NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023 The Art Newspaper

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New York Spring Fairs Tefaf New York 10-16 May 2023

Design dealers are setting the tone at Tefaf Despite the fair’s small stands in comparison to its Dutch sister fair, gallerists are pairing art with functional design

CARPENTERS WORKSHOP: PHOTO © DAVID BENTHAL/BFA. GRASSHOPPER BAR: © LALANNE, ADAGP, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MENNOUR; PHOTO: ARCHIVES MENNOUR. BUTLER: MARK HANAUER. SHAH: © DREW ALTIZER

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efaf New York is quite different than Tefaf Maastricht,” says the furniture dealer Stephane Danant of the French design gallery Demisch Danant. His stand has shown at both editions of the fair since 2015 and he serves on the selection committee for design galleries at the Dutch edition. “At the New York fair, because we are limited, it’s about about having a nice display on the floor and the walls,” he says. The average stand size of 60 square metres enjoyed by the 270 galleries at Tefaf Maastricht is double that for this year’s New York fair, which is in the historical Park Avenue Armory. The 90 galleries at Tefaf New York (11-16 May) have around 30 sq. m of space each on average. This is especially challenging for the fair’s 15 design-focused galleries, whose directors have to deliberate about every square inch as furniture and objects—as opposed to twodimensional art on walls—fill the space much faster. “We bring the best of the best for the room, whilst most dealers bring the same for the walls,” says British dealer Adrian Sassoon. “In Maastricht, you have a bit more room to play with, while in New York, every gallery has to bring

contemporary works made to debut at the fair. The design mega-gallery Carpenters Workshop commissioned a one-of-a-kind centrepiece for its stand that is sure to draw a crowd.

Showstoppers and grasshoppers

Space aces: the Carpenters Workshop stand (above) at Tefaf 2022, and a rediscovered Lalanne grasshopper cabinet bar (right) destined for the Mennour and Granges stand their best,” says Will Korner, Tefaf’s head of fairs. “Dealers also usually focus on fewer artists.” Each team takes a different approach. For Danant, an art fair that values connoisseurship and design is the perfect opportunity to pair his French post-war furniture with historic art on the walls—this year, five large sculptural pieces by the Paris-based American textile artist Sheila Hicks—thereby appealing to a

wider range of collectors. “You are side by side with masterpieces from the 16th to the 21st century,” Marc Benda of Friedman Benda says of showing at Tefaf. He believes it is important to have design objects that can have a dialogue with art at that level. Tefaf this year also features a contingent of design dealers who, instead of sourcing modern or historical objects, have opted to have

“We’ve been working on it for two years in our atelier,” says Loic Le Gaillard, a partner at the gallery, of the intricately gilded cabinet that the Swedish-French bronze artist Ingrid Donat has created. “That’s the magic of Tefaf New York—people coming with one incredibly strong object that is going to be a complete showstopper.” Priced at $850,000, the large bronze Commode Skarabée (2023) is certain to turn heads. As Le Gaillard sees it, an object with that level of craftsmanship is quite simply art. “We don’t draw a line between art, design, functionality and form, so we absolutely belong amongst these dealers,” he says. He adds that, even at the highest of price tiers, the gallery was minimally affected by the pandemic and the associated economic slowdown. It is a sentiment echoed

Top Los Angeles museum leader on her way to MoMA PS1 MOMA PS1 HAS A NEW DIRECTOR. CONNIE BUTLER, the chief curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is to leave her position in California and will join the New York museum on 26 September. Her appointment to the Queens institution marks something of a return. She worked as MoMA’s chief curator

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of drawings 2006-13, during which time she co-curated WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2008), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (2012) and the posthumous Mike Kelley retrospective (2013). She will run MoMA’s affiliate PS1 museum, which Connie Butler, the Hammer Museum’s longtime director, will take the helm at MoMA PS1

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is housed in a 19th-century public schoolhouse in Long Island City. MoMA has an annual operating budget of $165m and contributes 25 percent of PS1’s $11m budget. In a statement, Sarah Arison, chair of the board of MoMA PS1, said Butler “deeply understands MoMA PS1 and our artist-centric DNA”. Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s director, called Butler a “trailblazing curator and scholar”. While at the Hammer, Butler recently oversaw the exhibition

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Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection (2023), which opened the museum’s recent expansion—a 24-year-long process she helped steer. She succeeds Kate Fowle, who resigned in summer 2022. Fowle’s three-year tenure coincided with the lockdowns and economic travails of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as social unrest brought about by events such as the murder of George Floyd. Fowle did not publicly offer a reason for her departure.

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by other design dealers. “It was business as usual,” Danant says. However, design dealers have noted a shift away from contemporary objects towards those with provenance. “Younger generations are increasingly into the story element,” Danant says. To Benda, what has been most evident since the pandemic is that clients are looking for aesthetic objects that are also functional. “People want the comfort of seats and use of tables over something they can just look at,” he says. There is much buzz around the gallerist Kamel Mennour and the designer Jacques Granges joining forces to show an object that brings together form, function and storytelling. They are presenting a recently rediscovered design from around 1974 by the late sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne—a two-metrelong bronze drinks cabinet and bar in the shape of a grasshopper. Only two other editions of the piece are known to exist. Given the recent market frenzy around Lalanne’s work, it will likely not take long for a collector to buy the bar. Sophia Herring

In a statement, Butler paid testament to the work Fowle did to connect MoMA PS1 with local constituencies, pledging to “continue its mission serving the New York and Queens communities”. Butler began her career at the Des Moines Arts Center before going on to hold curatorial posts at the Neuberger Museum of Art and Artists Space in New York. She joined the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1996 before making a similar crosscountry journey to New York to join MoMA in 2006. Tom Seymour

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NEWS New York

Overlooked and emerging artists get opportunity to interact with the better known at Independent fair

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he bigger-is-better mentality of many of its counterparts is not shared by New York’s Independent fair, which maintains a boutique spirit. Its 14th edition (11-14 May) features an international coterie of 66 galleries with a mix of works by blue-chip and emerging artists. “We have always been consciously scaled and very intentional about our every step,” says Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder. “We want to present a true overview of the art world rather than just the industry which has been constantly growing around us.” This year’s fair, which once again takes over Spring Studios in the increasingly crowded Tribeca art district, showcases new works while filling historical gaps from galleries of every size. London’s Maureen Paley, at the fair since it started in 2009, and the Berlin powerhouse Peres Projects will show alongside first-time exhibitor and three-year-old London gallery Niru Ratnam (showing work by the British-Ghanaian painter Kimathi Donkor) and the Los Angelesbased Diane Rosenstein Gallery (which is giving Nigerian-British painter Abe Odedina his New York debut). Meanwhile Kasmin’s stand offers the first focused display of Judith Bernstein’s lesser-known charcoal text drawings made between 1989 and 2009. Dee describes the presentation of Bernstein’s works alongside Richard Saltoun’s solo presentation of Eleanor Antin’s antiVietnam War postal art project 100 Boots (1971-73) as “a reassessment of two second-wave feminist icons from two sides of the country”. Both artists’ works use black-and-white palettes

Newcomer: Kimathi Donkor’s Johnny was born aloft by Joy and Stephen (2010) to grapple with the aggression and violence of modern American history.

