BmoreArt

Mostly, the vibe this year seems to have been one of burnout. Everyone just looked so exhausted. It wasn’t even the infamous “fair fatigue” that sets in after hectic days of install, parties, or “see it all” mandates—it was more like the world’s collective discourse battery had entered power-saving mode. No one has any more energy to speculate about the economy or its impact on the art market, censorship at institutions, whether or not the US will even participate in the Venice Biennale next year, et al. Eyes have been glazing over halfway through conversations. In-demand artists seemed overworked. Arts administrators looked resigned. Dealers and collectors were weary of checking currency conversion rates for the fourth time in one day.

The silver lining of all this uncertainty is that enthusiasm about materials, process, and craft still managed to bubble up through the quagmire and take the cognitive spotlight. Maybe uptown it’s a different story. I am imagining the conversations at the auction houses and TEFAF these past few days have probably been very different from those I’ve been having at museums, galleries, and the fun fairs—NADA, SPRING/BREAK, Esther, and Independent—fairs that reminded me why I’m happier reporting on artmaking/seeing and its joys than… uh, literally everything else happening in the news cycle.

It’s no surprise that paintings and ceramics are as popular as ever, but the out-of-focus-blurry-figuration trend I discussed in detail after NADA’s last Miami edition seems to have only intensified.  I am also happy to see a lot of galleries embracing works on paper or at a smaller format and filling booths with art at various price points. One craze I am a bit perplexed by: paintings of curtains everywhere. Seemingly every fair has at least a few paintings of delicately-rendered drapes or cascading fabric. I think I counted at least three booths dedicated exclusively to this subject matter. Is this representative of some unspoken desire for the curtain to fall, signifying the end of a scene and a new act? Anticipation? A classical reference to the ol’ Zeuxis and Parrhasius painters’ rivalry? Or just less esoteric nostalgia for the simpler days of technical art school homework? Speaking of cognitive burnout, there’s gotta be a Greek word for a symbol of an abstract concept that provokes the same sensation it signifies, right? In this case: mystery.

And, interestingly, our collective, ongoing love affair with painterly ceramics has now manifested in its final/original form—ceramic works that function as paintings, both abstract and representational, hanging on the wall. This is, of course, nothing new (hand-painted tiles predate oil-on-canvas, after all) but this latest batch fully embraces the irregularities, vulnerability, and charm of the medium’s happy accidents. I found myself thinking about all the gorgeous contemporary handmade tile-based artworks in the Lisbon metro and their relationship to the kitschy azulejo kitchen fridge magnets for sale at every corner tourist shop (in a good way). Paintings and tiles used to be inexorably tied to place. The souvenir is our longing for A Moveable Feast incarnate. I was unexpectedly overcome by all of the above associations looking at Raina Lee‘s solo booth with Los Angeles’ Stroll Garden at NADA. The artist conflates the format of a postcard and subway tile—lovingly carving and glazing scenes from a summer spent in France into stoneware. Even her reproductions of famous paintings in Parisian museums feel vulnerable and intimate, as if we’re seeing pages from the artist’s vacation sketchbook immortalized for posterity in unforgiving ceramic.

An aisle over, New York’s Asya Geisberg Gallery paired Trish Tillman‘s graphic wall-hanging assemblages that evoke luxury goods (I imagine them being constructed like a well-made handbag) with Carolyn Case‘s pastel-and-ceramic compositions, which also possess a sketchbook-transmuted-to-ceramic quality. Case was at the fair when I stopped by with my former roommate and overheard us commenting with surprise upon reading her bio and learning she lived in Baltimore. How is it possible we had never crossed paths? Case explained her process to us: she begins with expressive pastel drawings on paper, then sculpts clay extensions of the compositions beyond the page, which function as both frames and continuations of the images. Photos do not do justice to how lovely these are in the flesh. There’s a certain satisfaction to be had walking around them and seeing how the relationship between the matte/gloss surfaces, their textures, and impressively-coordinated colors from vastly different processes shift from different perspectives. We’ve been kicking ourselves for not finding the time to see her solo show at the gallery’s brick-and-mortar before it closed on Friday.

Of all the sculptural objects that found themselves mounted to fair booth walls this week, those at Asya Geisberg might, in retrospect, be considered outliers—most of the others I encountered around NADA and the other fairs were a bit less playful, monochromatic, and laden with references to either antiquity or the built environment (or both). Bas reliefs, tablets with mark-making resembling cuneiform, itinerant architectural elements in varying states of ruin… it’s a definite zeitgeist! One I observed earlier this year at the seductively apocalyptic fairs in Madrid, and the artist Zody Burke attributed to a generational preoccupation with “the end of archeology” in an interview last month. (The classical/ruin/archeological references aren’t just the domain of sculpture: they could be found in countless paintings, jacquard weavings, drawings, and collages all over town, such as recent Yale grad Xi Li’s haunting photographs of dioramas the artist constructed from decaying 1960s Chinese propaganda magazines at Hesse Flatow’s excellent NADA booth.)

Speaking of Zody Burke and bas reliefs, the Tallinn-by-way-of-Baltimore-by-way-of-New-York artist’s thesis work from her MFA at The Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) was presented at the second edition of the art fair Esther by the gallery Temnikova & Kasela, who also showed gorgeous relic-inspired ceramic candelabras by Edith Karlson (who represented Estonia at the last Venice Biennale). Esther is the kind of fair I typically really enjoy—where gallerists and curators engage with idiosyncratic buildings rather than an endless sea of cubicles in a convention center. Esther takes place at the Estonia House private club in Midtown, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a cool context—especially given that many of the participating galleries are based in Eastern or Central Europe—but since it’s a bit out of the way from the other fairs I worried it wasn’t attracting the foot traffic it deserved.

