Installation view, Camilla Engström, Carl Kostyál, NADA New York.
Photo: Courtesy Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, London, and Milan
10 Buzzworthy Artists from New York Art Week
Discover the talents that made the biggest splashes at Frieze New York, Esther, Future Fair, NADA New York, and 1-54 New York
Surveying the five art fairs that took place in New York over the past week, Galerie has rounded up two standout artists from each of the following venues: Frieze New York (May 1-5) at the Shed, Esther (May 1-4) at Estonian House, Future Fair (May 1-4) at Chelsea Industrial, NADA New York (May 2-5) at 548 West, and 1-54 New York (May 1-4) at the Starrett-Lehigh Building.
Highlighting artworks in a variety of media, there were compelling ceramics, paintings, photographes, assemblages, and collages. Below, discover the curated selection of works by the most buzzworthy artists from New York Art Week.
Holly Hendry, Ungrammatical Anatomy, (2024). Photo: Mark Blower; Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York
1. Holly Hendry, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Frieze New York
A British artist fascinated with the human body and the things it regularly encounters, Holly Hendry employs a variety of materials to create colorful lifelike sculptures and whimsical installations. For her sold-out solo presentation at Frieze, the London-based artist merged the objects commonly found in an office cubicle with internal organs and features of the body to comment on how work can impact our health. Casting post-its, cardboard, scissors, bits of food, and body parts in Jesmonite, plaster, ceramic, aluminum, marble, and bronze; shaping tacks, clips, paper, and envelopes in steel and wood; and blowing and bending glass into organs, intestines, and droplets of sweat and tears, Hendry creates an eye-catching analysis of a day at work that doubles as a reminder to take care of yourself as you labor to get ahead.
Haegue Yang, Swaying Spells Soul Scissors – Mesmerizing Mesh #227, (2024). Photo: Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul
2. Haegue Yang, Kukje Gallery, Frieze New York
A Korean artist based in Seoul and Berlin, Haegue Yang is widely known for her light and sound sculptures, installations, and performances that incorporate Venetian blinds, electrical fans, metal bells, and other everyday objects arranged in abstract compositions, which are meant to coax the viewer into a meditative mood. Continuing her ongoing Mesmerizing Mesh series in an arresting, sold-out installation of eight works on paper at the fair, Yang presented a series of colorful two-dimensional works involving shamanistic and animistic rituals and paper-cutting traditions from the Hmong, an indigenous group of people in East and Southeast Asia, on traditional Hanji and Washi papers. Beautifully crafted and transparently layered to construct symbolic, symmetrical figures and forms, Yang’s poetic collages excite the eye while lovingly uplifting the spirit.
Jesse Wine, O Do Rot Coat Roast Aortic Actions Tornados Consortia Rodin’s Coat, (2024). Photo: Courtesy The Modern Institute, Glasgow
3. Jesse Wine, The Modern Institute, Esther
With only one work of art in an exhibition, you want it to make an impact, which is just what Jesse Wine’s invisible figure in the elegant entrance area of Estonian House achieved. Titled O Do Rot Coat Roast Aortic Actions Tornados Consortia Rodin’s Coat, his six-foot-high ceramic sculpture, which has been reinforced with steel, coated in copper filings, and patinated to look like an aged bronze, references Auguste Rodin’s Study for Balzac’s Dressing Gown. Depicting only the sagging coat draped over a pair of legs and feet standing on a rock, the surreal sculpture focuses on the outfit that the French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac would write in rather than the physical features of the man, whom Rodin memorialized in his famous 1898 sculpture. Slyly quoting art history while experimenting with new methods to make sculptures, the Brooklyn-based British artist—who had one of his larger, ceramic limb sculptures on view at The Modern Institute’s Frieze New York booth—explores the relationship between the physical and psychological in humorous yet haunting ways.
Kris Lemsalu, Immaterial Material Love, (2024). Photo: Courtesy Margot Samel, New York
4. Kris Lemsalu, Margot Samel, Esther
Who better to be exhibiting work at Estonian House than an Estonian artist? Living and working between Tallinn and New York, Kris Lemsalu had two sculptures in the lobby of the private club-turned-exhibition space—a rocking chair with ceramic birds perched on its back and a giant ceramic tongue, wearing shorts, occupying its seat and a tabletop ceramic still life composed of strangely crafted shells, tongues, and teeth clustered into a singular form. Currently the subject of a solo show at Margot Samel gallery in Tribeca, where more ceramic sculptures celebrate life with wagging tongues and deconstructed figures created during Lemsalu’s recent residency at the celebrated Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. Replicating nature’s shell clusters, the artist’s Immaterial Material Love sculpture equates humankind with other elements of the environment while making an imaginative still life that’s both shocking and enchanting.
Beck Lowry, Rewilding, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Elijah Wheat Showroom, New York
5. Beck Lowry, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Future Fair
A self-taught artist with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a Certificate in African Studies from Smith College, Beck Lowry makes intricate, painted weavings presented in handmade frames, mixed media collages on used ledger paper, and carved wooden sculptures embellished with threads, fabric, and oil paint. The daughter of a carpenter father and a mother who was a jeweler, Lowry grew up learning how to throw pots, sew, weld, and make stained glass but chose a more practical path after watching their parents struggle financially. Leaving a full-time job 12 years ago, they returned to art, regularly working out of a converted garage studio behind their house in Connecticut to create beautifully crafted pieces. Exhibiting six mixed-media weavings in carved plywood frames at the Future Fair, Lowry is interested in continuing the lineage of laborers with her assemblages that marvelously mix found fabrics, threads, and paint with an intuitive flair.