Written back in

A revisionist approach has been key in crafting the fair’s identity. Independent 20th Century, which was spun off last September as the fair’s second annual edition, focuses on 20th-century art. “As an art history

graduate from a women’s college, I’ve always been confused by the lack of women artists in the canon,” Dee says. “With the September show, we have the chance to rewrite women and other artists who have been marginalised into the conversation.” The second fair has also given emerging galleries opportunities to work with artists’ estates and

recontextualise the younger artists on their rosters, which in turn is informing what dealers show at the spring edition. For example, local gallery Kapp Kapp pairs works by the painter Beverly Semmes addressing how women’s bodies (and their depictions) have been politicised with images by the photographer Stanley Stellar, whose black-and-white 1980s photos of piers along the Hudson River celebrate male eroticism against the backdrop of the Aids crisis. Another two-artist installation from a neighbourhood gallery appears on PPOW’s stand, which juxtaposes two very different approaches to conveying feminine physiques. Jessica Stoller’s porcelain sculptures of surreal and contorted female bodies sit next to Grace Carney’s paintings, which blur the line between figuration and abstraction with suggestions of twisting limbs, bound bodies and wrestling forms. Beyond the gallery stands, Independent will launch a collaboration with five publishers setting up shop to sell artists’ prints at the fair and online. The German magazine Texte zur Kunst will launch its collaboration with Cecily Brown, while the California Institute of the Arts is marking its 50th anniversary with the release of a 50-artist series. Phaidon will launch the fair’s artist collaboration series with hand-painted lithographs by Jameson Green, who had a solo stand with Derek Eller Gallery in 2021. Dee says: “Moving forward, we will invite one artist who had an important Independent moment in the last 15 years to create a print work which will be available both at the fair and online.” Osman Can Yerebakan

Homecoming for Abstract Expressionist Shirley Jaffe A TRAVELLING RETROSPECTIVE OF SHIRLEY JAFFE PAINTINGS has been making the rounds in Europe since last year. The tour for this secondgeneration Abstract Expressionist began in Paris, Jaffe’s adopted home from 1949 till her death in 2016, at the Centre Pompidou (the largest institutional holder of her work). It is now on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel and will open at the Musée Matisse de Nice later this year. The US-born Jaffe has yet to see similar institutional attention in her home country, but Galerie Nathalie Obadia is showing two of her 1960s paintings and several works on paper spanning her career at Tefaf New York (11-16 May). It is a homecoming of sorts for Jaffe, who was raised in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and studied at the Cooper Union. “Since the 2000s, European museums have been interested in her work, and today American collectors and museums want to

show this singular painter,” says Nathalie Obadia. Jaffe’s work first entered a public French collection in 1969, and in 1985 the Musée National d’Art Moderne started acquiring her work. She is represented in American collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and SFMoMA, but European museums have increasingly acquired her work recently (including Kunstmuseum Basel, National Gallery of Ireland, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon) and Obadia hopes to extend this momentum across the Atlantic. Jaffe’s early paintings in New York and Paris were gestural, but in the early 1960s she spent a year in West Berlin, where she shifted to the biomorphic and geometric forms for which she is now better known. By 1968 she was using flat, muted colours, and her distinctive style came into full force a few years later, when she started rendering geometric forms in hard-edged contours.

Sans titre (1965) is one of two paintings by Shirley Jaffe that can be seen at Tefaf

The two paintings Obadia is showing at Tefaf date to Jaffe’s departure from Berlin and definitive return to Paris. “She chose to remain in Europe and to approach Abstract Expressionism with European influences closer to Kandinsky,” Obadia says. “Jaffe made the choice to leave the USA at the end of the 1940s, and the 1950s [were] very much shaped by the choices of art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who left little room for American women painters.” It wasn’t until Jaffe was in her sixties that her work began being exhibited in the US. A solo show at New York’s Artists Space in 1989 was followed by two solo shows at Holly Solomon Gallery in the early 1990s. She will also be included in next year’s group exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France (1946-62). Karen Chernick

Long overdue showcase for abstractionist Anna Walinska

Anna Walinska’s The Picnic (1947) is on show at the American Art Fair THE DIRECTOR OF THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM asked Anna Walinska if he could visit her studio in 1954, but she politely declined. She was too busy, she explained, preparing to travel around Asia. And the Guggenheim could wait, she figured. She took her six-month trip, saw new things and learned new techniques, but the New York art world wasn’t holding its breath. “Her commercial future might have been different if she’d chosen to meet with [James Johnson] Sweeney instead of heading to the East,” says Rosina Rubin, Walinska’s niece and steward of her estate. “She was much more focused on exploration and expression in her work than on its commercial potential.” The Modernist artist is now enjoying renewed attention in her New York hometown, where she often exhibited before her death in 1997. However, Rubin says, by the 1970s “the art world was morphing into the art business, and Walinska had little interest in fitting in”. After her death, her only notable solo show came in 2019. But this January she had her first solo show at a commercial New York gallery in 60 years when Graham Shay 1857 exhibited the shan paper collages she started making after visiting Burma. The January exhibition focused on Walinska’s figure drawings from her time in Paris in the late 1920s, and later abstractions. “Mid-century abstraction is very popular right now, the American abstract painters,” Cameron Shay says. “Her abstract works are not only non-objective but there is a line to them, a continuous line, that does set her apart and is what she coined ‘calligraphy of line’.” For the American Art Fair (13-16 May), Shay is showing Walinska again amid a cross-section of historic and modern American works. Her Paris-era figure drawings will flank Diana, an 1899 bronze by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Also on view will be an abstract painting from Walinska’s Holocaust series of the 1950s and The Picnic (1947), which will be shown alongside an Elaine de Kooning painting of the same era. “I hope for the ultimate result: more recognition for her and also admiration for the quality of her work,” Shay says. Karen Chernick

DONKOR: © THE ARTIST, COURTESY OF NIRU RATNAM. JAFFE: ARTIST’S ESTATE AND GALERIE NATHALIE OBADIA, PHOTO © BERTRAND HUET/TUTTI IMAGE. WALINSKA: © ARTIST’S ESTATE

Independent complicates the canon

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NEWS Art market

Third-party guarantors slice and dice the risk The sale of fractions of third-party price guarantees to other parties hedges the risk but is it a violation of auction house rules? price if it fails to sell at auction, or gets a decent share of the profits if it sells above the guaranteed price. That said, while third-party guarantees assure a minimum price however a work fares at live auction, they carry an increasing risk. According to the analysis firm ArtTactic, the estimated average return on guarantees has been falling—from the 2021 peak of 21.8% to a seven-year low of 11.1% in 2022. Of the developing secondary market for guarantees, one prominent New York lawyer active in art market negotiations explains: “Third-party guarantors began to lay off some of their own risk to others; then, given the upside possibilities, a secondary market developed. People sought to get in on deals, and guarantors sold off some or all of their upside potential.” A New York-based private dealer who has orchestrated 20 or more of these deals, ran this writer through the steps of getting a third-party guarantee and what happens next. “I go through the viewing and do some research and then decide whether to guarantee it or not. I approach one of the specialists, who in turn approaches management for the possibility of a guarantee. When they come back to me, sometimes two days before the auction, and ask if I’m still interested, that’s when I call the people and ask if they want to go into it, at what percentage, etc. It’s usually in fours, sometimes threes,

Hedging the hedge: there is a secondary market developing in third-party guarantees of prices of works being auctioned including myself, so I will own either 25% or 33% of the painting. “Let’s say I guarantee it at 20% below the low estimate that’s set at $1.2m and I guarantee it for $800,000. So if it sells for $1m, I get $40,000. If it doesn’t sell, it belongs to me.”

