The weak yen could be one contributor to the renewed push to buy Japanese art. However, Japan’s art market is well known for being challenging both for galleries and buyers. Japanese law requires galleries to pay customs and a 10% sales tax up front on artworks, a cost which is later passed to the buyer upon the sale of the work. Until recently, Hong Kong, with its lack of a customs tax, was the go-to art hub of the region, but with COVID-19-related travel restrictions and lockdowns in place until recently, the Asian art market has looked elsewhere to cities such as Seoul, rather than turning to Tokyo.

Perrotin Tokyo senior director Stéphanie Vaillant was not at all surprised by the uptick. She says the energy in the market has changed drastically since the gallery opened about 7 years ago. And since COVID-19 has died down, she’s found a growing dynamism in the Tokyo scene, especially over the past year.

Vaillant points to a concentration of new large-scale events, including the Tokyo Gendai art fair, Art Collaboration Kyoto, and Art Week Tokyo. In addition, developer Mori Building’s new complex of three skyscrapers, Azabudai Hills, is bringing in new galleries; Pace Tokyo will open there in the spring. Vaillant feels that the art community is building and coalescing; in addition to Perrotin, she points to Blum Tokyo in Shibuya, and Ceysson & Bénétière, which announced last week it will open a space in Ginza. At the Piramide building in Roppongi, where Perrotin is based, one can also find Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, and a host of others.

SALAMANCA — As winter fades, plans are underway for a new juried art market that organizers hope will blossom into a leading destination for years to come.

The Ohi:yo’ Art Market in planned for May 11 at Seneca Allegany Resort & Casino on the Seneca Nation’s Allegany Territory in Salamanca.

It is being presented by the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center, home of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, and Visit Seneca Nation, the Nation’s tourism development arm.

“When the Seneca Nation of Indians opened the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center in 2018, part of our vision was to utilize the center as a true hub where we could celebrate and continue to grow public awareness of Native culture and traditions on a larger scale,” said President Rickey Armstrong Sr. “The Ohi:yo’ Art Market is an exciting step along that path.”

The juried market is open to all native artists from across Turtle Island, and the public is invited to attend. A $7,000 Best of Show award will be presented at the market’s conclusion.

The name Ohi;yo’, which means “beautiful river” in the Seneca language, refers to the traditional name for the Allegheny River, which flows through the Allegany Territory.

“We want native artists and our friends and neighbors from near and far to come together and join us in Ohi:yo’,” said Hayden Haynes, Director of the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center. “By sharing our creativity and works with one another, we can celebrate native culture and resiliency through artistic expression.”

The Ohi:yo’ Art Market builds on the success of a juried art show, established in 2018, which the Seneca Nation hosted for Haudenosaunee artists. By inviting all native artists to attend and participate, organizers hope to establish the market as one of the premier art markets in the northeast.

Artists and vendors interested in registering for the market are asked to contact the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center by email at info@senecamuseum.org.

Measuring 33,000 square feet, the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center is inspired by native oral history and designed to guide and immerse visitors through a variety of exhibits, collections, educational programs and special events. The center is currently open six days a week.

For information, visit senecamuseum.org or call (716) 945-1760.

STAR — Starworks Cafe & Taproom, 100 Russell Drive, Star, has announced its inaugural Community Art Market will be Saturday, March 2, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. 

The Community Art Market ensures that 100% of sales from the artwork directly benefit the participating local artists, providing them with vital support and recognition for their talents. Additionally, all booth fees collected will be donated to Star Elementary as the school raises funds for new playground equipment.

The event welcomes individuals of all ages, and friendly, leashed pets, making it an outing for families and art lovers alike. Attendees can expect to discover a wide range of artwork, including functional pieces, wearable art and collectibles, all crafted by talented artists in the region.

Participating artists include Andrew Tran, Abigail Flynt, Clayton Benefiel, Megan Lange, Ollie Grant, Moira Watson, Ariana Stein, Sarah Band, Reid Miller, Eamon Rogers and Liz Rodriguez.

