One Is the Luckiest Number

NEW YORK—A spate of cancellations has recently been announced for art fairs around the world—including Photo-London, DC Duesseldorf Contemporary, artDC, Art Cologne’s sister fair in Majorca, and Flow, a satellite of Art Basel Miami Beach—but The Art Show, which wrapped up this year's edition Monday in New York, has staying power. The 20-year-old fair, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America, has garnered respect from collectors and dealers alike for both its longevity and its sophistication.

“It’s a privilege to be a part of this fair” said Adam Sheffer, a partner at New York-based Cheim & Read gallery.

Part of The Art Show’s cachet comes from the fact that membership in the ADAA is invitation-only, and the fair is open exclusively to those members, with participants painstakingly hand-picked by the association. AADA executive director Linda Blumberg told ARTINFO during last year’s fair that each booth is considered a carefully curated exhibition.

And this year, the booths had even more of the curatorial quality the ADAA strives for, given that a large number of the 70 exhibitors dedicated their booths to single artists, making the spaces feel more like miniatures of gallery exhibitions you might see in Chelsea than the hodgepodges that can permeate some fairs. While solo booths have been an increasing trend at most art fairs over the past eight years or so, they were even more prolific at The Art Show this year, presented in interesting and well thought-out installations.

“When you represent as many artists as we do, you take advantage of being included in an art fair and giving an artist the opportunity to show a body of work,” Sheffer said of Cheim & Read, which had devoted its booth to a collection of mixed-media sculptures by the pioneering Lynda Benglis (save for one painting, Louise Fishman’s Heart on Fire [2007], which hung discreetly on a side wall). The gallery had installed pristine white walls and a white floor in its booth, creating a space that was simultaneously approachable and high-end—a strategy that seemed to work given that the gallery sold “everything,” according to Sheffer, including all the sculptures, which ranged from $30,000 to $75,000 each, and the painting, which was priced at $75,000.

Other galleries that went solo included Tanya Bonakdar, of New York, which offered mirrored sculptures by Olafur Eliasson. Director James Lavender, who said Tanya Bonakdar had been highlighting single artists at its booth for years, didn’t reveal specifics, but said sales had been good for the Eliasson works, priced at $28,000 to $45,000. New York gallery Sperone Westwater was offering all Lucio Fontana paintings, and associate Maryse Brand reported selling three of the eight works, ranging in price from $350,000 to $2.5 million. The New York-based Marian Goodman Gallery had all John Baldessari photographic works, while Fraenkel Gallery, from San Francisco, had a booth devoted to the photographer Richard Avedon. Nearby, PaceWildenstein was highlighting another important Richard—Richard Tuttle—in one of the standout booths of the fair. Tuttle designed the entire booth himself, including the lighting, for a group of his small mixed-media sculptures from 1999.

“We’ve been doing one-person shows for about eight years or so [at The Art Show]; I  would say we were the first,” said David Goerk, a director at PaceWildenstein. “We’ve had lots of success with it, and we’ve always gotten a very positive reaction. This year’s booth is very special for us because Richard Tuttle is new to the gallery, and it’s our way of letting people know he’s with PaceWildenstein.” Goerk added that sales had been steady at the booth, with the sculptures going for $50,000 apiece. “The Art Show is always good and always rewarding,” he said. “It’s very consistent.”

Galleries that didn’t show one artist exclusively also reported steady sales, including Thomas Segal from Baltimore, which declined to give details, but described its sales as “solid” and said it had seen lots of interest in many of the works at its booth, including Candida Hofer’s C-print Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra IV (2006), priced at $85,000; as well as the Los Angeles-based Manny Silverman Gallery. Among Silverman’s offerings were Michael Goldberg’s formidable abstract oil-and-canvas Madam Recamier (1956/1957), an understated, untitled oil on paper on canvas from Willem de Kooning that dates back to 1957/1958, and a John Chamberlain painted-and-chromium-plated steel sculpture, Tonka #13. Silverman said the gallery had done well, selling several New York School drawings from the 1950s for six figures.

When ARTINFO visited during the final hours of the fair, Silverman and the other gallerists we spoke to said attendance seemed on par with last year’s 14,000 visitors, and sales were apparently unaffected by market woes or the demise of fellow fairs.

“I’ve never been bothered by trends,” Silverman said.