Officially, the only one

Asked if auction houses are aware that secondary deals are being brokered, the dealer says: “They might know unofficially because they see us hanging around together, but legally and paperwork-wise, I’m the only one and they prefer it that way.” This development and scenario flies in the face of—indeed, seemingly violates—auction house rules and language found in third-party guarantor agreements. For instance, in a year-old example of a Christie’s agreement seen by The Art Newspaper between the auction house and the third-party guarantor, some of the fine print clearly states: “you shall not share any sums paid to you under this Agreement with any third party; and you have not and will not enter into any agreement with a third party concerning your interest

in the Property and obligations pursuant to this Agreement”. That language is pretty much boilerplate among the auction houses, according to several knowledgeable observers. A spokesman for Sotheby’s says the auction house is not able to comment “on the terms of our financial agreements with clients”. Asked about that clause, the anonymous guarantor replies with a smile: “If you go letter by letter, no one would ever sign it.” He adds: “All I care about is the 20%, 25% or 30% or whatever the amount we agree on.” Ironically, this relatively recent phenomenon appeared and possibly flourished just a year after New York City unilaterally eliminated regulations on auctions, and with it, any official oversight of the art industry, including the requirement for the auction houses to announce when they have a financial stake in a piece being sold. Still, evidence of these hedged third-party guarantee sell-offs is not widely acknowledged or recognised. “I have no examples of it,” says Jean-Paul Engelen, the president of

Phillips. “But it’s totally possible. Is it that much different from dealers buying stuff together as partners? It’s a hedge against a hedge, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened.” The New York art lawyer Thomas Danziger of Danziger, Danziger & Muro says he has “heard in the past of people partnering up on these things”, but adds: “I can’t tell you it’s a new thing—it sounds almost like a brokering of an irrevocable bid. It’s like the auction houses giving a guarantee to a consignor and then going off to unload risk to a third party which is the irrevocable bidder.” Although Danziger says he has not witnessed first-hand the sale of thirdparty guarantees, he adds: “But has it happened? Sure.” No matter what form they take, third-party price guarantees for works at an auction are evidently here to stay and have graduated from the perception of a decade or more ago that a marking of such in the catalogue was a knock on the picture. As Engelen observes, “they are an important factor in today’s auction market, 100%”. Judd Tully

PHOTO: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

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he market for third-party guarantees—which offer auction houses and sellers a useful tool to hedge their bets— is showing no signs of slowing, reaching a likely record of $3.41bn in 2022. But a darker, lesser-known market has been discovered by The Art Newspaper whereby thirdparty backers are selling off fractions of their guarantees to anonymous partners, sharing the risks as well as any upside. Some of the biggest names in the game include the Nahmad family of art traders, mega dealer Larry Gagosian and the billionaire collector José Mugrabi, all of whom are known to routinely offer thirdparty guarantees, or irrevocable bids, on works of art in exchange for a negotiated financial fee from the auction house. While Gagosian and Mugrabi are unlikely to need helping hands for their multimillion-dollar guarantees, the pair are understood to trade guarantees back and forth between each other. So why is a secondary market for guarantees emerging now? As the international art market softens in the wake of global economic insecurity, third-party guarantees for auction houses, which can relieve reluctance on the part of wary consignors, have grown ever more appealing. It can be a winning solution for the guarantor, too, who either buys a work for an “insured”

TEFAF New York

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Untitled, 1961, foil, ink, paint, and paper on board, 36 × 23¾" | 91.4 × 60.3 cm © 2023 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Louise Nevelson

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REVIEW FILM

Invisible man, unmissable art New documentary surveys revered but elusive artist David Hammons. By David D’Arcy

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he new documentary The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons begins with a memory of Hammons selling snowballs on the pavement outside the Cooper Union in the winter of 1983. The snowballs were objects in a performance. A woman who thought she was helping a homeless man bought one and put it in her freezer in Queens. The film ends with the legacy today of one such snowball. The documentary, by Judd Tully (a contributor to The Art Newspaper) and Harold Crooks, surveys Hammons’s artmaking over six decades, with appearances and disappearances of works of art, but mostly disappearances by the artist himself. The elusive Hammons, now 79, is sometimes called the Thomas Pynchon of the art world. He is not interviewed for the film and the filmmakers stress that they never asked him for an interview. “This is not a biopic and it was never intended as a biopic,” Crooks says. He was reassured when someone attending an early screening said the audience was all but unaware that Hammons had not participated in the film.

Selling snow in winter: The Melt Goes On Forever starts off with Dawoud Bey’s photographs of Hammons performing his work Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983)

The project involved an archaeology of probing the layers of people who interacted with a man who is now determined not to be seen. Hammons is present in his influence on multiple generations of artists, curators and critics. The project took ten years to assemble, and it took Tully and Crooks to Los

Angeles, where Hammons lived and studied as a young man. His influential mentor there was the artist and professor Charles White. “It was in 1965 after the Watts Riots that Charles White became the first non-white [artist] to teach at Otis [Art Institute]. And the story of his students begins then,” the curator Ilene Susan Fort tells the filmmakers. One of those students, Suzanne Jackson, remembers Hammons complaining that White “drew all over my drawing” and her replying: “He never did that to me, ’cause I can draw.” Jackson also remembers Hammons urging her to convert part of her studio into a gallery, which she did, reading off prices that were discounted to high double figures. Hammons would always return with more work to sell. “Every time there would be a next idea,” she says. Crucial for Hammons was the Watts Rebellion of 1965 that began on 11 August with a Black man’s arrest for drunk driving. In six days, 3,400 people were arrested and 34 killed. Much of South Central Los Angeles, a community with a large African American population, had burned. For Hammons, an admirer of the French artist Marcel Duchamp, the

neighbourhood was a ruin, but also an ominous expanse of readymades. In 1966, the artists Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell organised 66 Signs of Neon, an exhibition of art assembled from materials found on the streets of Watts. The documentary shows work from that Los Angeles exhibition, and then shifts to the poet Steve Cannon, founder of A Gathering of the Tribes, a place for art and talk on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is now shut. Cannon, who was blind and died in 2019, describes how Hammons picked up objects when he rode his bicycle downtown from Harlem. Standing in what was then his Harlem studio on 125th Street, Hammons explains in a rare video clip that “the objects that I use to make images from are from my community… and I call them culture sculptures, because they’re from the culture that grew up in today. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. These are the fruits from the neighbourhood that I live in.” Although eager to disappear from view personally, Hammons had a friend, the photographer Dawoud Bey, who documented much of his work—a crucial job, given the fragile materials involved. “So much of his work would have been literally invisible if it hadn’t been for the work of Dawoud Bey. Work would be on the street for a couple of days and then swept away,” Tully says. “Hammons was aware that he needed proof of these things that he had done. Dawoud was literally the lens for David Hammons’s work.” As for the snowballs that Hammons sold on the street in the performance work Bliz-aard Ball Sale, photographed by Bey 40 years ago, audiences will see that Hammons gets the last laugh. • The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art and Times of David Hammons, daily, Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan

HAMMONS: PERFORMANCE © THE ARTIST, PHOTO BY DAWOUD BEY

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Isamu Noguchi, mask (Orpheus’s severed head) for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky’s Orpheus, 1948. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 06665. ©INFGM / ARS. Screenshots from the Noguchi Museum’s guide, Noguchi Subscapes exhibition.

