The world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art celebrated 10 years, with show-stopping sales and dedicated virtual viewing rooms
Led for the first time by Christine Messineo, Frieze New York returned to the Shed in Hudson Yards for its 10th anniversary. The event brought together the world’s premier galleries, with representation by both emerging and established artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. The strong representation of work by leading local and international galleries was enhanced with an extensive city-wide programme. This year, the event also celebrated the 50th anniversary of some of the city’s most significant art non-profits including EIA and Artists’ Gallery and a large presentation of printed artists’ books and editions from Printed Matter, Inc.
For the first time, the fair also featured cutting-edge technology to create immersive viewing spaces for participating galleries. Leveraging Vortic’s advanced rendering engine, the technology enables the accurate replication of artworks, providing viewers with the opportunity to comprehensively navigate each virtual space in 3D. Key pieces sold quick and fast this year by industry luminaries like Charles Gaines, Tracey Emin, Georg Baselitz, Carol Bove, Al Held and Joan Snyder.
These were a few of the booths and installations that caught our eye at the five-day event:
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (New York)
The gallery presented a solo exhibition of the work of New York artist Nancy Grossman. Focusing on Grossman’s depiction of the human body, the presentation represented three decades of Grossman’s figural practice as represented in sculpture, collage, printmaking, and drawing. Grossman’s “intricately related themes of agency, otherness, vulnerability, and identity” played out in a collection of remarkable pieces that included Grossman’s ink and large-scale drawings of the early 1960s, her dyed paper collages, and pieces from her gunhead series which features leather-clad bodies with guns strapped onto their faces. This was a carefully curated collection with real gravitas.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
The topmost level at the fair housed presentations by a number of brand partners including master watchmaker Breguet and House of Champagne, Maison Ruinart. However, attendee attention was largely drawn to a future-forward installation of nine transparent LG Electronics OLED Signage screens which displayed the digital art of NFT pioneer Kevin McCoy and co-creator Jennifer McCoy. The McCoys presented Quantum Leap: Dark Star, an evolution of Kevin’s previous Quantum Leap iteration, a digital work which evolves autonomously through the use of algorithms and other technologies. While NFTs were not the focus of the fair, the installation by the McCoy pairing drew significant interest.
David Zwirner (New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong)
David Zwirner sold out its entire booth of new sculptures by Carol Bove within the opening hours of the fair. One could argue that Zwirner’s booth was “best in show” as its immersive, coral hued fabric panels featuring Bove’s sculptures protruding in twisted metal forms drew a constant stream of viewers. The pieces express Bove’s long-standing fascination with the “display and the limits of physicality and perception.” Fabricated from crashed steel tubing, her new sculptures “convey an apparent lightness that belies their materiality” – and it is remarkable to consider they are indeed not fabricated from more malleable materials.
Stephen Friedman Gallery (London)
The London-based Stephen Friedman Gallery presented a solo exhibition of works by Jonathan Baldock, in one of the only booths to solely display ceramics. Numerous pieces lined the wall while tall, freestanding installations commanded the centre of the booth. The dual nature of Baldock’s work was ever-compelling, with each piece possessing humour and wit as well as a macabre quality. The combination is a result of the subject matter addressed by the artist, which include “the deeper issues and traumas we experienced as bodies in space”. The masks were all sold within the first few hours of the fair.
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