Click HERE for a video tour of the Best Booths from this year's fair.
Although the fair is only 20 years old, the 2014 Armory Show feels a bit like a diamond jubilee, with tones of silver, white, and black dominating much of the work on view in the contemporary section. When colors do appear, they tend to be muted: There’s far more raw canvas and taupe mixed in among the ever-present mirrors than in years past. Still, like a diamond, the fair sparkles with bright color here and there—particularly when seen in the right light—and the nine booths below offer some of its finest facets.
Case in point is Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s “Storm Prototype II,” presented by Thomas Schulte of Berlin and Christopher Grimes of Santa Monica. The work’s two shapely silver clouds, made with fiberglass covered in titanium alloy, hang from the ceiling in an all-white booth surrounded by a series of gorgeously spare images, “Bird in Space Mach 10.” These document a whimsical experiment in which the artist placed the form of Brancusi’s iconic sculpture in the U.S. Air Force’s hypervelocity wind tunnel.
At Galerie Forsblum it’s impossible to miss Jason Martin’s aptly titled “Behemoth”, an enormous block of blackened cork like a charred mausoleum. But the dark sculpture stands in counterpoint to the neon delights of a Peter Halley painting, a voluptuous self-portrait by Chantal Joffe, and a freaky sculpture by Tony Oursler featuring a devil’s mask with a video eye, a witch’s conical hat, and a video image of a nude woman prowling over a scorched moon.
No work at the fair can match the outlandishness of Monica Cook’s seated swine at Postmasters Gallery. Crafted from an array of materials, Cook’s tusked pig boasts an open thorax in which one finds a piglet nibbling on internal grapes. Nearby, and guarded by male and female birds fashioned by Cook, hang William Powhida’s “How To Be Ok with the Contemporary Art Market,” a word painting with such helpful directives as “Temper your idealism,” as well as a number of witty abstractions by David Diao.
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects boasts two artists showing in the current Whitney Biennial: The collective My Barbarian as well as Shana Lutker, here with a white rope sculpture that begins on the floor and runs up onto the wall and an exquisite chrome piece that looks like a globe on tilted pedestal. These are joined by a fantastic group of oddly shaped charcoal drawings by Karl Haendel.
In this year’s outstanding Focus: China section, Beijing’s Space Station also hosts a collective, the Double Fly Art Center, which is comprised of nine members (“double fly” is Chinese slang for a male-female-female threesome). They’ve transformed the booth into several riotously fun carnival-like games that visitors can play for the chance to win prizes: throw hoops onto bagged gifts, pop a balloon with a dart. You can also enter the Double Fly Happiness Lottery.
The entire aisle-facing “front room” at Marianne Boesky Gallery has been transformed by the South African artist Serge Alain Nitegeka into a black fence-like labyrinth on which unfinished boxes (recalling coffins) hang higgledy-piggledy. Navigate the maze into the back room and you’ll find fine array of paintings on wood by Nitegeka that resemble flattened versions of the fencing you’ve just traversed.
Given the tonal starkness that presides at the fair, the color bursts of Aiko Hachisuka’s fabric sculptures at Eleven Rivington offer a revivifying respite. The Japanese-born, L.A.-based artist is showing large vessels made of silkscreened articles of clothing, which seem like the offspring of sofas that have mated with coffee mugs. They’re just begging for a collector or two to climb inside and curl up.
And if silvery 3-D spectacle wins the day at Pier 92—home to the Contemporary section of the fair—lush paintings hold most of the walls over at the decidedly more apollonian Modern section on Pier 94. At Hackett |Mill, a large, gold-hued abstraction by Jules Olitski shines like a sunburst on several equally big and intricately textured painted collages by Conrad Marca-Relli.
As first-generation Abstract Expressionist pictures have come to command stratospheric prices, their heirs have garnered increasing attention. Hill Gallery brings together several key works of second-generation Ab Ex—mammoth and imposingly beautiful pictures by Alfred Leslie—with nine diminutive pieces by the contemporary master John Walker. Walker’s series of landscapes depicting Sea Point, Maine, which deliquesce into abstraction, is painted in oil on bingo cards.
