More Art from New York City’s Spring Fairs to Spotlight Before Fall Gets Underway

Back in May of this year, I was fortunate enough to attend a series of art fairs around New York City, from the 2024 edition of Frieze New York — which I just wrote about here — to 1-54 New York, the NYC edition of a globe-trotting art event focusing on contemporary African art.

Assuming at least some curation, an art fair is a great opportunity for a crash course in (hopefully!) a broad selection of artists, though most of these works are going to be from the 20th Century at the earliest. And mostly, they’re recently made.

Among the May events was Independent New York, which took place at Spring Studios in Tribeca, near that downtown Manhattan neighborhood’s own art galleries. In terms of broad impressions from the event, I quite liked that it seemed fueled by a particularly large share of solo or small group presentations, which allowed a more fully realized look at whichever artist was spotlighted. The actual selection of galleries and art institutions participating in Independent was also a nice balance between familiarity and something new, in terms of my own experiences thus far.

Gavlak & Andrew Brischler

At the booth for the gallery called Gavlak, which has locations in Los Angeles and Palm Beach, I saw a series of artworks by Andrew Brischler. In the artist’s featured “Self Portraits” series, Brischler utilized images originating with well-known movies like “Alien” and “American Psycho.”

The visually commanding artworks each captured what was apparently a single, generally close-up shot from the invoked movie, here translated into a limited but still piercing color palette.

Process-wise, they rely on a gouache ground to which Brischler added with colored pencil. Rather than photorealistic reproductions, Brischler instead constructed arrays of halftone dots “to give them the patina of printed matter or the mechanical feel of silkscreen printmaking,” as the gallery explained. The dotting grows and recedes to produce the overarching image.

Brischler’s series separates this pervasive imagery of pop culture from anchors in photorealism, with the images both individually and as a category morphing instead into psychological guideposts. Like the series’ whole title suggests, we might take on such an image as a mask of sorts for ourselves when watching and (depending on the specifics) personally relating to these characters. The invocation of the character becomes a marker for a series of traits, experiences, or contemplations vs. just this one (fictional) individual as a singular entity.

The images have a life cycle, impact, and underlying language outside of the specifics of representation. When I was up close, I struggled to ascertain there was even an overarching image produced by the halftone dotting. Sigourney Weaver’s character from the “Alien” series and other figures featured here become almost like guardians bearing our wishes and ambitions, on par with artwork depicting religious figures from historical churches and the like.

Francisco Ugarte at Curro

At the first floor booth for Curro, a gallery from Mexico, I saw artworks by Francisco Ugarte that touched on a favorite theme of mine: evoking writing or inscription without actually communicating something specific in grammatical terms. It’s kind of like a further step in the sort of path I was contemplating with Brischler’s images as that artist loosened the bonds of precise realism.

Utilizing materials including charcoal, oil, and acrylic on linen, Ugarte’s artworks resembled plans for some kind of project, notes from an important meeting, or notations of just about anything wide-ranging and developing quickly. The artworks sported rows and groupings of proportionally writing-like scrawls accompanied by meaning-evocative boxes, underlines, and multiple colors (red, yellow) adding further faceting and emphasis.

Ugarte presented the flow of information as — no matter the consistently outward push — a relatively surmountable process, with nicely rounded off visual rhythms that suggested the story of that critical planning session ends with substantial progress, whatever specific fulfills that. You grow to appreciate a sense of disparate, disjointed parts threatening to pull into irreconcilable distances instead moving into cohesion. Complicated planning that’s successfully executed. A theater production that goes off with no big problems!

Franklin Parrasch Gallery and parrasch heijnen

I’ve visited Franklin Parrasch Gallery on the Upper East Side in Manhattan a couple of times, and their featured selection of art is always quite memorable, honestly.

At Independent, Franklin Parrasch Gallery and parrasch heijnen presented artwork by Joan Snyder and Teresa Tolliver.

Not everything is available in photographic form online, but they had a series of Snyder’s works on paper with bold, free-flowing color application, where areas of color didn’t fit into each other like precise puzzle pieces but still smoothly met. The paper-bound bursts of energy seemed simultaneously momentary and lasting, freely moving about but maintaining the kind of internal weight and forward-moving force that flickers towards the energy in front of you clearly lasting well beyond that moment. An encapsulation and de facto enshrining, even, of moments of inspiration, care, and sunlight.

The Snyder works were largely from the 1960s.

Tolliver’s artwork was sculptural, though one hung on the wall. Identified seemingly in their entirety as “mixed media,” I couldn’t tell you everything that was put together to make these art pieces, but the results were hybrid creatures and monuments in which artifacts of their creation were apparent, cultivating a sense of care behind their construction. The overarching visual impact of each artwork was generally rather unified — something pulling in the same direction as itself, combining the care with strength and cohesion.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Magenta Plains

I’ll combine these last two Independent booths.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, another Upper East Side institution, showed artwork by Alison Watt, who the gallery also spotlighted at that Upper East Side space. Here and in the exhibition that went up in the actual gallery, Watt’s work — oil paintings — featured carefully rendered, otherwise perhaps unremarkable objects suspended in strangely blank environments.

The figure-objects themselves — tablecloths given character and staging like a participant in a drama — are hyper-realistic, shaped in part by minutely orchestrated lighting mixed with its concurrent shadow. But they don’t seem to actually exist in any specific location. “Peale” (2018) features what looks like a white tablecloth hung up on a wall — but beyond the small pieces of shadow suggesting there is something physical beyond the tablecloth, it’s not evident.

This isolates the experience of these exquisitely rendered fabrics — and their concurrently evoked memories and expectations — to a remarkable degree. Awash in warm but gentle light, you’re left contemplating the tablecloth, flower, or whatever else that Watt depicts as a marker on the road of experience. Watt extricates an enrapturing sense of place in these paintings, quieting and drawing our attention to the back-and-forth communication of the tablecloth’s folds.

Magenta Plains, another New York City gallery whose space I’ve visited and found quite memorable, was presenting artwork by Jane Swavely and Alan Uglow, the latter of whom is deceased.

I was looking forward to the opportunity to check out Swavely’s work before the fair started. They’re big, bold, sweeping paintings with massive fields of color clashing into one another, with a lot of silver in the artist’s overall output.

The brushstrokes within the areas of color were impassioned, with enough unity that they moved in largely the same direction but not so much that individual brushstrokes weren’t still evident. Think of a river, perhaps. You can tell that the body of water flowing in front of you is an inwardly unified entity, moving with purpose — but on each stone in the river, or around each bend (depending, of course, on a lot of local specifics), the water might leap out of alignment before returning. It’s the same energy here.

That’s that, for now! Now, it’s on to Art on Paper, The Armory Show, and the many, many art gallery exhibitions that will be taking place across New York City the rest of this year!

Featured image: credits listed above