The Frieze New York art fair is open through Sunday at the Shed.
Photo: David Lê
It’s easy to be cynical about Frieze, the Ari Emanuel–owned art fair ensconced in the Shed until Sunday, and think of it as a multilevel folly much like the nearby Vessel, a glittering skin around a hollow core. But while the casual visitor might be mystified by, say, the interactive De Beers diamond installation that sits next to a Turkish Airlines activation — there is a mock check-in counter with hostesses in uniform — to acknowledge the conspicuous cash on view without acknowledging the freedom that cash purchases is to miss the point.
Frieze, the biggest of the four art fairs opening this week alongside TEFAF, Independent, and NADA, is a balancing act: “Blue-chip slop,” as one attendee described it to me, keeps the lights on for the bright-eyed gallerist presenting work that can and will and should sit in a museum one day. Admittedly, it is not always clear which is serving as a pretext for which.
At the VIP preview on Wednesday, I was struck less by the ostentatious wealth than by the quiet conservatism of the goods on display: polite, retrograde abstracts; “fun” bursts of color on canvas designed to sit in a beach home; and the last gasps of Biden-era “political” works. With the stunt-queen brinkmanship of the Venice Biennale happening at the same time and a creeping sense that the art market is not fully recovered, what is notable at Frieze is its “don’t rock the boat or spook the collectors” sensibility.
“A lot of galleries are just like, Oh, let’s attach ourselves to this life raft of things that present as painterly and not just decorative but are still quite safe and sellable,” says Jed Moch of Amity, an itinerant gallery that itself opened a show on Canal Street consisting mostly of works in pleasing washes of color. Even if he’s wary of an aesthetic consensus set by interior decorators, Moch has to be cognizant of the current market, which is dominated by paintings that are “a blending of figuration and abstraction that is delicate and very palatable.” The smaller scale of his gallery offers some freedom from the market mandate.
The semi-figurative, semi-abstract painting is, in fact, having a moment; that much was clear at Frieze. There is no avoiding the trends for social creatures like us. What, then, are galleries to do with a trend? If they simply reproduce it, they abdicate the taste-setting that is their raison d’être. If they defy it, they risk failing to sell (their other raison d’être). Frieze presents a unique optimization problem — how to cater to the existing tastes of buyers while advancing some idea of what contemporary art should look like.
For David Zwirner, the answer has been to seize the opportunity with a solo presentation of Joe Bradley, the American painter who has long mined this vein of semi-figurative, semi-abstract painting. The Zwirner proposition seems to be this: We’ve been here all along. “Joe has been making this kind of work for 20 years. There’s something powerful about presenting an artist who’s been working in this idiom long before it became such a visible trend,” says gallery director Thor Shannon.
The Bradley paintings evoke the mid-century charm of the New York School, somewhere between Grace Hartigan’s and Philip Guston’s abstracts: Today’s influencers are yesterday’s influenced, in the great circle of painting. In the cacophony of the opening, the Bradley paintings do suggest the power of restraint (which is an odd thing to say about works that are too large to fit through the door of my apartment).
In point of fact, David Zwirner could weather a Frieze of soft sales (though I think the Bradleys will do just fine) in a way others could not. So, too, could Gagosian, the megagallery that has six locations in New York alone (seven if you include the Gagosian Shop). Blue-chip galleries generate revenue elsewhere.
The Turkish Airlines activation at the Frieze lounge.
Photo: David Lê
Antwaun Sargent, who curated the booth (and is a self-described “Frieze booth veteran”), explained that this year’s presentation is a dialogue between younger artists (the painter Derrick Adams, the fashion/art photographer Tyler Mitchell) and 20th-century masters (Gerhard Richter, Helen Frankenthaler). Sargent describes the broader cultural moment as “small-c conservative,” and tellingly, the Gagosian booth includes paintings of polite abstraction that won’t have anyone clutching their pearls. Sargent, who became a director in 2021, should be trusted to know which way the winds are blowing — like Larry before him, he sells his shows. But he dismisses the idea that Frieze is simply a place to buy a painting to hang above the couch. “The truth is in the works,” he says, and those truths are present no matter where they hang.
For their part, small galleries (like Amity) keep the overhead low and compete where they can — on high-risk, more experimental works that they hope capture the attention of the globally itinerant collector class concentrated in town for a single week of satellite fairs and marquee auctions (Robert Mnuchin’s collection at Sotheby’s and S.I. Newhouse’s at Christie’s). As with so much in the current K-shaped economy, it is the midsize firms that are failing, as a spate of recent notable closings (Clearing, Blum, Marlborough, Venus Over Manhattan, Sperone Westwater) suggests.
One newcomer to Frieze, the New York gallery Ulrik, is taking the plunge in the fair’s emerging-gallery “Focus” section despite co-owner Alexander Fleming’s reservations about “the capitalist logic to expand.” For Fleming and co-owner Anya Komar, this is less a concern about art dealing as such and more a concern about the received “wisdom” that bigger is better in the gallery world. That idea drives up overhead. And no one wants to see a show organized around a sales quota.
Still, Frieze has been a critical opportunity for Ulrik. The exposure that the fair has brought has already yielded tangible effects — more visitors, more inquiries even before the fair opened. When I visited the booth, it looked like a major museum would be acquiring a work. The duo are presenting works from the late Chelsea Hotel–dwelling Bettina, the mononymic conceptual artist whose sharply observant photos and geometric sculptures disclose a maniacal, if paranoid, brilliance.
Bettina has seen an enormous swell in interest that helps lower the risk of the gallery’s investment in the fair. Her sculptures, developed by iterating the geometry of a lock’s keyhole, insist on some conceptual depth despite their surface charm. They also allow the gallery to telegraph a more important message: We are playing in the big leagues, warding off competitors, and advancing a curatorial agenda that should be taken seriously.
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