This year’s 36th edition of The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory leans heavily into painting — but its 75 exhibitors, all members of the Art Dealers Association of America, still manage to bring a little something for everyone, from a booth full of Charles White paintings and drawings (Michael Rosenfeld, D16) to a Richard Diebenkorn gouache that looks like a red and blue Ace of Clubs (Van Doren Waxter, B2). Not every booth’s a winner, but many are terrific, and since your admission fee directly benefits the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, you can feel good about going: Since 1989, the fair has raised more than $37 million.
Ortuzar (A10)
The earnest, only slightly unnerving self-portrait in this solo booth shows the reclusive midcentury artist Maybelle Stamper as a young woman studying at the Art Students League in 1933. But the rest of the display, all works on paper, gets stranger and more interesting. Lithographs in which round, netsuke-like heads float on moth wings or bump into unattached breasts mingle with tangled lines, invented not-quite-alphabets and more peculiar faces staring just over your shoulder.
Altman-Siegel (A15)
In this sand-colored exhibition of work by three women, the designs on Ruth Laskey’s delicate, hand-woven linens evoke sigils from the Maghreb and a small brass hanging by Ruth Asawa hits above its weight. But the stars are three abstract terra cotta sculptures by Adaline Kent (1900-1975), which loosely resemble a planter, a vase and an adobe dollhouse. Stocky but somehow soaring, they’re hard to parse but just as hard to look away from.
Kasmin (B1)
Five large photographs by Tina Barney greet visitors to the Art Show with the artist’s signature mix of close observation, complex composition and dispassionate remove. (The photos, which also appear in Barney’s current retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, aren’t new, but they’ve rarely been shown in New York.) In one striking shot from the early 1980s, four children and their mother, almost all dressed in white, look in different directions behind a close-up on an overturned box of graham crackers. It’s as if the scene’s total humanity has been averaged out among all its figures, empty red box included.
Michael Werner (B12)
One World War II-era drawing, in this roundup of three decades’ worth of charcoal and pencil drawings of women by Francis Picabia (1879-1953), is particularly vibrant. The blunt, back and forth strokes with which this protean French polymath rendered the shadow under his subject’s chin and her big hair have an energy that still comes across 80 years later. Most of the portraits, though, their eyelashes heavy as if with too much mascara and faces made extra white with gouache, have the exquisite, sickly perfection of marzipan fruit.
Luxembourg + Co. (C1)
Katsumi Nakai’s (1927-2013) wall-mounted plywood objects — the examples here date from the 1960s to the 1980s — make for one of the fair’s most striking displays. Painted in vivid but simple colors that point to design as much as to art, they all have doors, or flaps, that hang open. Cutouts on a powder-blue rectangle reveal golden yellow butterfly-wing-shaped inserts; the largest piece boasts a tail like a manta ray. The hinges are key — distinctly tantalizing, they make the pieces feel at once exposed and noncommittal.
Petzel (C3)
What’s most remarkable about these large paintings and collages on fabric by 93-year-old Isabella Ducrot is their sheer gusto. Several narrow pieces that depict scraggly plants and small rectangles of not entirely legible text bring to mind a children’s book come to life. The two largest pieces, in which nude couples embrace under crescent moons, have all the dreamy, undulating sensuality of the gorgeous Picasso prints at Almine Rech (A1), but without the old Spaniard’s fussy aggression.
Canada (C4)
Xylor Jane’s obsessive, numbers-based painting practice gets loose and even, if she’ll forgive the pun, bubbly in this suite of new canvases, inspired by Mondrian, in which neat grids of brightly colored circles intersect with irregularly tilted shapes and lines. If, in the past, her work was driven by a tension between order and exuberance, now she’s found a way to make them work together. (Canada’s stylish black bench also gets my vote for best Art Show furniture.)
Inman Gallery (D7)
One of several Houston-based galleries in the fair’s new city-focused “Spotlight On …” program, Inman brings large-scale watercolor and pencil drawings by the artist David McGee, also of Houston. Drawing inspiration from Shakespearean tragedy and 1970s Blaxploitation flicks, McGee surrounds poised, nearly life-size women with flowers, weapons, birds and cakes. The drawings are simultaneously lush and spare, leaving plenty of untouched white paper next to the figures’ brown skin tones. They make for a terrific pairing with Katherine Bernhardt’s monoprints of Cookie Monster and the Pink Panther across the aisle at Two Palms (D12).
Tibor de Nagy (D9)
Hildur Asgeirsdottir Jonsson lives in Cleveland, but she returns to Iceland every year to take the photographs that inspire her textile pieces. The island’s extremes of weather and of beauty show up in woodgrain-like patterns of psychedelic color that reliably capture the mystery and wonder of the far north even if they’re only sometimes identifiable as landscape. Jonsson paints directly on her silken thread, treating warp and weft separately before combining them in a weave almost too tight to discern.
Ricco/Maresca (D26)
After being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a young woman, Franne Davids (1950-2022) spent the rest of her life at her parents’ house in Connecticut, using the basement as an art studio. Occasionally she ventured down to the Museum of Modern Art. She ultimately left behind more than 500 works on paper and 42 large paintings. In this exhibition, her posthumous New York debut, the patchwork compositions are reminiscent of Klimt and the yellows and dark reds seem lifted from some Russian fairy tale; concentric circles and parallel lines serve as curtains and puffed sleeves and fill the spaces between bodies with radiating waves of energy.
The Art Show
Through Nov. 2, Park Avenue at 67th Street, Manhattan; admission: $30. theartshow.org.
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