Frieze New York is back for its 12th edition next week (open to the public May 2-5) with 68 exhibitors. More than half of them have a gallery presence in the city.
Though the fair is a third of its original size, artworks priced in six and seven figures are all but sure to change hands. Last year at Frieze New York, Hauser & Wirth sold an acrylic painting by Jack Whitten for $2.5 million, White Cube parted with a Doris Salcedo table for $1.25 million, and Thaddaeus Ropac received $900,000 for a work by Robert Longo.
The fair first opened in 2012 in a sprawling tent on Randall’s Island that set a record as the world’s longest tented floor and featured 180 stands. Present at the start was the Italian artist and provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, who, when invited to present his work in a fair booth four years later, exhibited a 15-year-old donkey that quietly grazed beneath a chandelier.
What to expect from this year’s fair? Here are some highlights and details.
Where it is
Since 2021, Frieze has taken place at the Shed, the multidisciplinary arts center between the High Line and Hudson Yards on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan. (Randall’s Island was not easy to get to, and floods and heat waves in 2017 and 2018 were an added deterrent; some galleries stopped taking booths.)
Will Frieze New York expand again, now that Frieze has bought New York’s Armory Show, which typically features about 220 exhibitors? Not likely. Given the season and the timing, the size of it is appropriate, said Christine Messineo, Frieze’s director of Americas. “It’s the right formula.” As for what happens to the Armory, Messineo said it was too early to say and that the fair had to go through its next iteration in September before any rethinking could take place.
What to see
The Rev. Joyce McDonald is a minister at the Church of the Open Door in Brooklyn, and a survivor of drug addiction and AIDS. She is also, and primarily, an artist who creates glazed ceramic portraits and figurines that bear witness to the lives of herself and the people she comes across.
McDonald discovered clay as a medium in the art department of an AIDS recovery program she took part in decades ago. A selection of her painted clay sculptures will be displayed in the Gordon Robichaux gallery booth. They’re the outcome of a creative process that McDonald describes as “turning the brokenness into beauty.”
What else to see
“Better Half” is the title of a small sculpture in hardwood, steel, glazed ceramic and gold leaf by the artist Arlene Shechet — a colorful interlocking of cubes and volumes that looks anything but static. Shechet is part of the Pace gallery’s dual-artist booth (the other artist is painter Robert Mangold).
Astonishingly, many of Shechet’s sculptures do not make the cut: She throws out a third of her output and never looks back because, as she told The New York Times in 2020, “I had to make that one yucky thing in order to make the other thing.” Vastly bigger sculptures than those in the Pace booth — meaning large-scale commissions that are 10 to 20 feet tall — can be seen at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, N.Y.
What to drink
If you’re partial to champagne, Ruinart (which is present at major art fairs) is serving Blanc de Blanc and Ruinart Rosé in its top-floor space, as well as showcasing works by a guest of its 2024 artist residency program in the Champagne region: Andrea Bowers, an artist and climate activist who lives and works in Los Angeles. In a tribute to a Californian oak forest she saw knocked down, Bowers presents a chandelier that’s shaped like tree branches, and an installation of slogan-bearing ribbon strips that you can tear off individually and take with you.
Elsewhere in town
Petrit Halilaj, from Kosovo, is the latest artist commissioned for the Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His vast sculptural installation is inspired by his experience of growing up in what was then Yugoslavia, watching Kosovo descend into a war, and escaping to a refugee camp in Albania.
