Frieze Week in New York Opens With Tribeca Gallery Debuts and Dinosaur Fossils
New York’s Frieze week began with the kind of crowded, high-low art-world theater that has become its own seasonal ritual: gallery openings, private parties, and a downtown scene that can feel both buoyant and overextended. Two of the week’s most talked-about stops were David Zwirner Tribeca, the former 52 Walker space, and Amanita, where fossils shared the room with a John Chamberlain sculpture.
At David Zwirner Tribeca, the opening of “Statics of an Egg” marked the space’s new official identity. The group show, curated by Martin Germann, features a network of Japanese artists gathered by Yu Nishimura and Kenji Ide. Among the works on view is Nishimura’s new painting, “i n waiting,” a quiet counterpoint to the pace of the week. The gallery has confirmed that Marlene Zwirner is leading the space day to day, and that it will be programmed in the same spirit as the rest of the gallery’s locations, with artists from both inside and outside the roster.
The mood shifted sharply at Amanita, where “A Land Before Time: Three Dinosaurs and a Gondola” paired contemporary sculpture with paleontological spectacle. The exhibition includes John Chamberlain’s 1982 work “Gondola Marianne Moore” and three complete Maiasaura fossil specimens. Amanita is helmed by Caio Twombly and Tommaso Rositani Suckert, with Jacob Hyman and Garrett Goldsmith as partners. Freddy Leiva is identified as the dinosaur dealer who brokered the partnership between Amanita and Granada Gallery.
That mix of polish and eccentricity is part of what gives Frieze week its particular charge. One moment it is all white orchids, collector greetings, and gallery chatter; the next, a room turns into a small museum of improbable juxtapositions. In New York, the week’s real subject is often not just the art on the walls, but the social machinery that gathers around it — and the way it keeps reinventing itself from one season to the next.
