Pulse Quickens on Day Two

Photo by GION

Pulse director Helen Allen with Geisai fair impressario Takashi Murakami

Courtesy the artist

Carrie Villines's photo "Rat, Trucker" is on view at Geisai.

Leo Villareal Takashi Murakami Dasha, Gaga, and Gago Party for MOCA Crazy for Koons A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s In the Right Circles Murakami's Geisai Fair Moves from Miami to Taiwan Blum & Poe Times Four

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But no matter: Pulse was having its biggest and strongest show ever, according to Allen, and the vernissage on Tuesday night “had all the right people.” By which she means people like Arnold Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum; Laura Skoler, a collector from New York and vice president of the New Museum’s board of trustees; and collectors Raúl de Molina and Lily Estefan, John and Julie Thornton, Tony Goldman, and Jean Pigozzi.

Now, with artwork on offer worth, Allen estimated, $15 million, with prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to several hundred thousand (for offerings such as artist Leo Villareal’s neon constructions at New York gallery Gering & López's booth), all the galleries had to do was sell, sell, sell.

Things got off to a slow start. “Wednesday was a throwaway day,” Allen said, “because everyone was at the Convention Center” for the Art Basel Miami Beach vernissage.

Pulse quickened on Thursday, when cars could be seen parked for blocks around its location at 2136 NW First Avenue, far from the Midtown constellation of seven satellite fairs.

The address may be bleak, but people were making the trip, if not necessarily buying right away. Right at the show entrance, Chelsea gallery Magnan Projects was showing a knockout sawhorse and pieces of “lumber” made of glass by Mexican artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, on offer for a mere $9,500. Magnan said that a lot of people had stopped to look, and many had promised to come back. “It’s so reasonably priced!” he said.

Miami gallerist Diana Lowenstein has booths at both Pulse and Scope and says both have been equally busy. At Pulse she has a gorgeous vase-shaped construction made of tiny, precise curls of Korean paper by Gye Hoon Park, a steal at $6,000 that as of Thursday no one had “stolen.”

Taiwan-born artist Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s large-format “Grand Concourse” photograph, showing a magical Bronx with streaks of taillights in the foreground and Yankee Stadium in the background, was a star at Chelsea’s Julie Saul Gallery, which also reported having lots of shoppers.

At Birch Libralato’s booth, a piece of wall art by Canadian artist Micah Lexier — who writes a phrase first with his wrong hand, then scribbles it out, then has it laser-cut out of rolled steel — was called Revelation, because it would be a revelation when the owner figured out what it said. Price: $15,000. The work is one in a series of 38 unique messages, which was 60 percent sold out back home at the Toronto gallery. There were no offers as of this writing at Pulse, but Birch Libralato had sold a large abstract by another Canadian artist, Martin Golland at the fair; the piece is expected to go into a corporate collection.

Several galleries had important sales to report: Chelsea’s Schroeder Romero sold a large tapestry by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth for $15,000. A figurative painting by Terry Rodgers sold to new collectors for $65,000. The Sagamore Hotel in Miami bought four large photographs by Miami artist Lee Materazzi for $1,500 each from the local Spinello Gallery. And New York’s Max Protetch sold two electronic touch-screen works for $25,000 each.

New media at Pulse seemed especially smart this year. One of the best works was German artist Arnold von Wedemeyer’s seven-minute video at Frankfurt’s Galerie Anita Beckers: Maelzel’s Return on Time Still Life II, a time lapse of fruit, a rose, a chess board, and an ominously ticking pendulum. The French, who so brilliantly gave us jolie/laide (pretty/ugly) should also have a word for wonderful/terrible, which is what Still Life II is. It’s wonderful, but watching it, you feel yourself getting older by the second. The gallery immediately sold three in the edition of 10, the first of which went for $ 9,800.