angles. At the Marian Goodman Gallery, Pierre Huyghe‘s vaguely sinister aluminum and LED mask called “The Host and the Cloud” (2010), looked like it might be used as protection from Saraceno’s nearby “Hydrogen Cloud Explosion.”
But the highlight of this theme of light and kinetic geometry was spotted at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in Conrad Shawcross’ “Limit of Everything” (2010). This revolving light sculpture echoed many of the pieces that came before, expansive as Saraceno’s “Hydrogen Cloud,” moving smoothly as Kruip’s “Counter Composition III” and as angular as Slotawa’s light arms. Shawcross’ mechanical pinwheel was a beautiful, ever changing, semaphoric display of minimalism.
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