In its 5th edition, Frieze New York offers the opportunity to encounter an exceptional quality and range of artwork, featuring the world’s most exciting emerging talents together with iconic names in modern and contemporary art.
Curator Celia Alemani highlights some of the artists to look out for at the fair this year.
Maurizio Cattelan
In Maurizio Cattelan’s
booth, which is part of the yearly
series of tributes to historical projects - instead of finding artworks, it
will be empty except for a live donkey beneath a chandelier. It’s like an image
from a fairytale.
Anthea Hamilton
British artist Anthea Hamilton will revive a project by the
Italian artist Mario Bellini and his workKar-A-Sutra which was
first shown at the exhibition at MoMA in 1972 ‘Italy: the new domestic
landscape’. A recreation of Bellini’s concept car will be inhabited by seven
mimes, enacting different and quite unusual ways of positioning themselves
within the car’s interior.
Eduardo Navarro
Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro is organizing a performance using five
dancers outside of the fair itself: the dancers will wear circular mirrors
attached to their waists and walk in straight lines using the reflections in
their mirrors to follow the path of clouds.
Heather Phillipson
British artist Heather Phillipson will present a series of the same
installation, both inside and outside of the fair, so you will encounter the
same work in different places like a recurring motif. She is interested in the
shape of the tent, which from above looks like a spinal cord. Heather has a
multimedia approach to installation, involving video and sculpture, sound and a
lot of props – all of which, here, are animated by dogs who are the main
protagonists. As with much of her work she’s not so interested in a specific
theme or topic but more in the way the viewer encounters these slightly odd
scenarios and actors - plastic dogs in this case.
Alex
Da Corte
US artist Alex Da Corte is also presenting a
large-scale installation. He will show a large floating balloon outside of the
fair, in the form of a cartoonish crying baby. The work won’t be revealed until
the fair, but I can say that Alex’s balloon will be monumental in size –
roughly 12 to 15 meters long – and it will hover above the fair as this icon
viewable from the other side of the river and by visitors approaching by ferry.
David Horvitz
For David, one of the most interesting aspects
of the fair is the huge number of people who visit – around 40,000 last year.
He decided he didn’t want to fabricate a physical work, as that’s what you find
in the different booths that make up the fair itself. Instead he wanted to do
something invisible, some kind of generous gesture for the majority of visitors
who come to view artworks rather than to buy them. His project is fairly
clandestine. A pickpocket will be in the fair but his or her role will be
reversed: he/she will drop a miniature sculpture into the bags or pockets of
visitors. If you’re one of the lucky ones, after your visit, you’ll reach into
your pocket and discover you’ve walked out with a work by David Horvitz. He’s
planning on giving away about 200 of these sculptures per day. As nobody knows
what the pickpocket looks like, if the pickpocket is good, he or she won’t get
caught and will remain anonymous. I guess that’s how we’ll judge the success of
the project. It’s interesting to see how the work has developed since the
proposal has got out. It’s like a rumor that people are spreading.
Frieze New York runs from May 5-8. For more
information, or to purchase tickets, click here.