Angela Fang Zirbes, Lamp with Picture Frame, (2024). Photo: Courtesy Hashimoto Contemporary, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco
6. Angela Fang Zirbes, Hashimoto Contemporary, Future Fair
A young painter born in Iowa in 2000 who now splits her time between there and New York, Angela Fang Zirbes explores her experiences of isolation growing up as a biracial woman in the American Midwest through her art. Starting with colorful visual characterizations of the growing pains of her teenage years, where she saw herself surrounded by animals, burning houses and cars, devils, and other types of demons, her work has since mutated into a more monochromatic palette and dreamlike, nocturnal scenes. Her sold-out, black-and-white paintings at the fair captured the artist revisiting a birthday and Christmas from times past and recalling objects from her rural upbringing while also reconnecting Zirbes to her Asian ancestry through decorative heirlooms in her parent’s house. The winner of Future Fair’s inaugural Artists Prize, which provides her a four-week artist stay at the Virreina Artist Residency this fall, the graphic artist will find herself in a related rural realm of Columbia’s countryside, where new dreams can become the subject for her memorable paintings.
Camilla Engström, Afternoon Nap, (2024). Photo: Courtesy Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, London, and Milan
7. Camilla Engström, Carl Kostyál, NADA New York
A self-taught artist who studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology School and worked as a fashion assistant in New York, Camilla Engström turned to a childhood interest, drawing and painting, after what she calls a “failed career” in the fashion industry. Posting her drawings to Instagram, she found an audience and took a five-year, deep dive into painting to develop a personal style with soft, curvilinear, representational forms. Painting surreal self-portraits and dreamlike landscapes, her work has been compared to Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist who got her start in New York before moving out West (Engström now lives and works in Los Angeles) and Hilma af Klint (like Af Klint, Engström was born in Sweden and returns often). She spent a month in 2023 painting landscapes on the island of Blidö, which inspired the five trippy, metaphysical canvases on view in her sold-out show at the fair.
Jova Lynne, Calabash, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Matéria Gallery, Detroit
8. Jova Lynne, Matéria Gallery, NADA New York
A multidisciplinary conceptual artist and curator of Jamaican and Colombian heritage, Jova Lynne was born and raised in New York and initially studied video at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, before moving to Detroit, where she currently lives and works, to pursue an MFA in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which she earned in 2017. The co-founder of Bulk Space Artists Residency and Black Artists Meetup Detroit, the talented Lynne was recently named artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; but it was her art that was on full display in her solo show, “Mitosis,” at NADA New York. Staging the subject of her photographs and creating sculptural props from readymade objects and indigenous musical instruments, her pictures portrayed a Black woman as a god, with all of the works in the poetic presentation becoming a different aspect—a different cell—of her central subject.
David Alekhuogie, Mask 99/2, from the series A Reprise, (2021). Photo: Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York
9. David Alekhuogie, Yancey Richardson, 1-54 New York
A Yale MFA grad in Photography, Los Angeles-based artist David Alekhuogie explores his Nigerian roots and African American identity through images that mix traditional African sculptures and fabrics with aspects of modernism married to his personal history. Taking photographs of African sculptures by Walker Evans and Man Ray as the point of departure in his series of digital prints titled A Reprise, Alekhuogie deconstructed, collaged, and rephotographed their pictures with African fabrics he purchased on a trip to Nigeria in 2019. These photographs were paired with smaller photographs from his To Live and Die in LA series, which explores the body as landscape through the staging of cropped images of male torsos in Los Angeles locations that are packed with personal and political significance. Exhibited alongside black-and-white self-portraits of South African visual activist Zanele Muholi strikingly draped in fabrics, the presentation stood out in the sea of paintings and sculptures on view at most other booths at the fair.
Miska Mohmmed, When it blooms, (2022). Photo: Courtesy of OOA Gallery, Barcelona
10. Miska Mohmmed, OOA Gallery, 1-54 New York
Fascinated by the animated landscape of Khartoum, which is situated at the point where the Nile River splits into the White Nile and Blue Nile, Miska Mohmmed has turned her fascination into the subject of her art. Drawing and painting the landscape of her hometown since childhood, the Sudanese artist went on to study art at Khartoum’s College of Fine Art, where she received a BFA in Painting in 2016, but her journey as a painter flowered after she left school. Upon graduating college, her work progressed from realism to abstraction to improvisation in a short amount of time. Sketching and painting en plein air almost daily, she began to turn nature into pure color and form, which was fully on view in her two energetic paintings at the fair. Working from memory, the Oman-based artist invents what she wants to see, aptly dubbing her abstract panoramic views as “Mindscapes,” which dynamically capture reality and imagination on lively picture planes.
Cover: Installation view, Camilla Engström, Carl Kostyál, NADA New York.
Photo: Courtesy Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, London, and Milan
