By JY&A New York. May 11th, 2021.
The first physical opening of the Frieze international contemporary fair at The Shed in New York City after 1.5 years of the global pandemic was a blessing for everyone attending the fair. We prepared the following detailed report on what's been cherished by the attending collectors and the current global art market. We hope that our report can help those who couldn't attend the fair to experience the exciting artworks and the warm and welcoming atmosphere of the event remotely.
Our current report is based on our in-depth conversations and investigation with each gallery we mentioned in our article, and with which we keep working closely. Collectors and art lovers having questions or inquiries about the artists, their works, or galleries in the current report are welcome to contact us at info@jyuanassociates.com at your convenience. We will do our best to reply to you and provide the information or services you need within the shortest timeline.
HIGHLIGHTS
Karen Kilimnik (American artist born in 1955)
Blue-chip artist
Solo exhibition by Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zurich, Switzerland) at Frieze New York 2021
Karen Kilimnik, The Fairie Queens Sheep in the Woods, 2021. Water-soluble oil color on canvas. 30 x 24 x 3/4 inches / 76 x 61 x 2 cm. $ 175,000
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
On our visit day (Saturday, May 7th), multiple pieces have shown "sold." The paintings' price range was between $60,000 and $175,000, and drawings priced from $15,000 to $110,000.
Karen Kilimnik is a contemporary American artist subverting the traditions of painting and installation to investigate contemporary notions of celebrity and obsession. Her small-scale paintings are both sophisticated and slapdash, deliberately evoking the efforts of an amateur painter depicting their favorite movie star, copying a postcard of a resort, or attempting the techniques of an Old Master. Today, her works can be found in The Museum of Modern Art collections in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others. Kilimnik lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Annette Messager (French artist born in 1943)
Blue-chip artist
Solo exhibition by Marian Goodman Gallery (New York, Paris) at Frieze New York 2021
Annette Messager, En Même Temps (At the same Time), 2021. 5 drawings (acrylic on Japanese paper), 42 effigies, polyurethane foam, aluminum foil, acrylic paint, string. 141.73 x 204.72 inches / 360 x 520 cm. Price on Application.
Visual material provided by Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
En même temps, 2021, an installation of drawings and Petites effigies, is inspired in part by art history – drawing on, as Messager says, Constructivism and Constantin Brâncusi to Oskar Schlemmer and Alberto Giacometti. The opacity and uniformity of these small figures indicate parity between the forty-some tiny sculptures, which are "hieratic and upright and represent us humans, and seem to be observing us.’ Messager integrates several organic, elongated drawings that bring the inside-outside in dialogue with these small figures, making the unseen seen. The drawings ‘play on our bodies, our organs, our fantasies; they seep in and circulate, seeming to disrupt the dignity of these little effigies, at the same time."
The Petites effigies, the tiny figures that Messager pins and suspends, and personifies and memorializes in her wall installations, represent hybrid forms that recall childhood toys or fetish objects. Often arranged in the style of entomological collections, placed at systematic intervals along a wall, they have been exhibited in diverse historical contexts over the years.
(Marian Goodman Gallery)
Trenton Doyle Hancock (American artist born in 1974)
Established representation
Solo exhibition by James Cohen Gallery (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
“Recently, in my comics and paintings, I’ve used the Klansman to represent America’s contract with White Supremacy, especially how that contract is negotiated with Black Americans. I’ve paired the volatile klansman symbol with my own Black superhero, Torpedoboy, to highlight the “exchange” or dialogue that Black Americans are forced into daily.”
- Trenton Doyle Hancock
[On the right]
Trenton Doyle Hancock
Step and Screw: West End Scrap #3
2021.
Acrylic, ink, and paper collage on canvas.
30 x 30 inches / 76.2 x 76.2 cm.
