Loop Barcelona
June 5-7, 2014
Enrique Granados 3
Barcelona
Spain
loop-barcelona.com

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Artists Darren Bader, Eduardo Basualdo, Eva Kotátková, Marie Lorenz, Koki Tanaka, and Naama Tsabar have conceived works for “Projects,” curated by Ceclia Alemani, which engage with the history of Randall’s Island, the site of the fair. While viewers can expect a consistent theme for “Projects,” “Sounds,” also curated by Alemani, will present three works, one by each Keren Cytter, Cally Spooner, and Hannah Weinberger, each of which will explore and utilize sound as a medium in a different way.

The Education program will provide workshops and tours for students from area public schools. Additionally, this year, Frieze has organized a workshop for high school students, which will offer them a comprehensive view of the contemporary art world from the artist’s studio to exhibition.

Frieze’s Talks program will be a daily occurrence and will cover a variety of issues pertinent to the contemporary arts from politics to filmmaking to writing. One such talk will be a conversation with Masha Alekhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot.
Frieze Art Fair runs from Friday, May 9, 2014 to Monday, May 12, 2014. See the fair website for hours and ticketing information.

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There are novels to be written about the weird parade of these fairs, the people posing in their outfits for “youies” in front of artworks, the dealers scowling, anxious, some deadly glum. With the senseless last-minute change-up in the tax rate the government pulled, very few of them seemed happy. The missing meat? Politics. The bun was filled out with acres of abstraction, and endless montage—mash-ups of past art. Dealers scrupulously avoided showing art with any relation to the real world. Democracia’s large photo blow-ups of captioned riot police struck at the prevailing absence of similar content like a gong.

The problem with the art fair model—which seems to be creaking badly in Madrid—is the problem with the global economy. It has a strained relation to production. It is about the financialization of everything, and totally abstracted from life. Making new art is, yes, about making new value—like bitcoin mining. But, it’s value in the social sense, as well. The art fairs are only about banking—maintaining and transacting established value. The more they retrench and put their guard up, the deader they become.

The oldest Madrid art fair was held this year in the refurbished city hall. It’s usually dead-boring in just these terms, so I didn’t go. JustMad, the fair of “emergent art,” was a shadow of its 2013 self (although the parties looked like fun). With high audience demand and timid diminishing content, this year’s art fair offerings seem ripe for takeover. Truly, “wir sind wo anders.”

Yeah, yeah, kvetch, kvetch. But, as always, there was a lot, even too much to see. And like the Sochi Olympic games which ended this weekend, we have to say it’s all about the athletes. Even if white men ruled the roost, with barely a nod to any outside. And even if they weren’t allowed to try for any records, the sensuous generic animator Julian Opie, for example, a perennial at art fairs, showed paintings. Matt Mullican went for beauty and scored, with a bright, haunting semi-abstract That world where cartoon characters roam (Frame World Elements), 2013. It’s very knowing, evoking scratched film, dirty canvas, and using a color scheme from the RGB model of electronic devices. (Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich)

Utterly eerie and totally weird was the beautiful room installation of multiple screens of a faux-Weimar era German film “The Lost.”  Reynold Reynolds pretends he found this film censored by the Nazis that survives only in fragments. (Actually, he made it.) The seven screens were cleverly situated, so that watching them becomes an interactive experience of intersecting gazes, interests and desires. (West gallery, The Hague.)

Anti Laitinen, a part of the spotlight on Finland, works with glacier landscapes. He’s a classic earth artist. A video shows him at work, preparing materials like pine needles and lichens, for display. A floor piece is squares of this stuff, poignantly evoking the deep quiet forests from whence they came. (Galerie Anhava, Helsinki.)

Through the forest of decorative rubbish, one could still see the tall trees of modernism, telling their familiar tales. A mini-show of exquisite Juan Gris paintings was crowned by a powerful nearly abstract Picasso in Gris’ colors, showing the master thief at work. Roy Lichtenstein had surprising mid-1950s constructivist style assemblages. (Galeria Marc Domenech, Barcelona) It was also great to see vitrines full of works by Meret Oppenheim, the German Swiss Surrealist. A bronze shoe with a bubbling warty fill would be my choice of low-load investment grade feminist art. (Levy Galerie, Eppendorf, Germany) Some works by the under-known Filipino master David Medalla were delightful, like the “bio-kinetic” soap bubble fountain in a passageway (reconstructed from a 1965 original). These shared space with documents of an early British museum-crashing work by Mexican ’68 émigré and Fluxus comrade Felipe Ehrenberg, and a row of enigmatic masks by the political humorist Roberto Jacoby. The presenter (Baró Galeria, São Paulo) is doing very interesting work putting these masters together with younger artists.

