Participants paint Jonathan Horowitz’s “100 Dots” at Frieze (photo by twi-ny/ees)
FRIEZE ART FAIR
Randall’s Island Park
May 14-17, $28-$109
friezenewyork.com
The ferry, the crowds, the food, and the fashion may all seem familiar and as well done as ever at Frieze, but what’s new under the big white tent? Well, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise got a lot of press because of Jonathan Horowitz’s participatory project, “700 Dots,” which enlisted early attendees’ minds, hearts, hands, and Instagram feeds by providing them with brushes, black acrylic paint, a white square, a $20 check, and lots of helpful support for painting a perfect eight-inch circle. The circles became part of Horowitz’s project, which actually consists of seven sets of ten-by-ten grids of 100 dots, two of which had sold for $100,000 a piece by Thursday. Single-artist stands captured most of our attention, and the Frame section, for galleries less than eight years old showing solo exhibitions, felt particularly strong. In fact, the Stand Prize, a $15,000 award sponsored by Champagne Pommery and given by a panel of distinguished judges, went to a Frame gallery for the revelatory Martha Araújo show at Galeria Jaqueline Martins (São Paulo), focusing on Araújo’s body-based performative practice in Brazil from the 1970s through the present, little known to date.
Gallerists prepare a performance of Kris Lemsalu’s “Whole Alone 2” at Temnikova & Kasela, Frieze New York 2015 (photo by twi-ny/ees)
Also in Frame, as fairgoers arrived just after eleven on Thursday morning, gallerists at Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn, Estonia) prepared Kris Lemsalu’s “Whole Alone 2,” a sculptural installation and performance that featured a well-manicured woman under an intricately enameled and rhinestone-bedazzled tortoiseshell, while London’s Supplement Gallery showed Philomene Pirecki’s lovely and more subtly nontraditional painting, comprising old paintings processed into supports for new, and sculptures made of layers of images of previous works, processed as photographs of digital screen images and overlaid with transparencies of water droplets. The latest medium seems, somewhat bewilderingly, to be ceramics, as artists as diverse as Lucio Fontana, Milena Muzquiz, Takuro Kuwata, and Dan McCarthy all displayed glazed clay pieces, some quite beautiful, such as Fontana’s “Dolphins” and “Piatto-Battaglia,” some less so, like the scary yellow glazed smiley Face Pots by McCarthy.