$ 38,000
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Trenton Doyle Hancock solo exhibition at James Cohen Gallery at Frieze New York 2021
Photo courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Since the early 21st century, Trenton Doyle Hancock has been merging comic book narratives and abstraction in his vibrant, dizzyingly detailed prints, drawings, and mixed-media paintings, in which he explores the struggles within himself and in our world. For the first nine years of his career, he focused on creating an epic, allegorical tale, shaped, in part, by the Biblical stories with which he grew up. Each of his works is a part of this ongoing drama, in which beehive-like “Mounds,” representing, in his words, “the Earth and stability,” battle with skeletal “Vegans,” who he describes as “a mob…unleashed to upset that stability.” Representative of the ongoing strife among humans, his compositions is full of words, colors, and imaginative characters. Recently, Hancock has turned more inward, producing autobiographical works featuring himself as the protagonist. (James Cohen Gallery)
Rashid Johnson (American artist born in 1977)
Blue-chip representation
Presented by Hauser & Wirth Gallery (New York, LA, London, Hong Kong, Zurich...) at Frieze New York 2021
Rashid Johnson, Bruise Painting "Blue Bird, "2021. Oil on linen. 98 × 86 × 2 1/2 inches / 248.9 × 218.4 × 6.4 cm. Sold $ 750,000
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media – including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation – yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history. Johnson’s practice is defined by its critical evocations and entangling of racial and cultural identity, African American history, and mysticism. Many of his early works took the form of conceptual photography. However, Johnson eventually expanded his practice to include wall-based works that engage the legacy of painting, sculptural installation, and assemblage using manufactured materials like shea butter, books records, and incense. “The goal,” Johnson explains, “is for all of the materials to miscegenate into a new language, with me as its author.” Johnson also exercises a range of mark-making techniques—like scoring, scraping, engraving, and branding—using self-made tools. (Hauser & Wirth Gallery)
SURPRISES
Katherine Bernhardt (American artist born in 1975)
Blue-chip representation
Presented Canada Gallery (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
Katherine Bernhardt first garnered the art world’s attention with her portraits of fashion models, exploring hyperreal fashion photography and mainstream notions of beauty. More recently, she has focused her energies on a series of “Pattern Paintings”—large-scale works in tropical, sherbert hues depicting banal consumer goods arranged in the style of jazz patterns. Fluid and hurried, Bernhardt’s canvases are seemingly provisional, radiating energy to express the pleasure of art-making. First exploring patterns in the context of imported rugs, Bernhardt’s more recent works stem from an interest in Dutch wax printing and the all-over patterning of African textiles. Her subjects are selected and grouped according to underlying emotional associations—whether hamburgers, french fries, and basketballs; or coffee, cigarettes, and pizza—and broken down into elemental details, pure forms, and swaths of color to build simpler, yet expressive, arrangements.
Katherine Bernhardt, Mas de ti, 2021
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
198.12 x 182.88 cm / 78 x 72 inches
Sold $ 65,000
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Dominic Chambers (American artist born in 1993)
Presented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery (New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, London) at Frieze New York 2021
Dominic Chambers, Book Stack 1, 2021. Oil on linen. 65.98 x 55.98 inches / 167.6 x 142.2 cm. Sold in the range of $ 40,000
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Dominic Chambers' practice explores various literary narratives, mythologies, and magical realism. A writer himself, Chambers places most of his subjects in moments of leisure and rest, reading a book or engaging in quiet contemplation. In these images, the environments surrounding his figures are intangible. Their mutability is meant to reflect the power of literature to transform our relationship with the world around us. In his Wash Paintings, including Gabriel's Resting Place (2021), the artist refers to the book The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Dubois and one of its central themes- the veil. The veil is a metaphorical lens through which black bodies are observed and experienced as a product of racial injustice. Considering the words of Dubois, Chambers washes pre-constructed compositions with a thin veil of paint that partially obscures his figures and their environments, rendering a comprehensive view of the subject unobtainable. The results are paintings that have a strong relationship to art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, in addition to contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure. (Lehmann Maupin Gallery)
Related reading
Kendra Walker, Dominic Chambers’s Magical Realist Paintings Capture the Sanctity of Black Leisure, Artsy Art, Oct. 23, 2021
Daniel Hesidence (American artist born in 1975)
Solo exhibition presented by Salon 94 (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
Daniel Hesidence solo exhibition at Salon 94 at Frieze New York 2021.
The works on show are in the range of $ 16,000 - $65,000.
Visual material provided by Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Terrestrial and synthetic, Daniel Hesidence’s new body of paintings evokes unreliable visions of a future shaped by manufactured human experience. Recognizable forms are warped and deconstructed, while the land is whittled down to blotches of camouflage smears. Meanwhile, iconic symbols laden with centuries of universal symbolism, like triangles and letters, seem to be caught in the cosmic storm—their presence depleted of meaning in spaces that work to neither contextualize nor affirm their presence—disconnected from our current reality. (Salon 94)
Sarah Ball (British artist born in 1965)
Solo exhibition presented by Stephen Friedman Gallery (London) at Frieze New York 2021
Sarah Ball, Anthony, 2020
62.99 x 62.99 inches / 160 x 160 cm
Sold 35,000 GBP
Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates
Frequently depicting people who celebrate self-expression and contest traditional binary norms, Ball highlights physiognomy, hairstyles, clothes, jewelry, and make-up that reveal the idiosyncrasies of her anonymous, often unknowing sitters. Deep, pooling eyes pierce luminescent skin, while textures and patterns on garments are depicted with a strong sense of tactility. Set against flat planes of color and confined within closely cropped compositions, the artist lends the people within her work a surreal, timeless quality by denying the viewer any form of a narrative about their identity.
