Art Fairs
What Top Galleries Are Bringing to the ADAA Art Show
Sperone Westwater, James Cohan, Luhring Augustine, and Paul Kasmin give a sneak peek.
Cait Munro
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Tonight the Art Dealers Association of America’s annual Art Show will kick off with a gala preview undoubtedly attended by a veritable who’s who of New York society. For the next four days, dealers from the nation’s top art galleries will take up residence at the Park Avenue Armory to show off their most impressive wares. But what, you may ask, qualifies as worthy fodder for the art fair that (for better or worse) started it all? (To read more about Armory Arts week, of which the Art Show is one event, see Your Art Agenda: 12 Exclusive VIP Events Not to Miss During Armory Week, Plan Your Armory Week 2015 With Our Guide to the Best Art on Show, and What Are Top Art Dealers Bringing to The Armory Show 2015 and Why?)
There’s always the usual high-selling suspects like Warhol and Basquiat, but for the most part, it appears dealers are assembling presentations of primary market works by a top-tier artist on their roster. This affords galleries the opportunity to subtly brag to their peers about the strength of their stables, on top of their regular agenda of simply raking in the big bucks. It also makes fair-going akin to an especially swanky, climate-controlled evening in Chelsea, and less of a long, monotonous slog.
For Sperone Westwater, this means sculptures and accompanying process photographs by Barry X Ball, a New York artist known for creating epic, expressive busts in materials like onyx and steel. The highlight of the booth will be a redux of Umberto Boccioni‘s seminal 1913 work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. In sleek black marble, the piece was created using a digital scan of one of Boccioni’s original casts, which Ball obtained with permission from the estate. The structure seeks to re-imagine the sculpture in a modern way, this time in the imposing size that Boccioni reportedly wanted to see it and was never was able to realize during his lifetime.
At Luhring Augustine, Michelangelo Pistoletto will take center stage, a wise move for the gallery on the heels of a well-received solo show in the gallery’s Bushwick outpost last year (see New York Gallery Beat: 5 Critics Review 14 Shows), and a renewed interest in the Arte Povera movement, which Pistoletto has been at the forefront of for decades. The booth will feature three surreal mirror paintings, including Cordoni, a new piece created specifically for the fair that shows a set of velvet ropes.
James Cohan Gallery will feature a selection of textural canvases by Michelle Grabner, whose name is fresh in the collective mind of the art world after her turn as a curator for the 2014 Whitney Biennial (see Critical Reduction: The 2014 Whitney Biennial). This reads as a strategic move on the part of the gallery and gives us a chance to see a more creative (though less highly publicized) side of Grabner.
Thematic group shows abound as well, with Paul Kasmin Gallery boasting a collection of works by Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, William N. Copley, and Les Lalanne, all of whom spent time at L’Impasse Ronsin, a ramshackle neighborhood in Paris occupied by artists and bohemians, in the 1950s. The works reveal informal links between the artists—as if pointing to a kind of creative contagion—which indicates that this will not be the average mixed-bag art fair booth, but rather a well-curated glance at a specific place and time.
For the full list of exhibitors, see The 2015 ADAA Art Show Will Have 72 Galleries.
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