Art(212)By Bryant Rousseau, Robert Ayers, Jennie Bell, Jacquelyn Lewis
Published: October 1, 2006
Art(212) made its debut here with over 60 galleries from the United States, Canada and Europe. While the aisles at the fair, held at the 69th Regiment Armory in Gramercy Park from Sept. 27-Oct. 1, were never overly crowded, gallerists reported that the quality of buyer in attendance was high—as was the quality of the work on view. ArtInfo’s reporting team stopped by dozens of galleries to talk about art, sales and trends.
-------------------------- David Kramer was the star at Birch Libralato’s booth (Toronto)—the gallery by Friday afternoon had sold two of his smaller, mixed-media-on-paper, autobiographical works, This Point in My Life and Thoughts to Myself ($1,700 and $1,400). Another collector had committed to buying one of two of Kramer’s larger oil-on-canvas pieces, Looking Back or Living Vicariously ($6,000 each), but was trying to decide between the pair, according to Robert Birch, who co-owns gallery. Birch said he can understand the interest—he’s a Kramer fan himself and owns several of the artist’s works. Although the quirky, humorous works center on the Manhattan-based artist’s own life, “they fit anybody,” Birch said. “They’re universal.” -------------------------- A Tad More Please At the David Lusk Gallery (Memphis), Tad Lauritzen Wright was a discovery. His large-scale (70" x 72") mixed-media pieces are created by applying pages torn from his notebooks onto a canvas in a grid arrangement; each individual work on paper (a figurative drawing, often with text; or a simple, abstract painting) is worth spending time with. Collectively, the works have a powerful charm and are a real bargain at $7,000 (smaller versions can be had for $2,000). Lauritzen Wright also has another specialty: one-line drawings of groups of individuated people, flowers and houses—all created without his lifting his pencil from the paper. Steals at $1,000. The gallery was also doing a brisk business in wooden cupcakes by Greely Myatt, which were so realistic that fair attendees kept asking if they could take one for a snack (21 of the 24 had sold for $100/each). -------------------------- Best in Show At least one of our team was happy to award his personal “Best in Show” prize to Devorah Sperber’s magically inventive After van Eyck (2006) shown by the Marcia Wood Gallery (Atlanta). Available in an edition of three, the first example is priced at $43,000. In the work, a 15th-century portrait is translated into more than five thousand hanging spools of deliciously colored thread; and thence, via a simple viewing sphere (which would have fascinated van Eyck himself), back into a glowing, pocket-sized version of the portrait again. Brava! -------------------------- On the Comepagk Trail Collectors from the 1980s and 1990s might have recognized pieces by Paul Pagk. The British-born, New York-based artist had his heyday with exhibitions at Thread Waxing Space and CRG Gallery in New York, and a plethora of French galleries, before nearly disappearing from the scene, said Tairone Bastien, director of the Moti Hasson Gallery (New York). But he’s making a comeback with a treasure trove of “post-abstraction abstraction works” he has created over the past five years. Bastien said the New York gallery is planning to spotlight Pagk as the second exhibition in its new gallery space—set to open in January—in Chelsea. He said Pagk’s re-emergence is part of what he predicts is “the rebirth of abstraction. Honestly, I think abstraction is coming back in a very big way.” -------------------------- Murakami Mentors Marshall At Galerie Magda Danysz (Paris), owner Magda Danysz said she had sold several pieces by Brooklyn artist James Marshall, who goes by the name Dalek. Dalek has worked with Takashi Murakami, and the artist’s influence is evident in his works—acrylic on wood and acrylic on actual LP covers—which were selling for $1,500 to $7,000 at the fair. “You can almost hear the music,” Danysz said, gazing at one of the LP covers. “They’re always old covers, and it’s really fun.” |
Save to Del.icio.us
Digg this
