Frieze New York 2024: what to see in and around the city

A white poodle was unendingly rotating on a sleek black and white roundabout during Wednesday’s preview of Frieze in New York, showing his doe-eyed face and then his fluffy back to the fairgoers on an infinite loop. The sculpture titled Social Media (white poodle) (2023) by the Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset at the Milanese gallery Massimo de Carlo’s booth captures the hallucinatory spirit of stomping the aisles across an art fair. Booth after booth, art flows like a film roll. The seasoned attendees of a preview day however have long perfected the recipe of getting the most of a blockbuster affair: scan through the walls, chat with colleagues, and make sure to avoid circling around the same corner. 

Frieze New York 2024: what to see

Frieze spans three floors at The Shed which helps stagger the whirlwind into sections while also getting whiffs of the sun-lit High Line park views during each escalator break. “We have the right people in the room, mostly New Yorkers and many from South America,” Frieze Americas director Christine Messineo tells Wallpaper*. She thinks quality of the local audience requires the galleries to come up with strong presentations: “Exhibition-making is happening at this fair.” A few solo presentations among the first floor’s bluechips hint at the director’s point. Seoul’s Kukje Gallery exhibits a striking display of eleven paper collages, overall titled Mesmerizing Mesh, by the Korean German sculptor Haegue Yang; Gladstone Gallery dedicates their section to Alex Katz’s new allusive monochromatic paintings of tree trunks in various scales and hues. James Cohan brings Venice to Manhattan with a group of paintings of repurposed technological debris by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime who currently has an exhibition, titled Dichotomy ፊት አና ጀርባ’, dedicated to same material source at Spazio Tana. 

A few galleries use their platforms to turn attention to the artists’ shows outside of The Shed. Arlene Shechet’s intricately-orchestrated hardwood, steel, and ceramic sculptures at Pace Gallery nod to the artist’s new upstate outdoors Storm King Art Center project, Girl Group, which blows up her scale to twenty feet high with the backdrop of the spring blossoms. White Cube’s group booth includes an intergenerational range with Etel Adnan, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Georg Baselitz, Ibrahim Mahama, and Antony Gormley whose solo show, AERIAL, also opens this week at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost. The titular maze-like installation downstairs absorbs the visitors into a structure of thin solid aluminum bars, while three solid cast iron humanoid forms from the Big Double Blockworks (2023) series break the body’s likeness into hefty pixel-like chunks. 

Brussel’s Xavier Hufkens salutes their roster artists’ institutional moments, as well. Huma Bhabha who recently unveiled her four large scale bronze sculptures, titled Before The End, for Public Art Fund at the Manhattan-viewed Brooklyn Bridge Park stands at the gallery’s booth with a smaller totemic bust, while a joyous fish painting by Josh Smith pre-celebrates the New Yorker artist’s upcoming institutional solo inspired by the work of late Antiguan painter Frank Walter at Soho’s The Drawing Center. 

The booth makes a full circle with the hang of a small scale Walter painting, a few steps away from Smith’s. Beauty and its gnarly ways is explored on the 8th floor where Korean luxury skin care brand Poiret unveils their collaboration with Sarah Cwynar ahead of the conceptual lens-based artist’s solo show at Tribeca’s 52 Walker this fall. Encyclopedia Grid at the brand’s booth includes collaged images of everyday objects associated with beauty such as a lush purple rose next to a female model with wide open arms. Cwynar selected the model through a casting agent out of a fascination for those she comes across on the luxury online retailer ssense’s website. “I am interested in how the ways the models are presented in an interchangeable way, almost like robots posing a standardized way for internet,” says Cwynar who indeed hired an actual ssense model for the shoot.

Frieze however is not only about the aisles. The fair’s programming prompts the visitors to go out to soak in the May warmth and catch Matty Davis’s gut-punching daily performance Die No Die (The High Line) which proceeds with a group of diverse performers, including Davis himself and a child dancer, from the elevated park’s south end towards the fair’s premise in Hudson Yards. During Tuesday’s preview, the performers crawled, scooted, and eventually fell onto the ground in front of an intrigued audience as well as the park’s clueless passerby. 

Right below, Kasmin unveiled its new exhibition of surreal pastel paintings by the Swedish artist Sara Anstis. Two nude women’s blonde hair evolves into blades of a scissors in Separation Anxiety (2024) or in Woodwoose (2024), a woman whose hair is a tree trunk hosts another female figure on its branch. Even a silent symphony is a part of the Frieze week. Uptown, conductor by Petr Kotik and the orchestra and choir of the S.E.M. Ensemble performed Yves Klein’s 1949-dated single note composition, Monotone-Silence Symphony, which also includes a twenty-minute silence at St. James’ Church. The act crescendoed Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s ongoing exhibition, Yves Klein and the Tangible World, which features 1957’s Pure Pigment pool floor sculpture in the original Klein blue. 

Frieze New York 2024 continues through 5 May 2024

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