There were plenty of major figures in attendance from celebrities to collectors to dealers, and there was strong artwork on display in the booths and healthy sales to boot.

“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

We spent some time going around the fair, camera in tow, to get a feel for the scene and the energy at LA’s most important fair.

]]> https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/news/outsider-art-fair-2024-best-booths-1234698557/ Fri, 01 Mar 2024 21:52:38 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?post_type=pmc_list&p=1234698557 This year’s edition of the Outsider Art Fair, held at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, brought back to New York a group of dealers whose artists sometimes find themselves on the margins of the commercial art world.

These artists don’t typically have the MFA degrees that are required for representation at blue-chip galleries. They are more likely to have members of the clergy, or to have been firefighters or houseless. But as this fair shows, these artists who are just worthy of study as the ones that pass through the nation’s top art schools.

Those who show at this fair have spent decades working to bring to light these makers, who historically have not made into museums. Their work is now paying off.

During the fair’s VIP preview day on Thursday, ARTnews spoke with several exhibitors about the artists they brought to the fair this year.

The work, titled Declaration, has become an iconic part of the Venice Beach landscape. Weighing in at 25 tons, it is composed of I-beams that are delicately balanced against one another in V-shaped arrangements.

Declaration was initially installed more than 20 years ago, in 2001, as a loan made in tandem with a Venice Family Clinic benefit, so it was never intended to be permanently sited where it is today. But because it has been located for so long near the boardwalk, between a skate park and a police station, it has been integrated into the Venice Beach landscape.

Word that the sculpture may leave Venice Beach was first heard in 2019, when di Suvero and his gallery L.A. Louver failed multiple times to get the City of Los Angeles to acquire the piece. The two were charged with raising the funds needed to keep the work there.

Local outlets in Venice Beach reported this week that Declaration was officially slated for removal, an exact date for which has not yet been determined. The sculpture, now worth $7 million, according to L.A. Louver director Kimberly Davis, is set to be returned to di Suvero himself.

“I am honored that this sculpture has been embraced by the community of Venice for more than two decades,” di Suvero said in a statement to ARTnews. “I’m grateful that it was on view for so long—longer than ever intended—and that it contributed to the identity of this special place.”

The funding for the sculpture has routinely been a sticking point. L.A. Louver paid for it to be installed in the first place, but according to a Los Angeles City Council member quoted by the New York Times in 2019, the gallery had offered the work to the city, but the terms for the donation would’ve required as much as $4 million to be spent in the process. Even after private donors were sought, the city could not afford the work.

Per Yo! Venice!, L.A. Louver had raised less than $2 million in pledges—which is less than half of the work’s value, according to Davis. Now, the work will be disassembled and sent back in pieces to di Suvero’s studio in Petaluma, California.

Peter Goulds, founding director of L.A. Louver, said in a statement, “Even though permanent status could not be achieved in its present location, we are honored to have championed this iconic work, a Los Angeles cultural landmark and the focal point of Venice Beach and its Boardwalk. Everywhere Mark goes, he builds community, and his sculptures do the same. We are immensely proud of our long association with Mark, who is one of the greatest American sculptors of our time, and our support for this key work from his career.”

St. Félix, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Giovanni, an acclaimed poet, were set to appear at the museum following a screening of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a recent documentary about that writer that won an award when it debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The event is co-hosted by PEN America, an advocacy organization that aims to support freedom of expression in the US and elsewhere.

In their statement, posted to Instagram on Friday, St. Félix and Giovanni said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to requests for comment.

“We very much regret that the event with the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled,” PEN America said in a statement to ARTnews. “As a free expression organization of course we respect every individual’s right to voice their own perspective on the conflict and to respond as their conscience dictates. We mourn the immense loss of Palestinian lives, and the destruction of museums, libraries, and mosques that contribute to a vibrant cultural community.  We have also voiced our shared anguish for the Israelis whose families were killed or taken hostage.”