For more information about the Community Art Market or becoming involved in an upcoming market, email Cafe@StarworksNC.org.

SALAMANCA — As winter fades, plans are underway for a new juried art market that organizers hope will blossom into a leading destination for years to come.

The Ohi:yo’ Art Market will be held Saturday, May 11 at Seneca Allegany Resort & Casino on the Seneca Nation’s Allegany Territory in Salamanca.

It is being presented by the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center, home of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, and Visit Seneca Nation, the Nation’s tourism development arm.

“When the Seneca Nation of Indians opened the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center in 2018, part of our vision was to utilize the center as a true hub where we could celebrate and continue to grow public awareness of Native culture and traditions on a larger scale,” said President Rickey Armstrong, Sr. “The Ohi:yo’ Art Market is an exciting step along that path.”

The juried market is open to all native artists from across Turtle Island, and the public is invited to attend. A $7,000 Best of Show award will be presented at the market’s conclusion.

The name Ohi;yo’, which means “beautiful river” in the Seneca language, refers to the traditional name for the Allegheny River, which flows through the Allegany Territory.

“We want native artists and our friends and neighbors from near and far to come together and join us in Ohi:yo’,” said Hayden Haynes, Director of the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center. “By sharing our creativity and works with one another, we can celebrate native culture and resiliency through artistic expression.”

The Ohi:yo’ Art Market builds on the success of a juried art show, established in 2018, which the Seneca Nation hosted for Haudenosaunee artists. By inviting all native artists to attend and participate, organizers hope to establish the market as one of the premier art markets in the northeast.

Artists and vendors interested in registering for the market are asked to contact the Onohsagwe:de’ Cultural Center by email at info@senecamuseum.org.

Measuring 33,000 square feet, the Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center is inspired by native oral history and designed to guide and immerse visitors through a variety of exhibits, collections, educational programs and special events. The center is currently open six days a week.

For information, visit senecamuseum.org or call (716) 945-1760.

Most of us quickly dispose of late-night takeout evidence or the abruptly empty box from the cookies we polished off in a single sitting, but Yoonmi Nam preserves the remnants of her consumption in unforgiving ceramic.

The South Korean artist (previously) has spent the last few years collecting single-use containers like aluminum pans, egg cartons, and styrofoam cups that she slip casts, creating archeological sculptures of their interiors. “I am a collector of trash,” Nam says about her works, which put our relationship to consumerism and disposability front and center.

Glazed in celadon, the sculptures juxtapose the decidedly contemporary subject matter with the history of the medium, as the distinctive gray-green hue transformed ceramic production in Korea during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). For her ongoing solo show Generally Meant to be Discarded, Nam displays these stacks on soban, small dining tables traditional in Korea that sometimes double as altars. She explains:

I am deeply aware of the presence of objects that we handle, consume, display, and discard. I am drawn to them especially when they subtly suggest a sense of time that seems both temporary and lasting. There is truth and honesty in time, as all of us share the fate of impermanence. But the way we surround ourselves with collections of things, it is as if we feel a sense of permanence through these comforts and arrangements. In my work, I make images and forms that highlight everyday objects, spaces, events, and routines. While insignificant and mundane, they allow us to notice both the stillness and the passage of time.

Generally Meant to be Discarded is on view through February 24 at Studios Inc in Kansas City, Missouri. Find more from the artist on Instagram.

”

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Pensive faces, ambiguous light sources, and mysterious spaces characterize the atmospheric drawings of Moonassi, whose solo exhibition Murmures at Vazieux Gallery delves into the surreal world of memory and emotions.

In black-and-white ink and acrylic, the Seoul-based artist cross-hatches figurative scenes onto Korean hanji paper, portraying deep contrasts, dualities, and tensions. Rich, black shadows reveal glowing hands and faces, exploring relationships between light and dark, awareness and the unconscious, presence and absence, and the known and unknown.