Héctor Zamora, a Mexican public artist working in São Paulo, had a delirious video installation of workers inside a museum throwing bricks from one pile to another in a kind of proletarian circus act. To me, Inconstância Material (2012) brilliantly evoked the building sprees that led to the global economic collapse. Fun while it lasted. (Luciana Brito Galeria,  São Paulo)

Karin Sander’s blank canvases, shipped unwrapped, greatly annoyed a friend I was visiting with the second day. I think they’re funny, these forms, abraded by chance, pasted with labels. One, a large tondo, has been patched up with bright colored tape by DHL workers. (Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich)

Dan Graham’s Tunnel of Love (2014), a simple grand work in his architectural style, made sly use of the reflective properties of curved glass. Only we inside can see each other as we are; outside, everyone and everything looks funny. (Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen)

By Alan W. Moore

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Volta rises above all this in allowing the work to shine, growing in importance by opening the viewer up to visual relationships from piece to piece. The organizers have created a viewing environment that feels professional without reverting to the typical big fair art sprawl. As spectators, we are able to see something of how a career is developing, rather than having to settle for a singular statement that offers one stanza in the developing poem that is an artist’s complete body of work.

As someone who doesn’t have any spare cash in my decidedly meager bank roll, collecting isn’t really an option. I think anyone else who is in this art game for the love is or has been in a similar situation. This leaves us to be attracted to fairs that are focused on giving something back to the viewer, like allowing one to see and compare the work with our impression of how it contributes to the larger conversation. Volta affords us this opportunity, and for this we can all be glad. The fair closes on Sunday, so get over there this weekend for a fair experience that won’t leave you with tired eyes and a mushy feeling brain.

By Matthew Hassell

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VOLTA NY 2014
An invitational solo project fair for contemporary art.
March 6 – 9, 2014
82MERCER
New York City
ny.voltashow.com

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Sometimes art fairs take your money, pour an unbelievable amount of closely-hung work into your brain via your wandering eyeballs, and kick you in the ass as you exit. You are stuck on the sidewalk wondering whether you ever need to see a work of art in person again.

Pulse is not that art fair.

We were happy to visit last night and found it quite enjoyable. The following is a rundown of some of our favorite moments.

Generally, the bottom floor was a bit more difficult to digest. Set traditionally in the art fair format of one gallery and many artists per booth, it took a minute to adjust to after entering. By the time we got to the second floor, the restriction of one artist per booth was a welcome change of pace. The quality of work between the two floors was a pretty evenly split.

Charles Hinman courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery

Charles Hinman of Marc Straus Gallery (NYC) is making brightly painted gem-like constructions of armatures covered in stretched canvas. The planes of the wall-based work are selectively painted to utilize the contrast between vibrant and more subtle color shifts of paint. Hinman makes lovely use of the light and shadow created by the form’s relationship to selective gallery lighting. He also paints some reverse facing planes of the work in radiant pigments, bouncing colored light off of the wall behind the constructions.

Eric Cahan Courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery

Eric Cahan of Eric Firestone Gallery (East Hampton NY) is showing a vertically installed stack of images that at first come across as polychromatic pigment bleeds similar to Cory Archangel. On second inspection these are actually images of the sky at sunrise and sunset. Mounted on panel and covered in what appeared to be resin, the work is sickly sweet in it’s use of candy colors under surfaces which are slick and seductive, but at the same time make one wonder whether the images could possibly be altered. In the end, its just nice work and we don’t actually care to know.

Pius Fox courtesy of Patrick Heide Contemporary Art

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London) had a booth with a nice variety of different work. The most compelling of which was a series of paintings by Pius Fox, a young German painter. His intimate works are of paint on a canvas-paper like material applied to panel. All around the size of printer paper or smaller, these works use paint applied many different ways in beautifully muted tones. They play between painterly passages and tightly controlled geometries that reference recognizable internal spaces. Fox’s compositions here utilize a broken frame of color around the boarder, which serves to suggest looking into a fragmented space through a window or a door.

Image courtesy of David E. Peterson and Krause Gallery

David E. Peterson, showing with Krause Gallery (NYC) is making paintings and wall-based constructions that both utilize and actualize hard-edged geometric abstraction. His resin covered acrylic works on MDF are carefully composed abstractions, of high contrast of hues sunken into sexy high gloss resin environments. From intimate to quite large in scale, Peterson has a knack for making attractive wall based work that dances between painting and object. Their formal compositions allude to space while their reflective exteriors seem to keep the viewer out, creating a divide that is tempting to cross.

Two single work standouts in the show served to blow the art hung around them out of the water. The first was a one-of-a-kind tondo construction by Frank Stella. Showing in the booth of Zemack Contemporary (Tel Aviv) this work was something to behold not just because of its singular status, but because it was executed in typical vibrant Stella colors embedded in a support of formed paper and fiberglass.

Frank Gerritz Courtesy of Pablo’s Birthday

The other object that left us wanting more was a work by Frank Gerritz shown by Pablo’s Birthday (NYC). A painter of many talents, one body of Gerritz’s work is reductive abstraction that appear to be black oil on aluminum. Inspection of the edges reveals that Gerritz is actually filling channels cut in the metal support with oil stick gestures amassed so that they evenly fill the empty space. Simplicity of form here disguises what must have been a brainy process to conceive.

The art that made a real impression on us was all carefully composed abstraction and experimentation with material, but maybe that’s due to personal taste. Pulse truly has something for everyone and is a fair that is curated so as to resist overwhelming the viewer. If you skip all the rest, we suggest you still consider Pulse. Go take the chance. This is one that won’t disappoint.

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