Can New York sustain as many art fairs as its calendar currently has? As New York Art Week dragged into its second week yesterday, I—and I’m sure I’m not alone—began to wonder. With Frieze and its satellites behind us, this week brings Independent and TEFAF New York, which both opened to VIPs Thursday.
With a 1 p.m. start-time, TEFAF, the US iteration of the Dutch fair in Maastricht, was bustling and crowded by the start of its second hour. Perhaps that might have more to do with the fact that aisles were so narrow that navigating them was an obstacle in itself, or the fact that TEFAF’s booth architecture feels so intrusive that you forget you’re standing in one of New York’s architectural gems, the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.
And that doesn’t even begin to get us to what is actually on view. While TEFAF prides itself on presenting objects from antiquity to today in all forms—visual arts, design and furniture, and jewelry—this edition appeared lackluster. Add to that the fact that the fair’s floral arrangements, a signature of TEFAF, were also rather drab, lacking in the abundance of tulips that marked the fair’s arrival in 2016, where the flowers defied gravity and the champagne and oysters were flowing. (There were oysters Thursday but they too lacked the panache of the days of yore.) But as the day drew to a close, I did receive a few self-reported sales reports from galleries, so there’s that.
Below, the best of what’s on view at the 2024 edition of TEFAF New York, which runs through Tuesday, May 14.
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Hughie Lee-Smith at Karma
Image Credit: Courtesy Karma Upstairs, New York’s Karma gallery is showing the range of artists it has shown in the past several years, with exceptional pieces ranging from Gertrude Abercrombie to Reggie Burrows Hodges. But the highlight is two early works (both oil on Masonite) by Hughie Lee-Smith that show the range of the emotional depth he imbued in his art. A pensive nude sits atop a piece of red fabric, her head in her hand—lost in thought against an inky black-gray background. The other shows a woman in a green dress set against a landscape that doesn’t quite seem like it is drawn from reality, while lacking the surrealist and existential inflections that would define the artist’s later work. On the left, notice the curve of a wire snapping from the fence, a precursor to the flitting pink ribbons that recur in many of his best works.
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Rebecca Salsbury James at Salon 94
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Salon 94 has on view several pieces, made between the 1930s and ’50s, by underknown modernist Rebecca Salsbury James, who at one point was at the center of the New York art world, married to photographer Paul Strand and friends with Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Salsbury James’s approach to modernism focused on using folk art as a jumping off point and she painted primarily still lifes and other genre scenes. But her technique was quite unlike anyone else: reverse paintings on glass. It gives these pieces a certain tension between transparency and opacity that is fantastic. My favorite is Seashells on the Sand (ca. 1935) showing a pink shell cozying up to a white shell, in front of a piece of driftwood; she dedicated the piece to O’Keeffe.
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Giorgio Morandi and George Ohr at David Zwirner
Image Credit: Courtesy David Zwirner David Zwirner has on view a rather delightful pairing of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and the ceramics of George Ohr. Though working decades apart and across vastly different geographies (late 19th-century Mississippi for Ohr and early to mid-20th century Italy for Morandi), Ohr’s otherworldly sculptures enhance the cups, jugs, and other vessels that Morandi depicts. Where Morandi paints in muted tones in which the still lifes sometimes appear to meld into the background, the forms sculpted by Ohr, the self-proclaimed Mad Potter of Biloxi, are otherworldly, slightly misshapen, and deep in color. Morandi never looked better and Ohr is finally re-emerging into the spotlight.
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Norberto Nicola at Nara Roesler
Image Credit: Charles Roussel The best abstraction you’ll find at TEFAF doesn’t employ oils or acrylics, but is an all-over, knotty feast of intersecting vibrant colors, made from textiles, made long before fiber experienced its recent resurgence in the art world. Norberto Nicola’s Ciranda (2002) is a mess of woven, tufted, and braided natural fibers colored with natural dyes. Its title borrows its name from a Brazilian children’s dance that is similar to “Ring Around the Rosie.” Nicola, who died in 2007, is well-known in Brazil as a pioneer of textile art; his work was the first fiber-based piece to be ever accept by the Sao Paulo Biennal. Although the MFA Houston owns a work by him, he is not as well known in the US, likely due to the fact that his estate doesn’t work with an American gallery. (Roesler doesn’t officially represent the estate but is showing him at TEFAF as part of a booth focused on various forms and interpretations of fiber and hand-crafted work.) I hope this changes soon as this work is just scratching the surface.
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Chung Chang-Sup at PKM
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Made by adhering Tak fiber from Korean mulberry trees to cotton, the paintings of Chung Chang-Sup, a first-generation member of the Dansaekhwa movement, are texturally rich, prizing materiality above all else. On view in Seoul-based gallery PKM’s booth are three such monochrome examples: an off-white one and two in a shade of patina-bronze green. In the white canvas, the Tak fiber is especially pronounced along the edges, appearing to frame the center of the canvas, where more off-white tones await. In the larger of the green works, the canvas is now divided in two like a diptych, with both the borders and centers lush in the crumpled tree pulp.