Moonassi uses meok, a type of traditional Korean inkstick ground against a stone with water to produce a liquid medium. The meditative process of preparing the ink helps the artist focus on the task at hand and concentrate on each step.

Describing his work as “mind illustration,” Moonassi’s pieces focus on pairs or twins in uncanny situations like tending to a flame inside one of their heads, peering into a void, or tying their arms together with string. His subjects represent psychological and spiritual dichotomies that exist both within individuals and in relationships, creating a dreamlike world which invites myriad interpretations.

Murmures continues in Paris through February 24. See more on Moonassi’s website.

“Keep you burning” (2023), meok and acrylic on hanji, 92 x 72 centimeters

“Dive into uncertainty” (2023), meok and acrylic on hanji, 92 x 72 centimeters

“Superposition X” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 48 x 34.5 centimeters

“Seeing alone together” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 142 x 102 centimeters

“Tie the knot” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 102 x 142 centimeters

“Light we found” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 142 x 102 centimeters

“Two times two” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 142 x 102 centimeters

“Light we prepared” (2024), meok and acrylic on hanji, 93 x 119 centimeters

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More than 40 local and international artists have signed on for the fifth iteration of Meow Wolf Houston, an immersive exhibition vaulting viewers into an otherworldly universe of color and chaos.

Known for her fantastical creatures with intensely emotional eyes, Houston’s Ana María Ortiz will create a new work for the project that departs from what she’s done previously. The mural will be “closer to elements and ideas that I often keep reserved in my head. So I believe it will be a very honest and almost intimate representation of my feelings and imagination,” she tells Colossal.

Leaning into Meow Wolf’s mission to create “portals of possibility,” Adela Andea (previously) will install “The Adela Oceanic Trench,” a frenetic, kaleidoscopic work of LED lights, cables, and recycled plastics that envelop the space with luminous color. While working with synthetic materials, Andea entwines nature and technology “to make the point that in the future they will blend together, complement each other and fuse together,” she says.

For this project, Andea will install a piece similar to the  “Chaos Incarnate,” an immersive, otherworldly environment shown above. “For a more in-depth sensory experience, I will also incorporate projection and sound,” she says. “The installation will have my signature artistic flair, with a lot of chromatic elements, lights, and nature and technology convergence themes.”

Artists El Franco Lee II and Kill Joy, whose works are familiar sights in the Texan city, will also contribute to the new exhibition. The name, theme, and opening date of the 5th Ward location haven’t been announced yet, but you can follow updates on Meow Wolf’s Instagram.

El Franco Lee II

Kill Joy

Ana María Ortiz

Killy Joy

Ana María Ortiz

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Underestimate Jeff Koons at your own peril.

The artist’s soaring ambition shows no sign of abating, market doldrums be damned. In the past year alone, Koons has taken on the moon, where his sculptures just landed after a weeklong journey—and the sun (more on that later).

Here on Earth, some of the 69-year-old artist’s biggest champions are working hard to reverse the recent downward trajectory in his prices.

The stakes are high. Koons’s auction totals have plummeted since his gleaming steel Rabbit (1986) fetched $91 million in 2019, making him the most expensive living artist in the world, the crown he still holds. Last year was particularly bad: Sales fell to just $27.8 million, down 84 percent from the peak of $170.8 million in 2014, according to the Artnet Price Database. Almost 40 percent of the 292 Koons lots offered failed to find buyers. He ranked 72nd on a list of artists’ annual auction revenue, down from 55th in 2022—itself a demotion from 2019, when he was 15th, according to Artnet data.

Such ebb-and-flow is not new for Koons. At various points in his long career, he has been the world’s most famous artist and the comeback kid. Right now he appears to be both at the same time. And so this spring, several powerful secondary market players are mounting Koons exhibitions in New York, London, and Hong Kong to remind everyone of his greatness.

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They believe that his market will bounce back, realigning itself once again with his art historical significance.

“There’s no question about it,” said Dakis Joannou, who’s been collecting Koons for almost 40 years, becoming a close friend along the way.

