Urban Sprawl

CHICAGO—If the organizers of Art Chicago have their way, the once-ailing art fair’s splashy comeback in 2007 will be outshone by an even splashier show in 2008. This year’s fair, set to run April 25 to 28 at the Windy City’s Merchandise Mart complex, has 182 exhibitors (up from last year’s 132), with new entries that include some very familiar names in the international art market: Zwirner & Wirth and Leo Castelli, of New York; Timothy Taylor Gallery, of London; and Donald Young Gallery, of Chicago. Among the works they plan to offer are Andy Warhol’s portrait Joseph Beuys, 1980, from Taylor; Anne Chu’s bronze sculpture El Primo II, 2006, from Young; Ed Ruscha’s text painting Year After Year, 1974, from Castelli; and Neo Rauch’s figurative oil Autor, 1993, from Zwirner & Wirth.

For the second year in a row, Art Chicago is the headliner event of Artropolis, a cluster of concurrent shows at the Mart that also includes the International Antiques Fair, the Intuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art, the Artist Project (featuring about 300 mostly unrepresented artists) and, in its debut, NEXT, a sampling of work from high-quality emerging contemporary galleries. NEXT’s 160 exhibitors were chosen on an invitation-only basis by co-organizers Kavi Gupta, a Chicago gallerist, and Christian Viveros-Faune, most recently a critic for the Village Voice—both are behind the Volta fair in New York. Among the participants are London’s Rokeby gallery, which is offering the British artist Graham Hudson’s All my exes live in Tesco’s, 2007, and Australia’s Darren Knight Gallery, selling the Australia-born, Los Angeles-based sculptor Ricky Swallow’s patinated bronze sculpture Tusk, 2007.

"Urban Sprawl" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.