Both the Brooklyn Museum and PEN America have been criticized for a perceived lack of response to the conflict in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 30,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack, according to the Gazan health ministry.

When the Brooklyn Museum was protested by pro-Palestine activists last December, a spokesperson said, “we support any group’s right to peacefully assemble.”

PEN America has been denounced by many prominent writers for its position on the conflict in Gaza. On February 3, more than 500 signed an open letter that accused PEN America of being “silent” on the issue, calling on the organization to “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.”

On February 7, PEN America issued a statement that called for a “mutually agreed upon ceasefire” in Gaza while also noting the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed more than 200 Israelis and took more than 1,200 hostages. Of the attack, the organization wrote that it was “devastated by and mourn these grave and ongoing losses.”

The Brooklyn Museum talk is the latest example of an arts event in the US that has been impacted by Israel’s war in Gaza. An Indiana University exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby was canceled earlier this year, and several artists exhibiting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco altered their work in support of Palestine, leading the museum to close certain galleries.

Palestine’s Ministry of Culture said this week that Ghaben died after appeals from his family to Israeli authorities that would have allowed Ghaben to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical aid.

In a statement, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture said that Ghaben was suffering from chronic chest and lung illness, and had been unable to find help in Gaza’s healthcare system, which has collapsed amid repeated Israeli airstrikes in the region.

In a video uploaded to Facebook on February 19 by a relative of Ghaben, the ailing artist makes a desperate appeal for aid, saying, “I am suffocating. I want to breathe, I want to breathe.” He repeats those words until he is overcome by violent coughing.

Gaza’s health ministry reported on Thursday that the number of Palestinians killed since October 7 has exceeded 30,000. Among the dead are artist Heba Zagout and scholar and poet Refaat Alareer. ARTnews has contacted the IDF for comment on the death of Ghaben.

Ghaben was one of Palestine’s most prominent painters, having gained renown in the 1970s and ’80s for his exuberantly colored paintings that memorialized Palestinian resistance. He was also a fierce advocate for arts education in Palestine and was a founding member of the Association of Fine Artists and Artists in Gaza and established the Fathi Ghaben Center of Arts.

“Palestine was always present in all its details in Ghaben’s works,” Palestinian Minister of Culture Atef Abu Seif said. “He immortalized the life of the Palestinian village that the Nakba wanted to erase, remembering the village of Harbia, in which he was born.” 

“Ghaben’s departure constitutes a loss to Palestinian art,” a statement from the culture ministry noted.

He was born in 1947, one year before Israel forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from the land they called home. That event is communally called the Nakba; its name translates to the Catastrophe. Ghaben’s family resettled in the Jabaliya camp in Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. Having left school at age 15, he supported his family by selling newspapers, all while teaching himself to paint with the supplies that he managed—often with great difficulty—to find.

He transitioned to painting full-time, transmuting the suffering of his neighbors and nation into symbolic, defiant portraits. In some, swelling crowds flood the street while horses, painted as large as the sky, rear and fight against their shackles.

“My paintings are not filled with smiles; they are not loud, flashy or without a deep thought. I draw the national Palestinian issues and the reality of the Palestinian struggle,” the artist once said.

He taught art at the Al Naser Islamic school for 13 years and expressed with frustration with how the struggle to meet basic needs impeded artistic ambitions in Palestine. “I cannot afford paint and tools, so I cannot fully engage in my art, and the children need food on the table daily—it’s a big dilemma,” he said.

Ghaben also served as an adviser in the Ministry of Culture, during which time he gifted the building multiple beloved murals. In 2015, the Palestinian government awarded him the Order of Culture, Science, and Arts on the Creativity Level, and later, he received the Medal of Sword of Canaan from Yasser Arafat and the Annual Media Freedom Awards Appreciation Award from the Palestinian Press House. His international accolades included the Order of Hiroshima and the Order of the World Federation of Societies of Tokyo.