Several significant works that the Greek collector originally acquired are now heading to Hong Kong for “Jeff Koons: 1979–1999” at Art Intelligence Global (AIG), the advisory firm co-founded by Amy Cappellazzo and Yuki Terase. The exhibition unites a dozen pieces from Koons’s early series, including the “Inflatables,” “Equilibrium,” and “Made in Heaven.” Most will be appearing in Asia for the first time, according to AIG. One work, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), has an asking price in excess of $50 million. The exhibition will open on March 23 alongside Art Basel Hong Kong.

Jeff Koons with his porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson in a SoHo freight elevator, 1989 ©️ Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

“Jeff Koons is one of the most well-known names in Asia, and yet he’s never really had a proper survey there, especially of the early works,” Terase said in an interview. “We are doing something very meaningful because a lot of people have only seen the works on social media and the internet, but never in person.”

In London, Skarstedt gallery will display five mural-size canvases in “Jeff Koons: Paintings, 2001–2013.” Opening March 1, the show will arrive in time for the marquee London auctions of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art. It will include works from the “Easyfun-Ethereal” series, which started with seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. (None of the Guggenheim’s paintings are in the show, the gallery confirmed. But two other pieces from the series are included, having recently come to auction, with Hot Dog, 2002, fetching $1.9 million in November and Pancakes, 2001, selling for $867,000 in 2021.)

Then, New York’s Mnuchin Gallery will revisit its watershed 2004 exhibition, “Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years,” which included many of his greatest hits, including Michael Jackson and Bubbles. The show began a new chapter for the artist, following a painful decade marked by the end of his first marriage in a bitter divorce and his near-bankruptcy while creating the “Celebration” series.

“It was an awe-inspiring show,” said Michael McGinnis, a partner at Mnuchin, remembering its impact when he was the head of contemporary art at Phillips. 

Stellar reviews followed and Koons’s auction market took off, crossing $20 million in auction sales for the first time that year. It would not sink below that level until the global pandemic hit in 2020, when annual sales plummeted to just $2.7 million.

Mnuchin’s show, set for late April, will present 25 artworks spanning the artist’s entire five-decade career. “It will be a wow, wow, wow kind of show,” McGinnis said, declining to elaborate on the specific works because loans have not been finalized.

Jeff Koons, Hot Dog, 2002. © Jeff Koons Courtesy of Skarstedt

Those in the know whispered that hedge-fund billionaire and Mets owner Steve Cohen may loan his yellow Balloon Dog (1994–2000), instead of the orange sibling that was in the original show, courtesy of its then owner, Peter Brant. (Yes, it does fit!) Sadly, the Rabbit, which was in the 2004 show, is unlikely to make an appearance. (Museums hold three of the four pieces in the edition; the only one in private hands was reportedly bought by Cohen in 2019 and subsequently resold to billionaire financier Ken Griffin, market insiders told me.)

Back in Hong Kong, AIG’s lineup will include works that have become icons after appearing in prestigious exhibitions, such as the artist’s 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Large Vase of Flowers, 1991, a massive, intricately carved wood bouquet, graced the cover of the Whitney’s exhibition catalog.) Terase and Cappellazzo are preparing for crowds, given the value of the artworks and their consequent insurance requirements.

“There will be a line around the block to see the show,” Cappellazzo said.

Several pieces have been closely linked to Joannou’s massive art collection, and they return to the market after decades. Take One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. JK 241 Series), a seminal 1985 work comprising a basketball suspended in a tank. Joannou saw it at Koons’s first solo exhibition at the International With Monument Gallery in New York’s East Village. It made a memorable first impression, he said, “something I couldn’t get out of my mind.” He bought the work for $2,700.

“And that’s how eventually I got to meet Jeff and the whole thing started from there,” Joannou told me.   

Joannou went on to acquire examples from almost every subsequent series Koons made (until the two most recent ones). He waited six years to get the red Balloon Dog, the first puppy from the “Celebration” series (and only after paying for its production). Twenty years would go by before he received a giant pile of Play-Doh (1994–2014).

