New York’s Stux Gallery had a gorgeous booth devoted to Lydia Venieri and Ruud van Empel. Van Empel’s huge World #25 (2007) was already reserved for a German client for $55,000, but Stefan Stux seemed almost as pleased to point out that the local bazkulturmagazin had used a half-page image of the same picture in their preview of the fair.

Typically A-typical

Stux’s attitude is not unusual here. These gallerists do not derive pleasure simply from commercial success. All of them want their artists to do well and their clients to be happy, but my experience is that the sort of dealers who share the SCOPE ethos tend to have a closer relationship with their artists than their more established colleagues over at Art Basel. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but SCOPE gallerists and their artists tend to be earlier in their careers, their prices tend to be lower, and their attitudes tend to be more experimental and relaxed.  

For example, New York’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery has just about filled its booth with groundbreaking motion-based work, including some entrancing LED pieces by Jim Campbell.

Galleria Barbara Mahler from Lugano has one of the most entertainingly garish, brightly colored, and downright tasteless booths I’ve ever seen, with wonderful work by Piero Gilardi, Nausicaa Berbenni, and Ivana Falconi, who—echoing a theme in Venice—have made dozens of kitschy, decorated clay skulls, which are selling well at 2,500 Swiss Francs each.

Rody Douzoglou, of Bethesda, Md.’s Douz & Mille, was literally trembling with excitement as she talked about Tomas Rivas’ delightfully witty paper works based upon the forms of classical architecture. Rivas is a classic SCOPE artist, a former winner of a SCOPE Foundation emerging-artist award, and, Douzoglou told me, “Every time I show him, ARTINFO writes about him!” I’m pleased to keep the pattern going.

This Whole Thing Is a Performance

And then there is plenty of excellent work at SCOPE, which even ordinary folks might imagine taking home with them. Some of the most remarkable work is at the booth belonging to New York’s Magnan Emrich Contemporary and has been made by Fabian Pena Diaz from what he describes as “fragments of cockroach wings and antennas.” (Ew!) He hunts the roaches in graveyards and dumpsters in his native Cuba and reconfigures them into delicate little images of butterflies, crowns of thorns, or human body parts, on canvas, glass, stones, or lightboxes. His Reconstrucciones (2007) are $2,500 each, and they are my best investment tip for you.

“We’re just a young gallery doing crazy things,” is how Marc de Puechredon summed things up for me. His gallery has a huge, slightly separate space to one end of the E-Halle, which I guess is the benefit of being SCOPE’s landlord. He showed me performance stills by Marlene Haring, including a kitchen full of cooked pasta and a wonderful image called Because Every Hair is Different, which they’d blown up to billboard size in an edition of 10 ($3,600 each). “She’s our goddess,” he told me, pointing up at it. “This whole event is a performance.”