12.12.23 — Better Than an Art Fair?

To pick up from last time on fall New York art fairs, is Salon Zürcher better than a fair? It may well seem so after a long day at the fairs, when pretty much anything would come as a relief.

It began by inviting Paris and New York galleries into its host, Zürcher gallery. For four years now, though, it has become no more than a group show for fair week. It also devotes itself to eleven women, a changing eleven each time. If that does come as a relief rather than an irrelevancy, credit where credit is due. Henri Matisse's Blue Nude (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Pompidou Center, 1952)

The gallery has a weakness for abstract artists, as do I—here all except Elizabeth Bisbbing, with sunny interiors in cut and collaged paper. If a silhouette breaks the mood, it is because they are lived in. Abstraction leans toward the play between two dimensions and material space. For Ilene Sunshine, that means what critics used to call drawing in space, with the wiry outlines of twigs and colored thread. For Susan Schwalb and Agathe Bouton, it means working small, with metalpoint on thick panels and gold thread atop the grid. Schwalb’s pencil adds like the soft shadows of her horizontals, while Bouton’s small, square monotypes hang together like a deep blue empty dress.

For Colleen Herman, Elizabeth Velazquez, and Lauren Ball, it means working large, in the spirit of postwar abstraction. Herman applies garden color to white fields, like Joan Mitchell but with splotches akin to poured ink. A small, stacked sculpture takes on a new life for Velazquez, with light traces on tar black, while Ball’s purple curves allow an otherwise unseen object to take shape. For Kristin Jones, a pen serves as a pendulum, while “the wind does the rest”—or the wind, gravity, and the laws of motion. Circles look like suns or moons with radiant edges. Margie Neuhaus wraps things up with thread, a long weave that seems to ravel and unravel before one’s eyes, while drawings and an almost bare frame suggest the impulse that brought them together.

Will midtown offices after Covid ever return to life? One art fair has never left. If a dedication to work sounds odd for Spring Break, this is a fair for action and for fun. In its third year on Madison Avenue, it spills out from two high floors of offices and across common space. A room of handmade flowers greeted me off the elevators, by Christina Massey—and then came two sets of puppets (cuddly and black cowled), gas pumps, a bubble-wrapped cubicle, tunneling video, a Ferris wheel, and toys scooting around the floor. What other fairs would call “special projects” are here the norm.

Sure, it has painting, lots of it, suspiciously like uploads to TikTok, although Peter Gynd brings the broad brush of gestural abstraction to small sunlit landscapes and Faustine Badrichan paints a credible imitation of Matisse cutouts directly on the wall. (I show the real thing.) Gilding comes as no surprise, on plush pillows, although Arlene Rush uses it air real fears of luxury goods and guns. In the same office, Caroline Voagen Nelson literally follows the money, in cash. What you will not find so easily are artists. In a “curator-driven fair,” labels leave it to you to ask who made the work, and it may seem beside the point.

Does that put Spring Break at the opposite extreme from the uncurated artists at Clio and, later in the month, Superfine? Those two still cry out for quality control, but they only add to the good-natured chaos. “I cannot handle art with no artists anymore.” So pleads Shalva Nikvashvili, in a painting for the dealer Why Not. She may have to wait a long time. Meanwhile, one can always have fun—and I continue next time with the Independent and Art on Paper.

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