Speaking to ARTnews, prominent Palestinian painter Samia Halaby recounted her decades-long friendship with Ghaben: “His best work and professionalism depended on the revolutionary optimism of the Intifada,” she said. “His best work had a combination of symbolist attitudes and Cubist form. Like all the artists of the First Intifada, Fathi was proud to have a cause and was loyal to it.”

Halaby continued: “My last visit with him was in a tent in Gaza, probably during the 2000s. I could see from the test that a sniper tower was nearby as he told me of the continuous sniping and the absence of any defense against it living in a tent. In that tent, he received me with traditional Arabic hospitality offering gracious welcome, coffee, his cigarette smoking, and conversation.”

Ghaben was arrested by Israeli authorities on several occasions, sometimes because of his art, which was deemed to be “inciting violence.” These events were described in the catalogue for a joint exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian artists held in 1984 in Tel Aviv titled “Israeli and Palestinian Artists Against Occupation.” That show was closed abruptly by the Israeli Military, and multiple paintings were confiscated.

During one such imprisonment, one of Ghaben’s sons, Hossam, succumbed to intestinal cancer after failing to receive medical treatment. Hossam died at the age of 18.

Recalling the realities of life in Gaza, Ghaben once said: “Being a sensitive artist soul, I believe the colors appropriate for our life in Jabalia and the individual perception of them are the warm, dark and earthly colors – with a grasp of hope, maybe half of that dark brown, dark blue, but with orange, yellow and a mixture of white and yellow, these light colors reflect glimpses of hope in this hell on earth.”

“Today has been our most successful first day at Frieze LA since the first year of the fair,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

David Zwirner’s first-day sales included works by Joe Bradley, John McCracken, Steven Shearer, Lisa Yuskavage, Huma Bhabha, Dana Schutz and Suzan Frecon for values between $250,000 and $650,000.

Along with the mega-dealers who sold works in the early hours of the celebrity-filled fair, Casey Kaplan, Vielmetter, Roberts Projects, and Tina Kim Gallery also reported sales of works priced at $250,000 or higher.

Dominique Gallery said it placed all works in its solo presentation by Mustafa Ali Clayton, including sculptures ranging from $12,000 to $100,000. New York’s Kasmin Gallery reported ten works by vanessa german sold on opening day, each priced between $25,000 and $65,000. The artist won the Heinz Award for the Arts in 2022. pt.2 gallery from Oakland, California, said it placed all of their works by Muzae Sesay, but did not disclose sales amounts.

Below, a look at seven works that were sold during Frieze’s first couple days, according to the galleries that brought them to the fair.

(All sales are in USD unless otherwise indicated. Sales information is provided voluntarily by galleries but does not include confirmation of transactions, discounts, or other fees.)

It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

I partook in one of the races-cum-performances, choosing the ceramic rat with a patch of Ghostface, called Ozone. Even with a practice run, I wasn’t very good, crashing into the cones that demarcated the track, hitting peoples’ feet, and even managing to run into the two-row bleacher that was not that close to the track.

Rat Race is Farrag’s first public project and builds on his ongoing body of work involving abstracted cars and motorcycles made in clay. “I wanted to try out making sculptures that could be interactive and activated by other people,” he said. “Then the rat race idea came up as a way to make fun of competition—winning, losing. … I think it’s also a way to address survival within competition.”

As with a number of LA artists, like Jason Rhoades (whose car-related works are currently the subject of an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in downtown LA), Farrag, who grew up in the Valley neighborhood of Reseda, said his interest in cars stems from the necessity of having to drive everywhere as an Angeleno, as well as his experience of being a food delivery person several years ago.

“Cars and transportation are a big part of my life—it’s why I keep making them [car-related sculptures], not because I love a [certain] brand of car,” he said. “I’m always in a Prius, going into zones while I drive. I come up with a lot of my ideas in the car. This is just another aspect of driving, just the race-side of it.”