Jeff Koons & Dakis Joannou, 2004, by Todd Eberle © Todd Eberle
Courtesy: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art

The artist and his patron became close over the years. Joannou is the godfather of Koons’s son Ludwig. The artist created the famously unorthodox (camouflage-inspired) look of his collector’s yacht, Guilty, and designed a heart-shaped wedding cake for his daughter’s wedding. (That concoction featured 2½-foot-tall figures of a swan and a rabbit that would later become 12- and 14-foot-tall sculptures.) The two men’s families vacationed together on Greek islands. In 2010, Joannou invited Koons to curate a controversial show of his collection at the New Museum.

But the most poignant manifestation of their friendship appeared two years ago on the island of Hydra in Greece, where each summer Joannou’s Deste Foundation taps contemporary artists to transform a small, cliff-side former slaughterhouse into an art display.

Notoriously controlling and perfectionist, Koons held the details of the project in absolute secrecy, making everyone involved sign non-disclosure agreements, according to Joannou, who first saw it just half an hour before the public opening.

“It was like giving me a present of the first impression,” he said.  

What he saw left him speechless. Koons transformed the dark, rugged bunker space into a temple to Apollo, complete with replicas of ancient frescoes discovered in a house near Pompeii (now displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a polychrome animatronic sculpture of the Greek sun god accompanied by a snake flicking its tongue, and a 30-foot-wide, blazing-gold wind spinner shaped like the sun, mounted on the roof to greet boats entering the port.

Jeff Koons, Apollo Windspinner, 2020–2022. Installation view of the exhibition “Jeff Koons: Apollo,” DESTE Foundation, Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra  © Jeff Koons, Photo: Eftychia Vlachou.

“I think of it as the island’s Statue of Liberty,” said Linda Yablonsky, the author of a forthcoming biography of Koons. “For those of us who know Dakis and know Jeff, that was a very touching and meaningful gesture.”

Meanwhile, just as this column was going to print, Koons’s artworks—small replicas of the moon—landed on the lunar surface, the first authorized artworks to reach that rocky terrain. Koons’s ability to pull off such a feat is what gives his fans confidence in their investments, despite market turbulence.

“He’s moving every time in the area that you could not have even imagined,” Joannou said when we spoke. “You can never catch up with him. Now he’s off to the moon!”

Koons’s market is also ready for blastoff, his boosters argue.

“This is the right time to buy Jeff Koons,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a collector and trader whose family bought the orange Balloon Dog for $58.4 million in 2013. “Jeff Koons has only one way to go, and that’s up.”

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In times of uncertainty, artists have historically returned to conservative forms of art-making—“the holy trinity of portrait, still life, and landscape,” London-based advisor Brandy Carstens recently told me. For example, following the traumatic upheaval of World War I, the likes of Picasso, Léger, and de Chirico momentarily retreated from the avant-garde into the comforts of familiarity. “After making radical work,” Carstens explained, “all of a sudden they were painting orderly classical figures.” Today, the art world is showing similar signs of distress, if the dominant market trends heading into the next edition of Frieze L.A. are any sign.

With the stresses of the sales slumps and inflation spikes of the last year, the mood is risk-averse, and dealers have shied away from works that might bring current politics or polarizing topics into the booth, instead gravitating toward reliably soothing, topically-neutral imagery of flowers, trees, and more flowers.

Below is a brief guide on where these trends can be found at Frieze L.A.—which, to be clear, is an indicator of what kinds of works are being presented on the market, and not necessarily what subjects artists have suddenly started making or pursuing. The two, however, often coincide.

Landscapes and Nature Scenes

This year, “landscapes are the new figuration,” says L.A. collector Laurie Ziegler. Figurative paintings are still very much being produced, but for galleries in L.A. and well beyond, the bucolic escapism of dreamy sunsets, rolling hillsides and lush gardens has the art world in a chokehold. Artists not typically associated with nature and flowers have added them to their visual repertoire, including Doron Langberg at Victoria Miro in Venice, Wanda Koop at Night Gallery in LA, and recent shows of Jordan Casteel at Casey Kaplan in New York.