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FEATURE Art market

“For me, that’s the work that signifies the entire last industrial revolution and the whole 20th century,” says the art adviser Lisa Schiff, who founded the New York-based firm SFA Art Advisory. “I hope somebody really spectacular gets it, and I hope it goes high.” Christie’s is also focusing on highlighting women artists and promoting their markets, Kaplan says. Half of the lots in its 21st-century auction on 15 May are by women. Kaplan adds: “The market is generally quite aware that works by female artists and artists of colour have been undervalued. A lot of collectors are both looking at that as a smart investment… and wanting to focus on a wider variety of artists and make sure their collection is more representative.”

Monumental Basquiats

BASQUIAT: © ESTATE OF THE ARTIST

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ew York auction houses are projecting their marquee spring sales could bring in more than $2.2bn, despite worries that the art market may be cooling, both for contemporary work deemed risky by collectors in times of economic uncertainty and for the most expensive works that consignors may be holding back given the uncertain macroeconomic picture. Notably absent this month are any works with ninefigure estimates, or even estimates in the low eights. There is no Georges Seurat masterpiece or Andy Warhol Marilyn portrait or Disaster canvas to test the appetites of the deep-pocketed trophyhunters, as in recent seasons. Dealers say that factors such as war, failing banks, an uncertain political outlook and rising interest rates aren’t stopping wealthy collectors from buying art altogether, but acknowledge that the jittery economy may keep them from repeating the record-breaking bids of the past few rounds of major auctions. “I wouldn’t say that that market is suffering whatsoever. I think it’s still very strong and very stable,” says Emily Kaplan, co-head of Christie’s 20th-century evening sale. “The completely unprecedented auction results that we saw from the last two years may have just tempered slightly.” Christie’s New York is devoting multiple sales to single-owner collections this month. They include works from the collections of the Chicago commodities trader Alan Press and his wife Dorothy, the late Boston Institute of Contemporary Art trustee Gerald Fineberg, and Sophie Danforth, whose family founded the

Auction houses anticipate

$2.2bn in May sales despite market cooling

Demand for ultra contemporary works may have eased but there is little sign of a sales slump, say the New York firms. By Carlie Porterfield

Rhode Island School of Design. Also headed for the auction block are pieces from the collections of the publishing billionaire SI Newhouse and the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Christie’s estimates that its May sales will bring in between $760m and $1.1bn. “To weave a narrative about the collections helps show collectors how special these works are,” Kaplan says. “That’s why we love selling collections,

to be able to tell these exciting stories our clients respond to so well.” Last year, Christie’s brought in $1.6bn from two sales of Allen’s collection. During Christie’s 20th-century evening sale on 11 May, Burning Gas Station (1966-69) by Ed Ruscha from the Press collection is estimated to sell for between $20m and $30m. It is only the second painting from Ruscha’s Stations series to appear at auction, according to Christie’s.

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A price tag to match the size of the canvas: Christie’s expects Jean-Michel Basquiat’s El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) (1983) to sell for around $45m this month

Christie’s 21st-century evening sale is led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) (1983), a massive canvas that is expected to fetch around $45m. It is not the only monumental Basquiat work up for sale this season. Three nights later, Sotheby’s New York is offering Now’s the Time (1985), Basquiat’s rendition of the jazz legend Charlie Parker’s 1945 record of the same name. Sotheby’s estimates the painting will sell for around $30m in its auction debut, after spending decades in the collection of the magazine publisher Peter Brant, the only person to have owned the painting. It is among the most valuable works being offered this month by Sotheby’s, which anticipates its May sales figures will hit between $732.3m and $1bn. During the same contemporary art evening sale, Sotheby’s is offering a tenfoot tall Spider (1996) by Louise Bourgeois that will likely break at least one auction record. Its estimate of between $30m and $40m is the highest ever for a Bourgeois work, Sotheby’s says. If it sells for the low end of the estimate, it will likely become the most valuable Bourgeois work to sell at auction, beating the $28m ($32.1m with fees) another version of Spider (1996) fetched at Christie’s in May 2019. If the sculpture’s price rallies toward the high end of its estimate, it stands to compete with the record for any work by a woman at auction, currently held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed (1936), which the Walmart heiress Alice Walton purchased for $44.4m (with fees) in 2014. Insel im Attersee (1901-02), a rare lake landscape by Gustav Klimt, is expected to fetch around $45m for Sotheby’s during the auction house’s modern art evening auction on 16 May. Another top lot for the sale is Peter Paul Rubens’s Portrait of a Man as the God Mars (around 1620), estimated at between $20m and $30m. The painting comes from a group of works caught up in a complicated divorce between the former Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee  CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

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FEATURE  CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 Mark Fisch and the former judge Rachel Davidson. Ten other Baroque paintings from their collection—including another Rubens—brought in a combined $49.5m with fees at Sotheby’s earlier this year. A dedicated evening auction and a sequence during a contemporary art day sale have been set aside by Sotheby’s for the collection of the late Warner Bros music executive Mo Ostin, whose works by René Magritte, Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning, Basquiat, Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown, Takashi Murakami and Pablo Picasso are estimated to bring in more than $120m. At Phillips, the auction house’s sole evening sale will be led by Banksy’s Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search (2018), a painting the pseudonymous British artist made in response to a 2017 Basquiat show in London. On a wall near the Barbican Centre, where the show was held, Banksy spray-painted a figure inspired by Basquiat’s painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982) being frisked by two London police officers. This version on canvas, released by Banksy the following year, is estimated to sell for between $8m and $12m. The painting is the most valuable work on offer this month at Phillips, which expects to bring in between $92.5m and $133m over an evening and two day sales.

During the same evening sale as the Banksy, two early Yayoi Kusama sculptures, Red Stripes (1965) and Blue Spots (1965), are estimated to fetch between $2.5m and $3.5m each. Kusama is one of the most globally beloved living artists—and the subject of an ongoing collaboration with Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury brand—but her early work is still “extremely rare” at auction, says Robert Manley, the deputy chairman of Phillips and its worldwide co-head of 20th-century and contemporary art. It is extraordinary for the auction house to be offering two at one time, he adds, pointing out that Kusama was proud enough of the two works to be photographed standing in front of the sculptures multiple times.

‘Her market couldn’t be stronger’

“It’s just one of these wonderful moments when art history and the art market are in alignment, because her market couldn’t be stronger,” Manley says. Last year, Phillips set Kusama’s auction record when her painting Untitled (Nets) (1959) sold for $10.5m with fees. While the auction houses are optimistic about this month’s sales, some collectors are showing more caution when it comes to buying art, dealers say. The latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market report, released last month, found auction sales fell last year by 2% to $30.6bn (including

On a grand scale: achieving the $30m low end of the estimate range for Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1996) would set a record for the artist, while the $40m high end would set a record for a female artist

Iwan Konstantinowitsch Aivazovsky Istanbul: The Golden Horn in the moonlight. 1868 Oil on canvas, 63.3 x 76.4 cm. Signed and dated. Sale 20 May

both public and private sales), in large part because of low rates of participation in China after Covid-19 lockdowns stalled autumn sales. The high end of the auction market was the most resilient, with works priced above $10m rising in value by 12%— the only part of the business to increase last year, according to the report. In times of economic uncertainty, wealthy collectors tend to focus on buying work by more established artists whom they believe pose less of an investment risk than the trendy contemporary artists whose works have inspired speculative frenzies in recent years. While auction houses and dealers say they have observed a sense of slowness among collectors

amid uncertain market factors, they don’t anticipate it disrupting May auctions. “People have been quick to herald the impact of a recession and the idea of the art market failing,” says Lucius Elliott, who leads Sotheby’s The Now sale, dedicated to art created in the previous two decades. “Based on the interest we have from third-party guarantors and preliminary interest already, it doesn’t feel like a bearish market.” Even so, he adds, there has been a “softening” in some sectors of the market. Compared to the previous few years, Manley says, buyers are “being a little more selective”. As a result, the market may be “a little bit less frothy”.