There’s also a sense of humor imbued in the performance, which isn’t necessarily intentional, according to the artist. “The funny part is that I’m not even trying to be humorous, but I’m open to people laughing,” he said, beginning to laugh. “It’s just who I am; it’s kind of been that way all my life: ‘Oh yeah, that way funny? I said something serious.’”

But Farrag drew a comparison between his project and the high stakes of what was happening just inside the tent, especially on the fair’s first day where collectors are rushing to buy works (likely ones they had put on hold based on PDF previews), galleries aiming for a prime spot in the fair’s layout, or even artists showing with the right gallery.

“Being at an art fair, competition is prevalent.vThere are all these competitive parts [to an art fair] that are often overlooked. I wanted to address that competition and make fun of it,’ he said. Then, he added, “Today, people have been having fun. It’s also, in a way, a way to let off some steam from the fair.”

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

Felsen, according to Takahatake, wanted to be a fly on the wall, preferring to be unseen and unheard to avoid disrupting their artistic processes. “He said the two words he felt he needed to live by were silent and invisible. One of the greatest compliments he felt someone could pay him was, when they would say: I didn’t even realize that you were there,” Takahatake said.

In the mid-’60s, Felsen brought in artists primarily on his own instinct, mailing postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. That process would lead him to that building out a personal network with some of the mid-20th century’s biggest creative forces. Critics and historians who have analyzed Gemini’s peak years have emphasized how Felsen and Grinstein, who died in 2014, gave artists unusual amount of freedom to work, seemingly without any financial or material restrictions. A 2010 Artforum review of a Robert Rauschenberg show detailed how critical the shop was to the artist and his peers, providing an atmosphere that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”

There were few other artists who produced as much under Felsen’s tutelage as Rauschenberg. In a 2013 interview, Felsen recalled first meeting the artist, who was looking to make a full-body print using a medical X-Ray, at an airport in 1967. “He wanted one plate—6 feet—of his whole body. We found out there is no such thing in the United States—except that Eastman Kodak in Rochester had a six-foot machine,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview. For another project Felsen took Rauschenberg to a Los Angeles Times printing facility to scour through metal type barrels for material; it was one of some 50 times Rauschenberg came to the shop over the next three decades. Felsen balanced being a close friend, while giving Rauschenberg the space to ideate, often watching in awe at the speed of Rauschenberg’s creative spurts. “He never looked back at his work,” Felsen said.

Because Felsen sought to capture the print shop’s private moments, he never intended to publish his archive of images, which lined the studio’s walls. Until 2003, they went uncatalogued. And that approach allowed him to get a level of candid access that most journalists would dream of. “I can’t work in front of people,” Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize–winning artist who works primarily in photography and film, told the Getty for an essay accompanying the show. “It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that.”

There’s a sense of a palpable joy in Felsen’s photographs, in which now famous artists resemble students at play, their expressions mostly candid and unserious. In one, David Hockney tacks drawings of his inner circle to Gemini’s walls, while in another, Richard Serra keeps his heads down, pouring black paint on the floor. “I think something that is quite notable about Gemini is the fact that they had to foster these long-term relationships with artists—it was by invitation,” Takahatake said.

“A lot of my friend were artists or just collectors,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview, describing how he’d put aside his career as an accountant to work with artists. Initially, he focused on LA artists, but he soon found himself nearly at the center of the global art world. In 1966, through chance, Man Ray, ever an enigma of an artist, came to Gemini when he had a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Surrealist had recently relocated from Paris to LA, focusing on commissioned photographs for fashion magazines; the museum arranged for him to stay at Grinstein’s house, bringing him into Gemini’s circle.

Decades later, with a close-knit yet expansive network, Felsen continued to run the shop until 2018, at the age of 93, always with the guiding principle, as Takahatake put it, of “how to be a good friend.”

In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work.