BmoreArt

Amity NYC and KRUPA Gallery (of Wroclaw, POLAND) are jointly presenting a solo booth by Łukasz Stokłosa at NADA. The Polish painter has a bit more experience under his belt than the average Young Blurry Artist, and a unique process. He achieves a dry, scratchy texture that almost looks like crayon by using a paper palette to wick the oil out of his colors, then applying the paint with dry brushes (which he almost never cleans). He achieves highlights and a glowing effect by wiping away pigment to reveal white canvas below.

“I like complicating my process so it gives me unexpected results,” he explained, “It drives me away from any previous idea for the painting.” The resulting surfaces are eerie and mysterious, even if they were inspired by imagery from pop culture. 

Nearby at March, NY’s booth,  Phyllis Yao’s paintings feature autobiographical references and a more diverse range of mark-making, but feel equally haunting. The gallerist explained that Yao’s work conveys a sense of motion or instability inspired by the artists’ experiences of moving as a child.

Culture shock and acceleration also informs the work of Preslav Kostov, who moved from a small town in Bulgaria to study art in London. He’s showing with New York gallery Tara Downs, where he was just recently signed and has been selling out shows. I love this series, in which the garbled, blurry, glitchy anatomy of the figures is a response to the “bad” images generated by early AI.

Bucking the trend, I was surprised to see how much more graphic and controlled my buddy Phaan Howng’s latest paintings on linen in Dinner Gallery’s booth are, compared to her prior, larger, more painterly works with a faster gestural vocabulary. The Baltimore painter—who is featured in our City of Artists book and has exhibited in BmoreArt’s Connect + Collect gallery—imagines future flora and how they might evolve to our overheating planet’s increasingly toxic environment, so a more illustrative style makes conceptual sense.

Another Baltimore-based painter, Bre Andy, shown by Cierra Britton, probably has the “crispest” paintings in NADA. Her honest and intimate portraits are so arresting they were stopping viewers in their tracks. When I swung by Wednesday night, all but one of them had sold.

Speaking of Baltimore, I was happy to encounter Larry Cook’s work again. The first time I discovered his found and/or manipulated photos that speak to class ambitions, conspicuous consumption, and absence at Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore I was blown away. At NADA, Cook is showing with Washington, DC’s Chela Mitchell Gallery, whose eponymous founder BmoreArt profiled for our “Collaboration” issue!

Over on the Beach, Untitled is also chock full of paintings flying off the walls—although, in reversal of expectations—there’s much less of any one defining trend at that fair. Bill Arning Exhibitions is showing some really lovely figurative paintings by Jean Paul Mallozzi and Rajab Ali Sayed. When I stopped by the booth, the artist was a bit incredulously explaining to a friend that one of these is going to a museum, but that because the museum is on a college campus that receives funds from Florida’s right-wing government they’re going to need to censor one of the figure’s dicks with a sticker before it can be displayed. I recommend an “I VOTED” sticker.

Other notable paintings include Shanee Roe at Berlin’s Kornfeld Galerie. The young artist builds up collage-like layers of texture, but their handling of color is what’s truly special. Roe plays with sudden hints and pops of color lurking at the fringes of forms in a way that just animates the whole composition… I love a painting you can “watch”. 

Emerson Dorsch (Miami) and La Bibi (Mallorca)—as always—have great booths with work that’s both visually appealing and curious. Judd Schiffman’s porcelain sculptures at Emerson Dorsch, for example, feature narratives and motifs plucked from the artist’s own invented mythologies. Both galleries also have fiber work that features repeating soft sculptures of hands…. I do not know why this is something I have been seeing pop up everywhere this year, but I am into it!

I’m happy to see that in these seemingly perpetual “uncertain economic times” some people in the art world still take risks and embrace the weird! Amsterdam’s No Man’s Art Gallery is showing the Oaxacan artist Alan Hernández, whose sculptures draw inspiration from metamorphic insects, traditional crafts, and newly-minted cult film “The Substance.” His work is a visual buffet of different stitches and embellishment strategies, but for all the impeccable craftsmanship, resists being conventionally “beautiful” and I love that about it. Let’s bring back the glory days of the paragraph-long materials list for artwork that cannot possibly hang above anyone’s sofa!

It’s funny—there’s been a lot of talk at the fairs about a market recalibration  to more realistically meet expectations for collectors’ tastes. I, for one, am thrilled so many fairs are full of pretty shiny gloopy ceramics and painterly paintings. I love those things! And I certainly don’t blame gallerists for prioritizing them as relatively salable objects. But I also want us all to remember that “collectors’ tastes” are far from universal!

Probably the two most talked about artworks in Miami right now are unconventional recent acquisitions that ended up in museums because of local collectors’ idiosyncratic tastes.

The Rubell Museum recently acquired a totally bonkers Cajsa von Zeipel sculpture of a dystopian lesbian orgy in which every participant seems more preoccupied with their own recording devices and an implied voyeuristic audience than interested in each other. I probably spent a good 15 minutes walking around it the other night in awe of its uncanniness.  And the de la Cruz Collection recently donated the Assume Vivid Astro Focus installation “XI” to the Bass Museum, where it is now on view.

The piece was originally installed in Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz’s home during Art Basel Miami Beach 20 years ago. It combines video of voguers, illustrations of drag queens, carpet, collage, wallpaper, artworks by other artists, architectural components, animation… I don’t think I even managed to get a photo that does it justice! But every single person who entered that installation was beaming from ear to ear with joy.

I mention these two works because I think they’re the best examples of “art objects” that seem like they would be hard to place due to their unusual materials and dimensions relative to, say, a painting on stretched canvas, but were obviously worth taking a risk! Let your freak flag fly, art world!