As Frieze neared closing on Sunday afternoon, Seventeen Gallerys booth was buzzing, with half the viewers squatting down to get a good look at the works of British artist Sue Collis, who has been named the Armory Shows featured artist for 2010. Collis’s meticulously constructs everyday objects (planks of wood, screws, tarps) and what seem like spontaneous moments (drops and splashes) with materials including mother of pearl, sapphire, turquoise, and onyx. They were reportedly all sold.
At the Romanian gallery Plan B (profiled in the September issue of Modern Painters), co-founder Mihai Pop was chuffed at the success of the gallery in its first year at Frieze. The gallery had sold most of the work it had brought to the fair, including an untitled Polaroid by Holland-based Navid Nuur for €1000 ($1490 and Romanian painter Adrian Ghenies stylistic and moody The Collector 4 (2009).(Nuur's work will be included in a feature on the artist in the December 2009/January 2010 "Art’s Generation Next" issue of Modern Painters.)
Meanwhile, at Zoos new Shoreditch location, the scene was quite different from Frieze. A noticeably younger crowd was seen viewing looking at lower priced (and less rigorous) work. The most memorable stands were in Zone A, the section devoted to editions, where at White Cube, Rachel Kneebones porcelain Milkmade (2009) sculpture — in an edition of 25 — was selling for an economical £850 ($1390). (At Frieze, her Stations (2007) porcelain went for a reported £200,000 ($327,000) earlier in the week.)
Damien’s Hirsts “Innocence Lost” — an edition of 35, each comprised of a glass baby bottle, sausage, and alcohol — went for £5,200 ($8,500) each at his London-based gallery Other Criteria. Prints by Keith Coventry and Gavin Turk, and one-off sculptures by Peter Saville went for prices under £5,000 ($8,200) at Paul Stolper.
The booth that kept me lingering the longest was Dundee Contemporary Arts, from Dundee, Scotland. Prints by artists including Martin Boyce (currently representing Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale), Richard Deacon, Mark Dion, Scott Myles, Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai, and Rosalind Nashashibi (who won the Beck's Futures prize in 2003) were displayed in the tiny booth like a string of pearls—going for prices between £95 ($156) and £940 ($1,540).
Marina Cashdan is Executive Editor of Modern Painters.
See all of ARTINFO's Frieze-related coverage here.
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