ICYMI, Here Are 10 of Our Favorite Artworks From Frieze New York

After more than a year without art fairs, Frieze New York is back. But this highly anticipated pandemic-era edition looked a little different. Rather than setting up shop in the usual sprawling tent on Randall’s Island, some 60 international galleries occupied the Shed, the multidisciplinary performing arts space in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side. Visitors, of course, were also subject to strict COVID-19 guidelines. Despite these tweaks, it was a pleasure to leave the house and see such an abundance of art—and people—outside of a museum. And though the in-person show closed to the public May 9, you can still take part through Frieze’s expanded virtual viewing room of 160 exhibitors through Friday, where you can watch interviews with architect Annabelle Selldorf, performance artist Marina Abramović, and more.

It’s impossible, of course, to select favorites among the hundreds of works that were on display during the IRL event, but here are a few that caught our eye.

We were taken by the luminous, large-scale portraiture of the Yorkshire, England–born painter Sarah Ball. The artist selects her subjects through found images from newspapers, magazines, and social media, but unlike Richard Prince and his famously troll-y Instagram paintings, Ball approaches her subjects with a tender intimacy. Large swaths of her images (namely backdrops and clothing) are rendered nearly flat in favor of evocative details like a stud earring, a necklace, and—most of all—the anonymous sitters’ eyes.

As part of its presentation at Frieze New York this year, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery showcased the work of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a generations-old group of Black women quilters in rural Alabama. Andrea Williams, part of the newer generation of quilt artists, repurposed old denim workwear to make her “Housetop” (a pattern of concentric squares) quilt. And it’s a delight to behold in its patchwork of indigo fabric, with the pockets, rips, and even a Fubu tab left visible.

We are, of course, suckers for spectacular Italian interiors (look no further than our May 2021 issue), and all the more so when seen through German photographer Candida Höfer’s lens. At Frieze 2021, Sean Kelly Gallery presented Höfer’s monumental 2008 photograph Palazzo Medici-Riccardi Firenze I 2, depicting the Renaissance palace in all of its splendor. Though it is eerily devoid of people (a trope gleaned from her teachers, the famed photography duo Bernd and Hilla Becher), the image hums with vitality.

Another standout from the Sean Kelly booth was this 1988 portrait by American photographer Dawoud Bey. Though Bey’s most recent work has drifted into more conceptual territory, his early street photography captured everyday life in Black communities. A Girl with School Medals depicts a young teenager, but her jaunty posture and direct gaze suggest wisdom beyond her years. Missed this photo at Frieze? Check out Bey’s show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, on view through October 3.

Daniel Buren’s installation of striped paintings at Frieze is one of the show’s simplest yet most striking presentations. The French artist, now 83, made the Peintures Découpées (“cut paintings”) in the 1970s and 80s. Each is painted on geometric pieces of cotton fabric and then applied directly to the wall, without a support. The works are usually site-specific, but they were shown in the United States for the first time here. The exhibit was made all the more stunning by the Shed’s structural shell hovering above the booth.

Nicholas Galanin, an artist of both Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent, installed the words “Indian Land” in the rugged desert landscape outside Palm Springs. They’re rendered in 45-foot-tall letters as both a riff on the famed Hollywood sign (which originally promoted a segregated real estate development in Los Angeles) and as a call to action for property owners to transfer land back to local indigenous communities. Though Peter Blum Gallery showed only a photograph of the work, titled Never Forget, at Frieze, you can see the real thing in California as part of Desert X, through September.

This standout installation from Los Angeles–based Wilding Cran Gallery featured the work of Karon Davis. The artist, who founded the city’s celebrated Underground Museum in 2012 with her husband, the late artist Noah Davis, is increasingly moving into the spotlight with her beautiful yet urgent works. Her Frieze New York presentation (which came on the heels of her first solo show in New York at Jeffrey Deitch) features a series of enigmatic busts created from plaster strips over a steel armature. The classical sculptures of Black women—some in blue vitrines, others jutting from a tondo covered in blue metal leaf—exude both delicacy and power and beckon you to take a closer look.

Berlin-based Esther Schipper and New York–based Mitchell-Innes & Nash galleries teamed up at this edition of Frieze to showcase the work of influential art collective General Idea. Canadian artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal formed the group in 1969; while their work (often through irony, humor, and kitsch) addressed everything from the art market to sexuality, they became best known for their pieces confronting the AIDS crisis (both Zontal and Partz died in 1994 of AIDS-related complications). This presentation showcased a variety of “Poodle Drawings” (the group’s mascot) as well as Fin de Siècle, a 1994 painting depicting the trio as a group of helpless seal pups.

There is something delightfully dark lurking beneath the shiny surfaces of artist Rachel Feinstein’s strange Rococo creations. Gagosian displayed several of them—all inspired by the famed porcelain figurines from Nymphenburg, Germany—at its Frieze presentation, including Corine (2018), which features a pair of buckled blue slippers almost to suggest that the wearer had been eaten alive by the porcelain dollop. “I’ve always been fascinated with that particular period of Rococo, and Baroque somewhat, because there’s this attempt to control nature,” Feinstein said in a Gagosian Quarterly interview. “...of course, nature is not controlled. You don’t know if there’s going to be a hurricane or a flash flood.”

If there was a “Selfie Magnet” award at Frieze New York, this work by Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson would certainly have taken the cake. Titled October 3–October 12, 2020 (Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020), the mirrored piece—one of several such Time mirrors in the artist’s oeuvre—allowed fairgoers to enjoy a whole 15 seconds of fame.