Casteel, an artist celebrated for her emotive portraits of quotidian Black life in New York City, began painting floral landscapes around the time she moved to upstate New York in 2021. Both types of work appear in Kaplan’s solo booth at Frieze LA, showcasing a new phase of Casteel’s practice undoubtedly shaped by her pastoral settings. These newer works are overall less bustling, less focused on the material details of the backdrop than atmospheric ones; background objects are abstracted, cropped, or unfinished, while light is more present, robust and pronounced. Mid- to large-scale pieces start around $300,000.  

Similarly, in a solo booth by Stephen Friedman, Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini’s canvases are saturated with tropical colors and plant life. And in Anat Ebgi’s three-person presentation, Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar’s embroidered, mountainous landscapes employ the Palestinian cross-stitch technique tatreez alongside other Levantine craft traditions.

Andrea Bowers, The Dead Silence of Extinction (Moloka’i Creeper, last confirmed sighting 1963, HI, scientific specimen preserved at Auckland Museum’s Natural History Collection) (2023). Photo: Brica Wilcox. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Vielmetter’s two-artist presentation includes Whitney Bedford’s nine-panel painting Veduta (Vulliard Jardin Publics), (2023–24), an homage to Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard’s decorative tendencies (it is being offered for $300,000). The leisurely park scenes of his 1894 painting Jardins Publics appear almost as a wallpaper, overlaid with bright orange and red weeping willows symbolic of ecological urgency. They also match the urgency of Andrea Bowers’ The Dead Silence of Extinction series, drawings of dead birds tagged and labeled as natural history museum specimens, that will appear alongside (each work is priced at $42,000).

And as part of the Focus section for emerging artists at Frieze LA, curated this year by Essence Harden, the visual arts curator at the California African American Museum, L.A. gallery Sow & Tailor presents new paintings by Javier Ramirez. In sheer, dripping acrylic, he layers bonsai trees, lawn mowers, and the domestic outdoors as an homage to the Japanese and Latino landscapers who’ve historically shaped LA’s greenery.

Javier Ramirez, Walk thoughts #2: Buzzy (2024). Photo: courtesy of Sow & Taylor.

In fact, urban landscapes that layer the city’s cultural iconography, especially by Chicano artists, is one of the most important things happening in L.A. art right now—a focal point of recent biennials and current shows at Charlie James and Jeffrey Deitch. It’s surprising and disappointing that such work is less visible at the fair. 

Flowers and Still Lifes

Flowers feature prominently in both landscapes and still lifes, but the two genres have important distinctions. Landscapes, regardless of their temporal or geographic specificity, are generally interesting to people because they’re pretty. The details of a still life, on the other hand, are inseparable from biographical or allegorical readings—we look at the placement of each object and expect it to mean something. They have been everywhere at recent fairs.

In this vein, Awol Erizku’s photographs on view in a solo booth with Sean Kelly capture the artist’s notions of Afro-esotericism, an aesthetic of cultural continuity between Africa and its diasporas. Often captured against a monochrome backdrop, his scenes may include African masks, Nefertiti busts, a bottle of Aunt Jemima breakfast syrup, or cash, plus allusions to fellow artists David Hammons, Marcel Duchamp, or Andy Warhol that are simultaneously reverent and critical of art history. (Flowers and female nudes, perennial subjects of interest, also intermittently appear.) 

Awol Erizku,Moonlight Freestyle (2021). Photo: © Awol Erizku, courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles.

Brazilian artist Paulo Nimer Pjota works in a conceptually similar vein, layering elements of contrasting graphic and historical references in his paintings. His older works deconstructed and reassembled the still life through the language of graffiti, placing photorealist ancient pottery on canvases that emphasized texture over image, like the surface of a blank wall. His more recent works, included in Mendes Wood’s group booth, are decidedly softer, where both the pottery and canvas are now filled with flowers. 

