Be sure to check out our favorite picks at Frieze this weekend!
Frieze New York 2016 brings together the world’s leading galleries, innovative curated sections, a celebrated series of talks, site-specific artist commissions and the city’s most talked about restaurants, all in a bespoke structure overlooking the East River in Randall’s Island Park, Manhattan.
May 5 – 8
Randall’s Island, New York
Thursday, May 5, 11am – 7pm
Friday, May 6, 11am – 8pm
Saturday, May 7, 11am – 7pm
Sunday, May 8, 11am – 6pm
Lips (Study #3), 2016, Single channel video installation, Mixed media, 57 x 76.2 x 91.4 inches
Mika Rottenberg, Andrea Rosen Gallery
Frieze New York Booth C29
Video installation artist Mika Rottenberg envisions the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues such as labor and class inequities. In her short films, women cast for their notable physical features and talents perform perfunctory factory-line duties, manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. Her homemade machinery and decor are functional but crudely constructed. These contraptions, operating by pedal, conveyor belt, paddle, rubber band, or string, are reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s kinetic props, though the human interaction in her works adds a carnivalesque element to Rottenberg’s environments, the physical comedy implicit in her narratives recalling Eleanor Antin’s filmed performances. The bright colors of Rottenberg’s self-contained sets don’t disguise the close quarters in which her characters work or mitigate the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job. A blue-collar work ethic is conjured through the women’s uniforms, ranging from diner-waitress dresses to jogging suits. Her cast often use several body parts at once, reminding the viewer of the feminine capacity for multitasking while it suggests an ironic futility in her sweatshop-like situations.
Andrea Rosen Gallery
525 & 544 West 24th Street, NYC
Lisa Yuskavage, Stoned, 2016. Oil and graphite on linen, 16 5/8 x 15 3/4 inches
Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner
Frieze New York Booth C56
Lisa Yuskavage‘s works are characterized by an ongoing engagement with the history of painting. Her oeuvre bears witness to a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting and takes its point of departure in part in the immediacy and tawdriness of contemporary life spurred by the mass media and the psycho-social realm of the individual. Over the past two decades, she has developed her own genre of the female nude: lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, angelic young women cast within fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. They appear to occupy their own realm while narcissistically contemplating themselves and their bodies. Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility.
David Zwirner
519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, NYC
Marola, 2015, Acrylic, hand-painted enamel on aluminum, stainless steel, polyester, 89 x 42 x 32 inches
Beatriz Milhazes, James Cohan Gallery
Frieze New York Booth B53
Beatriz Milhazes’ is well known for her vibrantly colorful, kaleidoscopic collages, prints, paintings and installations which draw on both Latin American and European traditions. Milhazes’ rigorously structured compositions are punctuated by a recurring set of arabesque motifs inspired by Brazilian culture, ceramics, lacework, carnival decoration, music, and Colonial baroque architecture. As Milhazes explains, “I am seeking geometrical structures, but with freedom of form and imagery taken from different worlds.” The artist has also cited opera, classical and Brazilian popular music as having informed the upbeat energy of her stripes, lines, circular forms, and rays. The careful balance of harmony and dissonance in her work, combined with her Technicolor palette, are evident of the strong influence by such 20th century masters as Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Matisse, Kandinksy and Delaunay. Milhazes has stated “I need to have all these elements and put them together. They are in some sort of a conflict that will never really end up anywhere. There are not peaceful surfaces. There should be some struggle on the surface and then create some activities for your eyes” (Interview with Beatriz Milhazes, RES Art World/World Art, No. 2 May 2008). As the Fondation Cartier further explains, Milhazes’ “use of intensely vibrant colors, such as fuchsia, gold or orange, endows her canvases with an explosive energy that many have compared to the breathtaking rhythm of fireworks.”
James Cohan
533 WEST 26 ST, NYC
Untitled, 2015, Guesso, oil, oistick, acrylic, permanent marker on canvas, 118 x 158 inches
Jannis Vareles, The Breeder Gallery
Frieze New York Booth B55
Jannis Varelas’ work explores the contrast between appearance and reality and exposes the increasingly theatrical nature of our lives. Sometimes ironic and caustic, sometimes purposefully saccharine, his depiction of the human condition and the construction of dystopias, critically comments on the changing relation of the individual to society and sacrilegiously approaches revered structures such as history, sexuality, politics and religion.
The Breeder Gallery
45 Iasonos st, GR 10436, Athens
Fancy Problems, Installation view, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 2015
Ella Kruglyanskaya, Thomas Dane Gallery
Frieze New York Booth B63
Ella Kruglyanskaya paints large-scale, cartoonish vignettes featuring exuberant, full-figured women and their fashion accessories. Characterized by splashy colors and patterns, her paintings depict women in revealing clothes, engaged in leisure activities or absurdist scenarios, such as Untitled (2010), in which a woman in high heels riding a small horse is attacked by a crocodile. “I’m interested in pictorial events that are not narrative but visual and sometimes aspire to an unspoken punch line,” she has said. “The figure functions as the vessel and the space onto which the events of the painting occur.” Kruglyanskaya has produced commissions for the windows of Barney’s in New York, and her work has been compared to that of R. Crumb, Sonia Delaunay, and Lyubov Popova.
Thomas Dane Gallery
3 & 11 Duke Street, St. James’s, SW1Y 6BN London