Guido Reni Mary Magdalene Adoring the Cross Oil on canvas, 69 x 55 cm. Sale 20 May

AUCTIONS IN COLOGNE 17 May Jewellery & Watches 19 May Decorative Arts 20 May Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures 14th–19th C. Cologne, Germany T +49-221-92 57 29 93 [email protected] www.lempertz.com Viewing: 13–16/19 May

2 25 Y E AR S

BOURGEOIS SPIDER: PHOTO BY EDOUARD FRAIPONT, COURTESY SOTHEBY’S

Art market

Contemporary African Art Fair New York 18–21 May 2023 Manhattanville Factory District of West Harlem 439 W 127th St New York

(Detail) Larry Amponsah, Wealth of Promised Glory, 2023, Paper, Acrylic on Paper Hot Mounted on Canvas, 140 x 120cm. Courtesy of 50 Golborne.

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THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023

IN PICTURES New York

A century of

Ellsworth Kelly

1955: Kelly poses with recent paintings inside his studio on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan

As Ellsworth Kelly’s 100th birthday (31 May) approaches, major institutions are paying tribute to the master of hard-edged abstraction: the Museum of Modern Art’s Ellsworth Kelly A Centennial Celebration continues until 11 June, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Ellsworth Kelly: Reflections on Water and Other Early Drawings continues until 1 December and Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, has just opened Ellsworth Kelly at 100 (until March 2024). The late artist’s partner of many years, Jack Shear, marked the occasion last month by donating 146 of Kelly’s works to 19 different museums. Appropriately, Shear, who serves as the executive director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, will be on hand at Tefaf New York on 12 May to participate in a panel about succession planning for artists and collectors. On the occasion of Kelly’s centenary, the artist’s foundation has given The Art Newspaper access to a trove of historical photos documenting his life and work in New York and beyond. Benjamin Sutton 1969: Kelly (centre) speaks with the curator Henry Geldzahler (left) and Metropolitan Museum of Art curator James Wood (right) during the installation of Kelly’s exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 at the museum

1951: Kelly poses with recent paintings in his very first solo exhibition, Kelly peintures et reliefs, at Galerie Arnaud in Paris

1973: Kelly at work in his Chatham, New York, studio. The artist had relocated upstate from New York City in 1970, renting out a space that had previously been a theatre, where he created one of his breakthrough bodies of work, the Chatham series

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1990: Kelly with his Yellow Curve-Portikus (1990), installed on the gallery floor, at Portikus in Frankfurt, Germany

2011: Kelly in his studio in Spencertown, New York. Two years later, he received the National Medal of Arts from president Barack Obama. The artist died at his home, also in Spencertown, in December 2015, aged 92

ALL PHOTOS: COURTESY AND © ELLSWORTH KELLY FOUNDATION; 1973: GIANFRANCO GORGONI; 1990 AND 2011: JACK SHEAR

1992: Kelly walks around Red Floor Panel (1992), one of the monumental floor paintings he began making two years before, seen here during its debut exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany

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THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023

INTERVIEW Artist // Lap-See Lam

The artist’s video installation extrapolates a fantastical narrative from the kind of Chinese restaurant her own parents ran. By Wallace Ludel

F

or her first solo exhibition in the US— Tales of the Altersea (until 27 August) at the Swiss Institute—the Stockholmbased artist Lap-See Lam has created an immersive video installation that uses imagery drawn from 3D scans she made of Westernstyle Chinese restaurants. Lam, whose parents operated a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, uses this visual lexicon as an allegory for the immigrant experience as well as a backdrop upon which she weaves a moving, magical realist narrative.

THE ART NEWSPAPER: The narrative of this piece begins with the Sea Palace, an actual floating Chinese restaurant shaped like a dragon that sailed from Hong Kong to Europe before going out of business. Your parents ran a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, right? LAP-SEE LAM: Yes, my grandmother opened the restaurant when she moved from Hong Kong. First she moved to the UK, then to Sweden, where she became a chef at a Chinese

restaurant before opening her own in the 1980s. It was because of that restaurant that she could bring her sisters and brothers from Hong Kong to Sweden, because they could all work there. She called it her school, because it’s where all of her family members got their education in how to run a Chinese restaurant, and almost all of them then opened their own restaurants throughout Sweden. My parents took over the restaurant that my grandmother opened, but they sold it in 2014, which in a way sparked this whole project that I’ve been doing all these years since. Is this family and personal history the seed of your interest in exploring the aesthetic of the Westernised Chinese restaurant? Definitely. I started the project because I had the idea of saving or archiving our space first, just for personal reasons. But the new owner wouldn’t let me 3D-scan it initially, so I started 3D-scanning other similar restaurants, and that grew into a larger project. A few years later I did get to 3D-scan the restaurant that my family owned,

though. It started with that personal need to look into the space with a sort of distance. 3D-scanning is a very nice metaphor for changing that relationship, because you’re recreating the space but in a detached and emotionally cool way. My first idea in scanning these spaces was to create these hyper-realistic images, but the scanning technique at the time wasn’t developed enough yet, so the materials I gathered were huge and my computer wasn’t able to handle it. That, in combination with the errors in the technology itself, created these faulty, glitchy images. My initial feeling was to correct it, but when I started to look at it, the material itself started to speak to all of these things—about fragments and memories. It was like a shipwreck of ideas and cultural symbols that were slowly disappearing, and it was like the material itself could invoke all these ideas. It became more like an after-image of the Hong Kong diaspora in Sweden, and that created a new space for me to work with.

I also want to ask about your use of a magical realist lens to tell this story, though when I think about the Sea Palace, for example, I can see how that kind of framework is a logical extension of the work. The Western Chinese restaurant is a magical realist place in a way. I find them fascinating because they have this duality to them—they are like dream images of something perceived as Chinese, or a Chineseness, but at the same time it is a real functioning space which holds all of these often-hidden histories of family, migration, belonging and dreams. I work with that kind of duality a lot. • Lap-See Lam: Tales of the Altersea, until 27 August, Swiss Institute

CAN ART FAIR

LUCIANO FABRO

MAY 6TH -- JUNE 23RD, 2023

PAULA COOPER GALLERY 534 W 21ST STREET NEW YORK/ 521 W 21ST STREET NEW YORK 212 255 1105 WWW.PAULACOOPERGALLERY.COM Luciano Fabro, Bronzo e seta indiana. (Piede), (1970-1971) bronze and silk, 31 1/2 x 59 x 59 in. (80 x 150 x 150 cm) ©Tate Gallery London. Courtesy Archivo Fotografico, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

2023 12-16 JUL IBIZA

FECOEV. Ctra d’Eivissa a Sant Antoni contemporaryartnow.com @canartibiza

LAM: © BEATRICE LUNDBORG, DAGENS NYHETER

‘Western Chinese restaurants are magical realist places’

I’m also curious about this decision to present the work in a manner that surrounds the viewer. There’s an openness and a directness to the immersive quality of the work. I’m interested in the idea of spatial history, so when I make these works I’m recreating these spaces but I’m not duplicating them, I’m creating another realm of space and time. The immersiveness is really my attempt to affect the audience in a very direct way. There is a narrative to the works, but these stories usually come quite late for me in the process. I use these spaces and create these images as points that allow these stories and texts to grow; I can find it really hard to describe the work because a lot of these ideas get lost in translation and are hard to put into words, but creating these spaces through sound and images allows for something else to come up that’s not based on language in that traditional form.