Artist Stephanie Syjuco’s research-based practice often mines photographic archives as a way of recontextualizing Filipino history. In Silverlens’ two-person booth, her new black-and-white prints collage images of decorative plants with faint texts alluding to civil unrest, both pulled from the since-shuttered Manila Chronicle newspaper. According to the gallery, the juxtaposition shows “how power disguises itself in decorative veneer.”

Stephanie SyjucoForce Majeure 5 (Propagation / Troopers) (2023). Photo: courtesy of the artist and The Lopez Museum and Library.

Another Focus presentation is Matthew Brown’s solo booth of works by Kent O’Connor, a painter known for depicting objects in his studio on perspective-flattening tables. And back in the general section of the fair, Seoul-based Gallery Hyundai’s booth features “approximately 20” works by emerging photorealist Kim Sung Yoon, whose paintings check multiple trending boxes. His still life (tick) makes historical reference (tick) to the Old Masters idea of the impossible bouquet, arranging flowers (tick) that would normally never bloom in the same place at the same time. The flowers are sourced from online stock imagery and digitally assembled in vases (tick) by fellow artist Yoo Eui Jeong, whose ceramics merge classical forms (tick) with contemporary graphics and logos. According to the gallery, Kim’s canvases embody a “convergence of multiple contexts” and “eerily recognizable landscapes” (tick and tick). 

Sculptural Vessels and Busts 

This leads us handily into our final trend to spot at Frieze LA: ceramics, the natural, classical, sculptural companion to floral still life paintings. Hyundai’s booth, for example, will also feature the actual vases by Yoo depicted in Kim’s paintings.

Allison Schulnik’s solo booth with L.A. gallery The Pit shows her textural oil paintings of arranged desert flora alongside new glazed porcelain vessels, priced between $12,000 and $18,000. Totemic and asymmetrical, their surfaces are covered with the wildlife of her home in the Mojave—coyotes, snakes, and butterflies. Vessels adorned with other tiny ceramic animals is a tradition of California Funk artists like Melvino Garretti, whose colorfully glazed pots prominently feature in Parker Gallery’s group booth. 

Allison Schulnik, Pink Moth Pot (2023). Photo: Jeff Mclane.

The classical bust also emerges as an extension of the portrait, in booths such as Dominique Gallery’s solo presentation of Mustafa Ali Clayton, an L.A. painter-turned-sculptor. His sculptural earthenware portraits of Black figures, stylized with cartoonishly childlike rounded ears and button noses and finished with a high-gloss ebony glaze, feature quotidian cultural markers like the colorful beaded braids of Sofia (2022). 

At Kasmin, multidisciplinary artist vanessa german presents a new series of works for the first time at Frieze LA. Her plaster busts are adorned with rose quartz, a pink crystal whose alleged healing properties align with the artist’s spiritual ethos of restorative justice, love and redemption. Combining elements of folk art and mysticism, the rose quartz, alongside pyrite, blue lapis and chalcedony, takes on gem- and bead-like qualities, covering the surface of the busts with a mosaic of patterns. A handful of these works will include accompanying prayers recorded by the artist, incorporating the ritual and performance elements of her practice. 

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If you’re a mathematician who specializes in geometry, you might be called a geometer. No other term could so neatly describe the meticulous focus of German scholar Max Brückner (1860-1934), who was lauded during his lifetime for his remarkable collection of polyhedra models.

In 1900, Brückner collected many of his specimens into the book Vielecke und Vielflache, Theorie und Geschichte, or “Polygons and Polyhedra, Theory and History,” which dives into great detail about the mathematically exact, three-dimensional shapes. His discoveries include beautifully complex forms known as the final stellation of the iscosahedron and the compound of three octahedra, the latter of which M.C. Escher incorporated into his 1948 wood engraving, “Stars.”

Dig into more of Brückner’s incredibly precise models in the Internet Archive. (via Present & Correct)

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