The works on display are a continuation of the artist’s ongoing series of meticulously rendered portraits examining themes of gender and identity. This new body of paintings revisits some of the artist’s previous subjects by realizing their portraits on a larger scale, thus allowing Ball to “open up” and explore the “physicality of painting” further. The artist references material such as newspaper cuttings, archival photographs, and social media to inform her portraits. Demonstrating an acute sensitivity to the psyche of her subjects, Ball emphasizes physical characteristics – which the artist refers to as a “mask” – that define how we outwardly portray ourselves to the world. (Stephen Friedman Gallery)
Elliott Hundley (American artist born in 1975)
Blue-chip representation
Presented by Kasmin Gallery (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
Elliott Hundley, Night, 2021. Encaustic, paper, plastic, photographs, fabric, pins, foam, and linen on panel.
30.24 x 40.24 x 5 inches / 76.8 x 102.2 x 12.7 cm. $48,000.
Visual material provided by Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Hundreds of images populate each of Elliott Hundley’s billboard-sized tableaux, as concrete figural subjects are stretched to the limits of perception, often to the point of becoming abstraction. He often begins by photographing his friends in costumes and acting out scenes, which he prints on rice paper and affixed to the canvas with thousands of tiny pins, as though they were etymologist’s specimens. Along with these photographs, Hundley connects clippings from magazines, pieces of fabrics, and images from earlier works, building and removing layers to create a history that tells itself within the painting. Though in some ways these works continue the legacy of Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed-media Combines, Hundley has said he finds inspiration for the kaleidoscopic works in a much older source: Greek plays and the endless permutations created by each new performance. (Kasmin Gallery)
Hugo McCloud (American artist born in 1980)
Established representation
Presented by Sean Kelly Gallery (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
Hugo McCloud, Rush hour, 2021. Single-use plastic mounted on panel. 76.5 x 89.49 x 2.13 inches / 194.3 x 227.3 x 5.4 cm.
Sold $ 175,000. Image courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
The New York-based artist Hugo McCloud is known for large-scale paintings in which he explores generally unaccepted notions of beauty. McCloud uses derelict construction materials, including common roofing metal, as canvases. Fusing damaged, unaesthetic scraps of copper, oxidized steel plates, and heated black tar, McCloud then stamps the roofing metal with floral prints covered in heated pigment. The artist draws inspiration from images on Instagram, which he is “drawn to either because of the composition of colors or subject matter.” The resulting objects are textural creations that speak to McCloud’s background in industrial design. (Sean Kelly Gallery)
Caroline Kent (American artist born in 1975)
Established representation
Solo exhibition by Casey Kaplan Gallery (New York) at Frieze New York 2021
Caroline Kent solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery at Frieze New York 2021
Price range:
$ 10,000 for works on paper
$ 30,000 - $45,000 for paintings
Photo courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Sterling, IL) engages in a visual language of abstraction through an instinctive approach to color and form. Her multi-disciplinary practice encourages a mutual exchange between maker and viewer by way of invented modes of communication. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, text, and performance, Kent stretches the limitations of language to create a meaningful space for both silence and sound, shape, and empty ground. (Casey Kaplan Gallery)
DISCOVERY
Karon Davis (American artist born in 1977)
Established representation
Solo exhibition by Wilding Cran Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) at Frieze New York 2021 (Frame section)
Karon Davis solo exhibition at Wilding Cran Gallery at Frieze New York 2021 (Frame section). All sold.
Sold price range: $ 38,000 - $ 40,000 per sculpture
Photo courtesy of Juliette Yuan & Associates New York
LOS ANGELES - Some people know Karon Davis mostly by association - with her husband, the acclaimed artist Noah Davis, who died at 32 in 2015; with the Underground Museum that the pair founded in 2012, which features the work of Black artists; with her father, the Broadway song-and-dance man Ben Vereen.
But recently, Davis has been carving out an independent professional identity as an artist, a process that has led to her first solo exhibition in New York at Jeffrey Deitch's gallery, through April 24.
"I always wanted to do it on my own," Davis said in a recent interview at her studio in Arlington Heights here, "to prove to myself that I was good enough - I got it. No one is going to give it to me."
- In After Reflected Fame, the Artist Karon Davis Steps Into Her Own Light,
by Robin Pogrebin, New York Times, Arts & Design. March 31st, 2021.