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EXHIBITIONS

Previews & listings around town Listings are arranged alphabetically by category

 Art fairs

An overdue retrospective for an artist in touch with America’s dark ‘underbelly’

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair 18-21 May Manhattanville, 439 West 127th Street

The American Art Fair

13-16 May Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street

Focus Art Fair

18-21 May Chelsea Industrial, 535 West 28th Street

Fridge Art Fair

17-21 May Gallery OneTwentyEight, 128 Rivington Street, and 2B&2C, 9 Avenue B

Frieze New York

17-21 May The Shed, 545 West 30th Street

Future Fair

10-13 May Chelsea Industrial, 535 West 28th Street

Independent

11-14 May Spring Studios, 6 St Johns Lane

Nada New York

18-21 May 548 West, 548 West 22nd Street

Tefaf New York

11-16 May Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue ART

 Museums and

institutions SMITH: © THE ARTIST, PHOTO BY DAVID BOWERS

American Folk Art Museum 2 Lincoln Square, Manhattan • What That Quilt Knows About Me UNTIL 29 OCTOBER

Americas Society

680 Park Avenue, Manhattan • Bispo do Rosário: All Existing Materials on Earth UNTIL 20 MAY

Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has been transforming the contemporary art canon for decades with multilayered works that address cultural misconceptions with humour Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map Whitney Museum of American Art UNTIL 13 AUGUST

The latest retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art features works evoking artists that the institution has championed for decades. There are canvases repurposing advertising iconography in a manner similar to Andy Warhol. There are paintings structured around the map and flag of the United States that evoke Jasper Johns. And there are mixed-media works incorporating newspaper clippings and other printed imagery that call up the collage aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg. They are all by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an artist and activist who is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, whose retrospective is the first by a Native American artist that the Whitney has organised since it opened 92 years ago. It comes at a moment of reckoning and institutional self-reflection for US museums. “The most important thing that happened was Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and Standing Rock—that began to shake some of the institutions in this country and rattle their cages,” Smith says. “It was clear that there was an underbelly to this country that wasn’t happy with the way things are.” Curated by Laura Phipps, an assistant curator at the Whitney, Memory Map brings together more than 100 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings made during the course of nearly five decades. Appropriately, pride of place in the exhibition is given to Indian Map (1992), Smith’s first painting structured around the US map. “I began with the premise that the map didn’t belong to Jasper Johns, the map was an abstract image of stolen land in this country, so how could I turn the map into a new story?” the artist says. “I had a real struggle with that.” Smith layered the canvas with fragments of newspaper headlines, whole articles, advertisements and more. The broiling

In the beginning: Indian Map (1992) was the first Jaune Quick-to-See Smith work to repurpose the US map as a way of criticising land theft and countering settler foundation myths and stereotypes about Native Americans composition is dominated by thick strokes of red, orange and pink that evoke smeared blood but also petroglyphs like those near Smith’s home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The composition is punctuated by collaged photographs of Native Americans taken by the ethnologist Edward Curtis, who helped spread images and an idea of his sitters as historical subjects of a bygone era. Throughout the exhibition, Smith works to resist Euro-American narratives and stereotypes about Native Americans, often relying on satire and humour. Her 1994 lithograph Modern Times, for instance, appropriates an industrial apple grower’s logo—an icon of a generic Indigenous figure wearing a colourful, feathered headdress— and affixes it to the body of a man in a business suit. Indigenous people are complex and

contemporary individuals living today, the work slyly asserts, not static signifiers of old history. For Smith, the colonisation of the Americas, systemic mistreatment of Indigenous people and people of colour, and the destruction of the environment are all linked, and some of the largest paintings in the show bring all these themes together with great force. Among them is Trade Canoe for the North Pole (2017), a 13ft-wide painting of a canoe navigating icy-blue waters. On board are three palm trees, fragments of drawings and collaged elements including some of Smith’s distinctive animal characters such as buffalo and coyote. Near the bow of the canoe, a collaged newspaper clipping issues a stark warning: “Listen up humans.” Benjamin Sutton

 CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

BLACK ART AUCTION

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THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023

EXHIBITIONS

Previews & listings around town

Our pick of the shows

Chryssa’s newly restored neon sculpture The Gates to Times Square (1964–66)

Dia Chelsea UNTIL 23 JULY

Calling of Saint Matthew (1661) by the Spanish Golden Age painter Juan de Pareja

Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter Metropolitan Museum of Art UNTIL 16 JULY

A piercing likeness of the man who was his slave for two decades was a way for Diego Velázquez to announce his artistry and arrival on the Roman art scene. Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja (1650) led to illustrious commissions, including one from Pope Innocent X, and gained more renown when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it in 1971 for a then record $5.5m.  CONTINUED FROM PAGE 19

The Bronx Museum of the Arts 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx • Abigail DeVille: Bronx Heavens UNTIL 18 JUNE

Brooklyn Museum

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn • A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration UNTIL 25 JUNE • Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: “Ain’t I a Woman” UNTIL 13 AUGUST • Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon UNTIL 17 SEPTEMBER

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 2 East 91st Street, Manhattan • Deconstructing Power: W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1900 World’s Fair UNTIL 29 MAY • Designing Peace UNTIL 6 AUGUST • Give Me a Sign: The Language of Symbols 13 MAY-2 SEPTEMBER

Dia Chelsea

537 West 22nd Street, Manhattan • Chryssa & New York UNTIL 23 JULY

The Drawing Center

35 Wooster Street, Manhattan • Of Mythic Worlds: Works from the Distant Past through the Present UNTIL 14 MAY

The sitter, Juan de Pareja (around 1608-70), has never before been the subject of major study. This show tells the story of a man who began his own artistic career after Velázquez freed him (just months after painting his portrait). “This exhibition reframes familiar works while bringing new ones into the canon, notably Pareja’s own paintings,” says David Pullins, the exhibition’s co-curator. Several pieces have been specially conserved, he adds, “to present Pareja in the best possible light as an artist in his own right rather than someone represented by Velázquez”. Karen Chernick

Faurschou Foundation

148 Green Street, Brooklyn • Embrace the World from Within: Louise Bourgeois, Miles Greenberg and Yoko Ono UNTIL 17 SEPTEMBER

Flag Art Foundation

545 West 25th Street, 9th floor, Manhattan • Somaya Critchlow: Paintings and Drawings UNTIL 3 JUNE • In New York, Thinking of You UNTIL 3 JUNE

Fotografiska

281 Park Avenue South, Manhattan • Hip-Hop: Conscious, Unconscious UNTIL 20 MAY • Listen Until You Hear UNTIL 22 OCTOBER • Prix Pictet: Fire 26 MAY-16 SEPTEMBER

