Art & Exhibitions
NADA Art Fair Is the Most Fun You’ll Have In Miami
Pig brains, porn, and David Duchovny set the emerging art fair apart.
Christie Chu
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A satellite fair in a league of it’s own, NADA is the least pretentious and, simply put, most fun fair to visit during the frenzy of Art Basel in Miami Beach. Located at the Deauville Beach Resort in Miami’s North Beach since 2009, the satellite fair is where all the young galleries (and others still young at heart) go to showcase the art world’s most exciting and unexplored talent. NADA is niche and it likes it that way.
A plethora of New York galleries are in attendance for the fair’s 2014 edition, with Marlborough Chelsea showing along the same aisle as Brooklyn and Brussels’s CLEARING and the Lower East Side’s Tomorrow Gallery. But how was business in the first few hours of NADA’s preview? According to Tomorrow Gallery director Tara Downs “it’s going really well. Brad Troemel’s works are pretty much booth candy. People are really attracted to it.” Troemel’s display consists of five rainbow-colored, slim plastic boxes that house living ant colonies. They’re a perfect backdrop for a #artselfie. CLEARING director, Lola Kramer, told artnet News that within the first hour of NADA’s preview, much of the work shown in their booth had also been snapped up by collectors.
David Lewis’ booth had a work by Hans-Christian Lotz, which was among the fair’s most interesting pieces. The choice work, Untitled, is a rectangular solar panel frame in which pig brains and a computer chip are suspended in resin. Though somewhat disturbing, the work refreshingly minimal and grapples with notions of decay, preservation, and the future of technology—all while maintaining a physical reference to traditional painting on canvas.
London-based gallery The Sunday Painter shows only one artist at NADA, Poland-based Piotr Lakomy. The entire booth is lined with yellow, foil-like material. Metal honeycomb pieces line one wall; a light installation bedecks another, and a metal sheet is strewn across the booth’s floor.
Meanwhile CANADA gallery’s booth is entirely covered with works on paper. Frames butt up against one another, which, while not exactly a popular strategy at fairs these days, was a successful one for the gallery at NADA. Only three hours into the fair, most works on show already had red stickers next to them.
Among the smaller booths or “projects” at the fair, Darja Bajagic’s work at Grand Century stands out (see Why Darja Bajagic Appropriates Porn and Serial Killer Art). The artist is showing a visceral black and red work layered with collages that have been splattered with red paint. The images, sourced from a Russian pornographic magazine, feature girls with busty chests juxtaposed with portraits of actor, David Duchovny, who was profiled in the same magazine due to his sex addiction.
Go to artnet News’s Art Basel in Miami page for the latest coverage, including:
What To Buy? See These Top 10 Booths at Art Basel in Miami Beach
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