This year’s edition of the Salon Art + Design fair at the Park Avenue Armory is back with 54 galleries, five special exhibitions and new leadership.
The fair, which brings together objects and installations that blur the lines between art and utility has a distinct mission this year: to address the obstacles that have kept many people out of creative fields. Its new director, Nicky Dessources, who is looking to expand the representation of artists — particularly people of color — and connect with other communities: there is a partnership with the Dia Art Foundation and a benefit to support that art institution’s programs as well as a new Design & Art Advisory Council to build ties between the various players in the art and design fields. What matters for most of us, though, is what you see in a fair, and this edition offers quite a lot to appreciate. Here are some highlights.
Ippodo Gallery (Booth B4)
The natural world often plays a starring role in Japanese art and design. At New York’s Ippodo Gallery, that can be as wild as the force of a tsunami, which inspires the origami-styled ceramics of Yukiya Izumita. Ikuro Yagi, who has an exhibition in the gallery, also has a gorgeous, serene painting made with trees painted on squares of mulberry paper and collaged onto a surface with sliding doors that recalls Japanese screens. Also here are Kodai Ujiie’s exceptional ceramics, which use nature’s imperfections as a springboard for creating surfaces that bubble and crackle and crawl. Here, the vessel is treated like a body and the glaze like skin that is living, breathing, and perfectly imperfect.
Elisabetta Cipriani (Booth B6)
Next door to Ippodo, the London gallerist Elisabetta Cipriani specializes in “wearable art,” which means jewelry that transcends jewelry, I guess. Some of the pieces are jaw-dropping, such as a whirling Frank Stella sculpture shrunken to the size of a chunky gold ring, or some crazy golden lips by the sculptor Jannis Kounellis. A homage to the natural world stands out though: Michele Oka Doner’s bronze casts of little tree branches sprinkled with old cut diamonds — basically, recycled diamonds rather than newly mined ones — to look like frost or dew. Spooky and poetic, they offer an interesting way to think about denuded branches as winter approaches.
Studio Giancarlo Valle (Entrance)
At the entrance to the fair, the designer Giancarlo Valle suggests a novel way to present your design projects, as little dollhouse-size models with hand-painted clay, plaster and wooden versions of furniture and interiors. Displayed here is a survey of Valle’s work, from big city apartments to island getaways, arranged in a grid of illuminated spaces. What’s special about this? Rather than the customary computer-software approach, the interiors have a handcrafted feel that starts, literally, with the artists and designer’s manual shaping and molding. It’s a reminder that while computers can be great, they can also, paradoxically, be limiting.
Verso (Booth D17)
Another booth that challenges limits — this time social and cultural ones within the design fields — is Verso, which is doing a collaboration with Black Folks in Design, an organization that seeks to connect Black practitioners in architecture, fashion, interior design and graphic design across the world. The interior designer Little Wing Lee has brought together seven artists and designers in the booth. One of the standouts here is Nifemi Marcus-Bello, a Nigerian designer whose cast aluminum bench evokes both traditional Yoruban sculpting and modernist minimal form — but also includes playful references to television shows he watched while growing up in Lagos.
Weinberg Modern (D9)
A few doors down at Weinberg Modern, the spotlight is on the Vienna-born designer Fran Hosken, who trained as an architect and, with her furniture, participated in MoMA’s “Good Design” promotions. What’s highlighted here, however, is her brass jewelry made on a lathe in her Boston basement between 1948 and 1951, and inspired by industrial spring mechanisms. The design historian and curator Charlotte von Hardenburgh has basically brought a dissertation to the booth at Weinberg, and here you can learn all you want about Hosken, who died in 2006. She trained under the Bauhaus maestro Walter Gropius, but also fought for women’s health care and against female and sexual genital mutilation.
Thomas Colville Fine Art (Booth D6)
Across the aisle from Weinberg, Connecticut dealer Thomas Colville offers a cheerier narrative with bright American modernist paintings from the 1930s and 1940s. It’s impossible to miss Charles Biederman’s lemon-yellow “Untitled” (1936), an oil-on-canvas painting of abstract forms that also looks like a painting of an abstract sculpture. Biederman spent time in Paris and his work resonates with the influences of artists he met there, like Picasso, Miró and Fernand Léger. Biederman was also a writer and an art historian and theorist, and his painting pulsates with the feeling that abstraction is a deeply theoretical, not just decorative, approach.
Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts (D1)
Finally, there is Bernard Goldberg, the amiable nonagenarian gallerist who also specializes in American art and always brings something that I might call critic-bait to the fair. This time it’s a frieze-like study by Rockwell Kent for a mural for the World’s Fair in New York in 1939 and 1940. The oil-on-canvas work champions the wonders of electricity, echoing the humans and deities in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel — only here with blooming sparks emitted from their fingertips. The World Fair’s theme was “Building the World of Tomorrow.” Since new technology is always at our doorstep, though, Goldberg has once again brought to this fair a fascinating piece of art history that feels incredibly relevant.
Salon Art + Design
Through Monday, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; thesalonny.com
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