Frick Madison

945 Madison Avenue, Manhattan • The Gregory Gift UNTIL 9 JULY

Hill Art Foundation

239 Tenth Avenue, 3rd floor, Manhattan • Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained UNTIL 21 JULY

Jewish Museum

1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan • The Sassoons UNTIL 13 AUGUST • After “The Wild” UNTIL 1 OCTOBER

Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art 26 Wooster Street, Manhattan • Coyote Park: I Love You Like Mirrors Do UNTIL 16 JULY • Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s UNTIL 30 JULY

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan • Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art UNTIL 14 JULY • Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty UNTIL 16 JULY • Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter UNTIL 16 JULY • Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 UNTIL 4 SEPTEMBER • Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey UNTIL 22 OCTOBER • Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid UNTIL 3 DECEMBER

MoMA PS1

22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens • Onyeka Igwe: A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver) UNTIL 21 AUGUST • Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish UNTIL 4 SEPTEMBER • Daniel Lind-Ramos: El Viejo Griot—Una historia de todos nosotros UNTIL 4 SEPTEMBER • Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton UNTIL 2 OCTOBER

Morgan Library and Museum 225 Madison Avenue, Manhattan • Uncommon Denominator: Nina Katchadourian at the Morgan UNTIL 28 MAY

On her first night in New York, in 1955, the Greek-born artist Chryssa found herself surrounded by the riotous glow of Times Square, the blinking signs shilling for Admiral appliances and Anheuser-Busch beer. The lit-up letters left an impact on the artist, who registered an enigmatic beauty—a particular vulgarity that she described as “extremely poetic”. Working in a range of media, she became an early experimenter in using neon in art to explore language, colour and light. Yet while Chryssa achieved prominence in her lifetime, her pioneering career is little known today. That is changing with the first major survey of her work in the US since 1982, now on view at Dia Chelsea

• Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason UNTIL 28 MAY • Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi UNTIL 4 JUNE

Museum of Arts and Design

2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan • Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture UNTIL 27 AUGUST • Generation Paper: A Fashion Phenom of the 1960s UNTIL 27 AUGUST

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan • Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Walled Unwalled and Other Monologues UNTIL 11 JUNE • Ming Smith: Projects UNTIL 29 MAY • Signals: How Video Transformed the World UNTIL 8 JULY • Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design UNTIL 16 JULY • Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time UNTIL 12 AUGUST • Chosen Memories: Contemporary Latin American Art UNTIL 9 SEPTEMBER • The Encounter: Barbara Chase-Riboud/ Alberto Giacometti UNTIL 9 OCTOBER

New Museum

235 Bowery, Manhattan • Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined UNTIL 4 JUNE

before travelling to the Menil Collection in Houston and Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. Titled Chryssa & New York, the exhibition brings together dozens of rarely seen neon sculptures (many restored for the occasion) with plaster, marble and cast-metal works, as well as works on canvas and paper that reveal her interest in the communicative possibilities of typographic forms. “Chryssa was very much a part of that scene of artists in 1960s and 70s New York, but she had essentially been forgotten,” says Dia’s external curator Megan Holly Witko, who co-curated the exhibition with the Menil’s Michelle White. “This was something we really wanted to bring to New York because it was a hugely important place to Chryssa—a lot of her artistic career and community was here.” Claire Voon

New-York Historical Society

170 Central Park West, Manhattan • Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw UNTIL 28 MAY • Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) UNTIL 11 JUNE • Nature, Crisis, Consequence UNTIL 16 JULY • Under Cover: J.C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity UNTIL 13 AUGUST

Pioneer Works

159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn • Aura Rosenberg: What Is Psychedelic UNTIL 11 JUNE

Poster House

119 West 23rd Street, Manhattan • Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER • Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER

Public Art Fund

Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn • Nicholas Galanin: In every language there is Land/En cada lengua hay una Tierra 16 MAY-12 NOVEMBER

Queens Museum

Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens • Aliza Nisenbaum: Queens, Lindo y Querido UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER • Tracey Rose: Shooting Down Babylon UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER

Rubin Museum

150 West 17th Street, Manhattan • Death Is Not the End UNTIL 14 JANUARY 2024

Scandinavia House 58 Park Avenue • Arctic Highways UNTIL 22 JULY

SculptureCenter

44–19 Purves Street, Queens • Édgar Calel: B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone) 11 MAY-7 AUGUST

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan • Gego: Measuring Infinity UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER • Sarah Sze: Timelapse UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER • Young Picasso in Paris 12 MAY-6 AUGUST

Swiss Institute

38 St Marks Place, Manhattan • Lap-See Lam: Tales of the Altersea UNTIL 27 AUGUST • Jac Leirner UNTIL 27 AUGUST

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan • Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map UNTIL 13 AUGUST • Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century UNTIL 13 AUGUST

PAREJA: © MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO; PHOTO, BAZTÁN LACASA JOSÉ. CHRYSSA: © ARTIST’S ESTATE; PHOTO, BILL JACOBSON STUDIO, COURTESY DIA ART FOUNDATION

Chryssa & New York

THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023

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TH EDITION

Sarah Sze’s Diver piece in her Timelapse (2023) multimedia installation

Sarah Sze: Timelapse Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum UNTIL 10 SEPTEMBER

The maxim that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts feels perfectly apt for the wild, entropic installations of the US artist Sarah Sze. The whole in question here elevates its requisite parts by finding magic in the mundane, taking everyday objects and weaving them into a commentary on the human need to make sense of a haywire world. Sze’s whirring ecologies are on view in her solo show Timelapse, which occupies both interior spaces and the façade of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. “Within the Guggenheim, every single decision is about every inch of that museum because every inch of that museum changes,” Sze says. “The floors are at different angles. In each bay, every single measurement is different. I was thinking of each bay as being a kind of image maker, and they each make images in different ways.” Torey Akers

Death Is Not the End Rubin Museum of Art UNTIL 15 JANUARY 2024

This show contrasts and parallels beliefs about and depictions of the afterlife in the religious traditions of both Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity. It features treasures from the Rubin’s collection and major loans from other institutions, including a cinematic, late 16th-century Boschian depiction of The Last Judgment from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a startling European painting of a half-living, half-skeletal female from the late 18th or early 19th century, on loan from London’s Wellcome Collection. Works are installed in a progression that echoes conceptions of the afterlife, from the grim fear and certainty of death to the purgatorial uncertainty of limbo, and finally resurrection and transformation. Some works will be swapped out over the course of the show, which the museum’s curators decided to delay from its original September 2020 opening amid the worst of the pandemic. “We felt that we should explore the theme of the afterlife because it had new immediacy,” says Elena Pakhoutova, the show’s organiser. Benjamin Sutton The inescapable Reaper: A woman divided into two, representing life and death (late 18th or early 19th century)

 Commercial 47 Canal

Greene Naftali

291 Grand Street, 2nd floor, Manhattan • Emmanuel Louisnord Desir: Ashes of Zion UNTIL 10 JUNE

508 West 26th Street, 8th floor, Manhattan • Jonathan Lasker: The Life of Objects in a Picture 17 JUNE

52 Walker

Hauser & Wirth

Casey Kaplan

Jeffrey Deitch

52 Walker Street, Manhattan • Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens UNTIL 8 JULY

SZE: PHOTO, DAVID HEALD © SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION. RUBIN: WELLCOME COLLECTION, LONDON

• Avedon 100 UNTIL 24 JUNE

121 West 27th Street, Manhattan • Kevin Beasley: In an Effort to Keep 13 MAY-28 JULY

David Zwirner

537 West 20th Street and 519, 525 and 533 West 19th Street, Manhattan • Luc Tuymans: The Barn 11 MAY-21 JULY • Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers 11 MAY-21 JULY

