Frieze New York Finds Its Strongest Booths in Work That Refuses to Behave
Frieze New York opened this week at the Shed in Hudson Yards with 68 galleries, and the fair’s most compelling presentations are the ones that feel least predictable. Through Sunday, visitors can move from Cindy Sherman’s self-fashioned photographs to booths shaped by aliens, abstraction, and politically charged ceramics — a reminder that even at a market-heavy event, ambition can still take the lead.
Hauser & Wirth’s booth is among the clearest draws. It marks the debut of new work by American photographer Cindy Sherman (b. 1954), whose latest images return to the performance of identity that made her “Untitled Film Stills” so influential. In the new photographs, Sherman appears in elaborate costumes and theatrical poses, balancing elegance with artifice. The effect is not simply playful. It is a study in how authority is staged, and how easily it can be undone.
Andrew Edlin Gallery offers a different kind of coherence. Rather than scattering unrelated works across the booth, the gallery has grouped Karla Knight, Paulina Peavy, Esther Pearl Watson, and Melvin Way around extraterrestrial imagery and speculative belief. Peavy’s abstractions, Knight’s and Watson’s paintings, and Way’s drawing all point toward forms of communication that sit outside ordinary language. The result is one of the fair’s most conceptually legible presentations.
Carlos/Ishikawa, sharing a booth with New York’s Chapter NY, presents work by Evelyn Taocheng Wang, whose paintings probe how value is assigned in art. One large-scale work overlays an Agnes Martin-like grid with a ram’s head and a flower drawn from Georgia O’Keeffe, folding art history into a meditation on lineage and perception. Nearby, Virginia Jaramillo’s booth includes Quanta, a 2021 canvas that extends her long engagement with abstraction.
Another notable collaboration comes from Marc Selwyn Fine Arts and Ortuzar, which have joined forces to present Akinsanya Kambon, the Sacramento artist and former leader of the Sacramento chapter of the Black Panther Party. His inclusion underscores the breadth of this year’s fair, where ceramics, painting, photography, and politically inflected practice all share the same commercial floor.
For all its sales pressure, Frieze New York still leaves room for booths that feel thought through rather than merely stocked. That distinction matters. It is what separates a fair that simply moves work from one that briefly clarifies why the work matters.
