Feature

UK Galleries participating at Frieze NY

13 May 2015

by ArtRabbit

Frieze New York returns to New York City’s Randall’s Island Park from the 14th of May to the 17th. This fourth edition will present 190 leading contemporary galleries from around the world with 26 participants from the UK.

ArtRabbit contacted Limoncello, MOT International, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Supplement, and Vigo Gallery to give a preview of what they will be bringing to this year’s fair.

Limoncello

Gabriele De Santis will be showing a new series of works in which he forms sculptural drawings by laying shoelaces in resin to make portraits. He persuades the laces into place, whilst allowing them their own ways - drawing in an expanded context with chance at play. The limitations of the materials – the hardening resin and the slack laces – force swift action to depict basic shapes, child-like forms of portraiture. A poignant gesture in this time of mass image proliferation and millisecond consumption; sometimes the more basic the form the more you look at it.

Yonatan Vinitsky has produced a new series of paintings using his own unique reverse-application method, whereby oil pastels, acrylic and gloss paints are applied to the back of a sheet of transparent acetate which is then conventionally stretched as if it were canvas, but with the unpainted side facing outwards. His technique makes visible multiple textures and layers through the high gloss sheen of the acetate surface.

Vinitsky starts every work he makes from specific source material. These works are based on paintings from the late 1950s made by Chaim Kiewe (1912-1983), a little known Israeli artist whose abstract compositions mimicked those made by his more successful European contemporaries. Vinitsky's distinguished painting technique forces him to reverse Kiewe’s process, with Kiewe’s last layers of paint on canvas being the first Vinitsky lays on the acetate. This interpretation and understanding of the original language and decision making absolves Vinitsky of creating anew, foregrounding his resignation that abstraction can never be new, as well as affirming his image recycling ethics, central to his entire practice.

MOT International

MOT International is delighted to be exhibiting works by internationally prominent artists, including a newly produced tapestry work by 2013 Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, a selection of recent Artex Paintings by Dan Rees and a new, large-scale photographic print from the series Anagrammatic Bodies by Ulay.

Exploring the boundaries between fiction and reality, Laure Prouvost’s work is composed of videos, ready-made sculptures, sound installations and paintings. Her new monumental tapestry (200 x 462cm) entitled Swallow me, From Italy to Flander, a tapestry has been commissioned specially for Frieze NY and produced in collaboration with Flanders Tapestries. It is based on Prouvost’s 2013 installation at Whitechapel Gallery, Farfromwords: cars mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells, which resulted from her winning the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Inspired by the aesthetic and sensuous pleasures of Italy, the cylindrical structure interspersed with collages and monitors led to her nomination for the Turner Prize the same year, along with her immersive installation Wantee first exhibited at Tate Britain (2013).

In just a few years, Dan Rees has emerged as part of a tradition of artists whose work is characterised by a conceptually orientated approach to art making. His work, which often includes elements from his own biography, such as his Welsh heritage, childhood memories of Swansea and aspects of middle-class life, explores the possible correlations between modernity and nostalgia, focusing on communities’ attempts to reinvent their past traditions through innovative ways. Such ideas are particularly visible in his series of Artex Paintings, in which the artist has combined an energetic use of colour with the material artex, a popular form of surface coating for ceilings that has been adorning working-class homes in Great Britain since the 1970s. By entering the gallery space or even collectors’ homes, this material is raised to the status of high-culture, somehow completing the circle.

The renowned Dutch-German photographer and artist Ulay was one of the leading representatives of body art and performance in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Questioning the relationship between gender and identity, his body of work is notable for its experimental use of photography, particularly in his use of Polaroids, such as the Renais–sense series produced with Paula.

Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Modern Art is dedicating the gallery’s presence at the fair to a solo show that surveys Linder’s work from the 1970s to the present day, comprising print and photomontage, light boxes, and photography.

For forty years, Linder has made work with the representations of domestication and sexuality as both its source material and its subject matter.

Most often working in the medium of collage, Linder finds material in the genres of home & garden and pornographic magazines, from which she puts together images that compound masculine and feminine categories. Linder is an active subject in her work, often staging herself within photographic images and both live and recorded performances.

Linder was born in Liverpool in 1954. She studied at Manchester Polytechnic 1972-1977, and was an influential participant in the Punk movement from its arrival in Manchester in 1976. Since 2007, Linder’s work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at MoMa PS1, New York, Tate St Ives, The Hepworth Wakefield, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

This show at Frieze New York coincides with the release of a new monograph surveying Linder’s work, published by Ridinghouse, London, with 270 pages, 240 reproductions, and a conversation between Linder and Dawn Ades.

Supplement

Philomene Pirecki’s practice deals with how time, memory, and perception are represented and manifested through the production of images and objects. Using originals and copies, often re-photographing her own work to generate new iterations within the studio and the exhibition space, Pirecki considers how images act as an analog for memory, unpredictably accumulating, persisting, mutating, or disappearing.

There is porousness between Pirecki’s works: they get returned to, reconfigured and used as a working material. The presentation at Frieze Frame 2015 demonstrates this interwoven nature. Two new sculptural pieces develop the “Image Persistence” series, layering images of previous works— photographed from their digital documentation, as viewed on a computer screen—with transparencies of protean substances such as water, bubbles, or ice. Also included is a recent group of paintings that rework older, rejected canvases as a framing device and support for the new work, while positing the art work as part of an ongoing enquiry rather than an absolute endpoint.

Pirecki has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions held at venues including: Limbo, Margate, UK (2014); Unosunove, Rome (with Jamie Shovlin, 2014); Supplement, London (2013); Green on Red Gallery, Dublin (2013); MOT International, Brussels (2012); and events at South London Gallery (2013) and the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2010). In 2013 Pirecki was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women.

Vigo Gallery

For Frieze New York, Vigo will present a selection of historical works from the artist’s private collection. Ibrahim El-Salahi is considered the godfather of African and Arabic Modernism and by many in the Museum world to be one of the more important links with western modernism due to his cross cultural learning, exposure and experience over 60 years.

Our stand will include rare 1960s paintings and drawings as well as monumental works from the 80s and 90s. The works on canvas will include three major works: Alphabet No.II, 1968, They Always Appear, 1964 and They Always Appear, 1961 and Fatima 1968. We will show Visual Diary of Time Waste Palace one of Ibrahim's most important works on paper, created on blank square books found in the Emir’s Palace during his self imposed exile in Doha where he acted as advisor to the Qatari government and then as a translator at the Emir's palace where he documented the countries history. This series began on his 66th birthday, September 5th 1996 and continued until April 28th, 1997. On completion, El-Salahi decided to dedicate his life solely to his art. It is a pivotal Museum quality work. In addition to this we propose showing Untitled 1984, which like the Time Waste Palace featured in his TATE show. This is considered by Salahi to be his masterpiece on paper comparable to the more famous The Inevitable, and is typical of his practice where he starts with one sheet of paper and the composition grows outwards organically. We will also show perhaps his most important abstract work on paper Calligraphic Forms 3, 1989.

In late 2013 he was the first African artist to have a solo retrospective at TATE Modern. Last year he had a very successful Gallery show at Vigo and this year participation at Frieze in NY would be a full circle for an 84 year old who first met and engaged with Alfred Bar in 1965 (Moma acquired a work). These works are accessible now with the artist’s involvement. We have wonderful information at our disposal from the artist but also from the TATE and Museum of African Art publications. The MOAA closed due to funding problems after the catalogue was printed so curators, collectors and the public will not have seen works on this scale in New York.