Deli Gallery

36 White Street, Manhattan • Sean-Kierre Lyons: They put sugar in the Kool-Aid where I was forged 12 MAY-17 JUNE

Gagosian

541 West 24th Street and 522 West 21st Street, Manhattan • Harold Ancart: Paintings UNTIL 16 JUNE

542 West 22nd Street, Manhattan ​​• Mark Bradford: You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice UNTIL 28 JULY

18 Wooster Street, Manhattan • Bisa Butler: The World Is Yours UNTIL 30 JUNE

Lehmann Maupin

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 100 Eleventh Avenue, Manhattan • Bob Thompson: Agony & Ecstasy UNTIL 26 MAY

540 West 25th Street, Manhattan • Trevor Paglen 12 MAY-1 JULY

Perrotin

130 Orchard Street, Manhattan • Rina Banerjee: Black Noodles UNTIL 10 JUNE

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5/4/23 16:36

THEARTNEWSPAPER.COM NEW YORK SPRING FAIRS: 10-16 MAY 2023

COLLECTOR’S EYE

THE ART NEWSPAPER

New York Spring Fairs editions

Art lovers tell us what they’ve bought and why

K

omal Shah, a former engineer and executive at tech companies including Oracle and Netscape, is now one of the most influential collectors in California. She serves on the board of trustees of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and, together with her husband Gaurav Garg, has spent much of the past decade assembling a nearly 300-piece art collection. Largely devoted to modern and contemporary works by women artists, it includes pieces by Elizabeth Murray, Jennifer Bartlett, Laura Owens, Carol Bove, Carrie Moyer, Phyllida Barlow and Cecily Brown. The couple routinely loan works to museums—their Jaune Quickto-See Smith painting Escarpment (1987) is at present hanging at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the artist’s retrospective (see our preview on p. 19). Many more works from their holdings are collected in Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, a 432-page book published earlier this month by Gregory Miller & Co. THE ART NEWSPAPER: What was the first work you bought? KOMAL SHAH: A painting on paper by Rina Banerjee in 2011, titled It rained, so she rained. I saw it during my very first auction preview at Christie’s New York and was immediately drawn to it. It is a gorgeous and poignant painting, with a woman holding her tears in an upside-down umbrella. I wasn’t registered to bid in the auction, but once bidding started, I begged my friend to raise her paddle for me—which she did, very graciously! I still love the work to this day, and it also reminds me how lucky I am to have such great friends. What was your most recent purchase? A wall hanging by Trude Guermonprez from around 1974. Trude had a storied career. After the Second World War, she left Europe to teach at Black Mountain College upon Anni Albers’ invitation. After Black Mountain College closed, she moved to California and eventually taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, becoming the chair of the

Which work do you regret not buying when you had the opportunity? A Lee Bontecou relief. I was the underbidder six years ago and I still regret it to this day. What is the most surprising place you have displayed a work? I don’t know if this is surprising, but we try to make use of every space in the house. The house was designed before our collection grew and matured, so over the years we have changed the house to accommodate more art. We replaced our fireplace with a Mary Weatherford neon painting, and we raised ceilings for an important work by Charles Gaines. Right now, every inch of wall in the stairwell is covered by art.

Komal Shah ‘Nothing beats mileage for developing your own collecting vision’: Komal Shah at a 2019 Cantor Arts Center fundraiser in Stanford, California crafts department. There she taught artists Kay Sekimachi and Barbara Kasten—I collect works by both, too—and left an indelible mark.

truest artistic self. The exuberance in that painting reminds me of the quote: “A flame burns brightest just before it goes out.”

If your house was on fire, which work would you save? That’s a tough one. Joan Mitchell’s Untitled (1992), which is one of her last known paintings. It is a reminder of how she depicted the beauty and joy of sunflowers. The strokes are powerful and confident. I see this painting as capturing her sense of freedom and strength in being her

If money were no object, what would be your dream purchase? There are so many works on my dream list. The ultimate purchase would be the entire suite of Hilma af Klint paintings. I would also love to have a Joan Mitchell work from every decade, a major Ruth Asawa wire sculpture and a 1960s Lee Krasner painting in the vein of Combat (1965).

Which artists, dead or alive, would you invite to your dream dinner party? I would travel back in time to the 1970s and have a raucous party with powerhouse women artists. The founders of the AIR Gallery, like Howardena Pindell and Mary Grigoriadis, and Lynda Benglis and Louise Fishman, would be there. I’d make sure that Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Kay WalkingStick and Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago were in attendance, too. That would be a truly amazing party! What is the best collecting advice you’ve been given? Collect what you love and believe in—you might never know how the market goes, but you can surround yourself with joy and wonder. Museum curators are an invaluable source of knowledge—support and learn from them. And nothing beats mileage—visit as many museums, biennials, art fairs and galleries as you can, so that you start developing your own collecting vision. Interview by Benjamin Sutton

“My ultimate dream purchase would be the entire suite of Hilma af Klint paintings”

Editorial and contributors

Editor (The Art Newspaper) Alison Cole Editor, New York Spring Fairs editions Benjamin Sutton Contributors Torey Akers, Julie Baumgardner, Karen Chernick, David D’Arcy, Aimee Dawson, Gareth Harris, Sophia Herring, Catherine Hickley, Louis Jebb, Annabel Keenan, Wallace Ludel, J.S. Marcus, Carlie Porterfield, Anny Shaw, Claire Voon, Osman Can Yerebakan Production editors Hannah May Kilroy, Helen Stoilas Designers James Ladbury, Jennifer Waddell Sub-editing Peter Kernan, Amanda Malone Picture editor Sara Feigin Photographer Alex Wroblewski

Publishing and commercial

Publisher Inna Bazhenova Chief executive officer Nick Sargent Partnerships and art fairs manager Rohan Stephens Global head of sales Juliette Ottley Commercial head of arts and fairs (international) Emily Palmer Advertising sales manager, Americas Kristin Troccoli Sales executive, Americas Steven Kaminski Subscriptions manager Louisa Coleman Partnerships and art fairs manager Rohan Stephens Design/production (commercial) Daniela Hathaway

To advertise, please contact: UK, Europe and rest of world Juliette Ottley T: +44 (0)203 586 8041 E: [email protected] Americas Kristin Troccoli T: +1 212 343 0727 E: [email protected]

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In the UK: The Art Newspaper, 17 Hanover Square, London W1S 1BN Tel: +44 0203 586 8054 Email: [email protected] In the US: 130 West 25th Street, Suite 2C, New York, NY 10001 Tel: +1 212 343 0727 Email: [email protected] Website: theartnewspaper.com Published by The Art Newspaper Ltd, 17 Hanover Square, London W1S 1BN, and by The Art Newspaper USA Inc, The Art Newspaper, 130 West 25th Street, Suite 2C, New York, NY 10001. Registration no: 5166640. © The Art Newspaper, 2023 Printed by Evergreen All rights reserved. No part of this newspaper may be reproduced without written consent of the copyright proprietor. The Art Newspaper is not responsible for statements expressed in the signed articles and interviews. While every care is taken by the publishers, the contents of advertisements are the responsibility of the individual advertisers

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