Burke’s installation was one of the biggest and most ambitious I encountered this year, when caution seems to be the norm. Comprising a scaffolding that evokes an excavation or restoration site and intricately-carved bas reliefs, it was originally intended as a site-specific intervention in a historic building in Tallinn. The piece riffs off the Estonian-mythology-inspired architectural motifs of that space, and updates them with contemporary references including a cringe-inducing trend Burke noticed of couples dressing as hunter and prey for Halloween. The level of detail in Burke’s mise-en-scenes resulted in me noticing something new every time I circled the work. Look through the window of that house: is that a woman surfing the net while her baby is in the fireplace? I need to ask about that one…

The same basement room featured garment racks with offerings from the Estonian art/design brands SORCERER and  Goods and Services, a collaboration between Laivi Suurväli and Kasia Zofia Gorniak. Visitors could select individual digitally-printed pattern pieces and commission the artists to assemble them into customized garments. It was very, very cool.

Many of my top picks at Estonia House were actually lurking in the building’s stairwells, lit by Edith Karlson’s haunting ceramic candle holders. When I stopped by, I had just been thinking about one of my favorite paintings of all time, Marlene Dumas’ 1997 “Miss January,” because it’s heading to auction at Christie’s and expected to fetch the highest sum ever for a living female painter. That would normally be good news, but I am bummed, because it’s being sold by the Rubells, and it’s somewhat of a ritual of mine to swing by and “visit” her in their very excellent collection whenever I’m in Miami. I shall miss her and all her weirdness. I took solace discovering this painting by Cathleen Clarke (of Margot Samel Gallery) here at Esther. She’s not “Miss January,” but perhaps a cousin who’s inherited some of the family’s spirit and podiatric peculiarities.

Thank god Zody Burke accompanied me to Independent. All week, I had heard from friends and acquaintances who work in the commercial art world that they were eager to check out the fair. At first, I didn’t get why. I had a strange déjà vu as if I had seen this exact same edition when I first visited the fair roughly a decade ago. Then it dawned on me: most of the work that felt familiar or purely decorative in so many booths this year could be used as a litmus test to see how the middle market is performing. While I was a bit underwhelmed by a lot (but not all!) of what was on the main floor, Burke took the initiative to explore some of the funkier architectural spaces where our favorite work was hiding. 

Case and point: Swedish artist Klara Zetterholm work at the Romanian gallery SUPRAINFINIT was tucked away up a staircase in an odd loft. Which actually worked out well, because it had total museum vitrine vibes that complimented her show.

Zetterholm works with polymer clay from craft stores to create bas reliefs and mannequins reminiscent of displays at natural history museums—evoking a distant, forgotten past or possible future. There’s an uncanny quality to the figures’ human gazes and mannerisms, and a loving amount of detail in the “artifacts” from their unknowable civilization. One of my favorite moments is a tiny slug-like creature resting on top of the “broken” statue whose alien toes dip out beneath her robes, hinting that this isn’t your typical antiquity. (I obviously enjoyed being a fly, or, er… alien trilobite? on the wall during the great meeting of minds between two weirdo sculptors living and working just one ferry ride across the frigid Baltic Sea apart!) 

Likewise, Burke discovered the tiny, endearing paintings and works on paper of Matt Kenny hiding in a space I had assumed was a bathroom. In retrospect, I appreciate how these idiosyncratic spaces forced viewers into more intimate experiences with the works. In what was a slightly uneven fair, I fear higher-caliber booths might’ve blended in with the crowd.

A few blocks away, we ran into some familiar faces at SPRING/BREAK. Brian Andrew Whiteley and MICA grad Dino Urpí both explained that their respective series were originally intended for the fair’s Los Angeles edition, which was cancelled due to the wildfires. In Whiteley’s case, that kinda worked out! His show, curated by Brittany Wherry, was titled Evacuation Plan and comprised confusing map-like dot paintings surrounded by prop flames. The artist has also been collecting ceramic knick-knacks and repainting them in garish colors. In this context, they bring to mind the most absurd possible answer to the classic “Your house is on fire. What do you save?” rhetorical.

The fires and climate change were also addressed in Phil Buehler’s installation “Hoax.” Buehler wallpapered a cubicle (SPRING/BREAK was, once again, hosted in vacant office space) with “before” images of burned neighborhoods in Los Angeles. In the center, there’s an impressive cyclorama that shows viewers the scorched “after” landscape. The title of the piece refers to the Republican insistence that the reality of climate change is some kind of hoax, because…. China? Or something?

I was also happy to see Baltimore ceramicist Patrick Bell’s body-horror evoking sculptures lounging menacingly in the sterile office space. These are so creepy and fantastic… like scrambled porn on the old cable channels rendered in immutable stoneware. They also are insanely affordable! Many of Bell’s monstrous creations were priced in the three figure range. I’d be shocked if this show hasn’t sold out.

But then again, there was only about one collector for every three artists or curators when we visited the fair. That’s wild! Part of this might have come down to poor visibility. There was no signage indicating that an art fair was taking place, high up in an office building. It’s a shame, because half the people heading to jam-packed Independent probably used the subway exit literally directly in front of the lobby. We circled the block twice before it occurred to me to just enter and ask.

Like most art fairs, SPRING/BREAK can be a bit hit-or-miss, but of the big May shows, it’s probably the one dearest to my heart. This edition had too many highlights to list! I pity the collectors who might’ve passed by none the wiser.

Below, a few more gems: