New York is hardly in need of another art fair, but that’s what we got this week in the form of Esther, which feels more like an ambitious group show than a selling event. That’s something to be thankful for, since the art market in this city tends to be pretty risk-averse. And, despite the fact that Esther is designed to peddle art, this show has character, which is more than you can say for all the other interchangeable fairs that pass through the Big Apple annually.
For starters, there’s Esther’s bizarre location: the Estonian House, a volunteer-operated space devoted to Estonian culture that’s located in Kips Bay. There are no cultural destinations around it, unless you count an AMC multiplex several blocks away.
Then there’s the fair’s ethos, which, for an event of its kind, is unusually not money-oriented. Esther was founded by Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova, who operate galleries in New York and Tallinn, respectively, and they’ve thought of it more as a means of collaboration than a place for dealers to sell their wares. Compared to Frieze, where booths typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, exhibitors at Esther must pay a flat rate of $1,500 to take part. (Admission to Esther is free; a full-price ticket to Frieze can cost as much as $206, depending on which day you visit.)
By Samel’s own admission, Esther may not have the most sustainable model. Then again, this fair isn’t only about conducting transactions—it’s also about inspiring collectivity. As Samel told ARTnews last week, “What was important for us was creating an environment where galleries can take risks and think about it as a complementary platform versus a more competitive one that fairs tend to be.”
Notably, there are no booths. The 25 galleries on hand have instead elected to intersperse their varied offerings, largely without any signage to delineate who’s brought what to Esther. Perhaps for that reason, Esther feels more like a dealers’ hangout than an art-market shark tank. Experiments in New York like Esther largely went extinct during the pandemic. It’s a pleasure to have that spirit back.
How’s the art itself? On the whole, it’s good, not great. There’s a lot of painting, and little of everything else, but at least the paintings at Esther largely aren’t the figurative kind seen at the Friezes and Art Basels of the world. And many of the artists aren’t stars, which means there’s fresh talent to discover.
Below, a look at some of the best offerings at the first edition of Esther, which runs through May 4.
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Jaanus Samma
Image Credit: Photo Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Temnikova’s own gallery—Temnikova & Kasela, run with Indrek Kasela—has lined this fair with works by Jaanus Samma, whose woven works and prints often take up the notion of Estonianness itself. The silkscreen Lepvalts’s Kalevipoeg I (2023) features a nearly nude, hunky man raising a sword above his head while two other shirtless guys look on. Its title is a reference to painter Rudolf Lepvalts’s paintings about Kalevipoeg, a 19th-century epic poem commonly read as a call for Estonian independence, something the country did not declare until 1918. Samma, rather than simply reiterating Lepvalts’s imagery, has pixelated it and paid more mind to the musculature of the poem’s protagonist, giving special attention to his well-defined pecs. Samma’s art has regularly circumscribed queerness within the history of Estonia, a country that was relatively open to gay people until it came under the control of the Soviet Union. Here, he suggests that texts core to the nation’s collective consciousness may actually be laced with homoeroticism.
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Skuja Braden
Image Credit: Photo Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Brought to Esther by Kaufmann Repetto, this Latvian duo produces oddball porcelain vessels that they’ve painted with ambiguous images and words. One of those vessels, exhibited atop a billiards table, features a crush of anime-like figures with bulbous eyes that stare out at the viewer. Another has a picture of a winged horse, along with the word “facade” written over and over. Skuja Braden’s work may not make much sense, especially without additional context to help elucidate it, but it certainly does offer aesthetically pleasurable disturbances. For that reason, do not miss one particularly ornate vase set within a fireplace. Painted onto it is an image of a nude woman bound up in ropes, shibari-style. It’s kinky and weird—and hardly the usual fair fare.
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Botond Keresztesi
Image Credit: Photo Alex Greeenberger/ARTnews Surrealism-inspired figurative painting is not exactly in short supply these days, and the trend shows no sign of dying off anytime soon. If more of it must appear in New York, let it be as strange as the paintings by this young Hungarian, brought to Esther by London’s Seventeen Gallery. Keresztesi makes his paintings by mocking up his images digitally, then painting them onto canvas. That explains the Photoshopped look of his horrifying creatures, which seem neither human nor inhuman, neither solid nor liquid. Behind these misshapen beings, Keresztesi has airbrushed odd imagery—one painting features an eye that stares out at a rocky outcropping and an unclassifiable monstrosity whose head culminates in a pointy blade. These intriguing works allude to bodily transformation, and because of their bright colors, they seem less scary than one might expect.
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Jan Wade
Image Credit: Photo Alex Greenberger/ARTnews This Canadian artist has rarely exhibited beyond her home country, but that is slowly beginning to change, with a solo show set to open in New York at Richard Saltoun Gallery on Thursday. As a teaser for that exhibition, the gallery is showing four fascinating works by Wade at Esther. All these pieces deal with the thin division between life and death. In two all-black works that combine vessels with sculpted figures, Wade refers to the tradition of memory jugs, which were produced by enslaved people for cemeteries in the American South. Despite being colorless, hers are imbued with warmth: one contains the words “LOVE” and “SOUL” repeated across its surfaces. There are also two drawings from her “Boneheads” series, featuring hybrid people that turn into snakes and sprout many eyes. In one, a person’s head emerges from a tree, crying as its head blooms with flowers. “In the midst of Life. There is death—,” a cryptic text beneath it reads.
