Editors’ Selects: New York Art Fairs
Esther II
New York Estonian House | 243 E 34th St
May 6 – 10, 2025
Installation view of Esther II at the New York Estonian House, May 6–10, 2025. Photo by Mathew Sherman.
At the second annual edition of Esther, the art fair founded by Margot Samel and Olga Temnikova, galleries participate in a laid-back, family-style fair that offers a refreshing breather from some of the larger productions during New York Art Week. Walking into Esther II felt like walking into a house party: morale was high; things felt celebratory and jubilant. The lack of clear-cut, white-walled booths combined with the unique architecture of the New York Estonian House allows galleries to overlap, creating an eclectic dialogue of artwork. The placement of each gallery feels intentional and dynamic, especially compared to the somewhat dizzying effect of moving from booth to booth.
A sconce with crystal embellishments bisects Sophie Tappeiner’s wall space. What to do with Kyle Thurman’s almost 6-foot-wide multi-media drawing? They opted to simply lean it against the wall. The gesture is casual, not overthought, and produces an object-viewer relationship atypical of a gallery setting. On the top floor in a snow globe-esque attic room with circular porthole windows, Triangolo shows graphite and colored pencil drawings by Francesco De Bernardi. The drawings, set against a neutral gray matte and frame, were humble, calming, and fit perfectly into the whimsy of a sunlit attic room.
Esther II co-founder Margot Samel’s contributions to the fair were also decentralized and took advantage of unexpected surfaces. Leroy Johnson’s small houses that employ mixed media and collage techniques are displayed on the surface of a pool table. The green felt of the table emphasizes the miniaturization of the houses and connects them to the sculptures, allowing them to be viewed as individual pieces or as a singular body of work. Off the pool table, Samel found unexpected places to display artwork, like a Cathleen Clarke painting, Girl Descending Staircase (2023), mirrors the viewer’s body as they, too, descend a staircase, the fluorescent painting graduating into their field of vision.
Art is tucked into every nook and cranny of the house—I could have spent all of my time just looking at the work filling the stairwell. Sculptures and monoprints by Vy Trinh with Galerie Quynh permeated the corridors of the space. The sculptures are at once industrial and delicate, with materials ranging from motor bike parts to rhinestones. They recall ornately decorated light fixtures, finding harmony with the Beaux-Arts light fixtures in the Estonian House. Trinh’s largest piece, Streetlight 3 (2024), is a freestanding sculpture that shoots out limbs like a tree. The piece was striking, but encountering the artist’s wall-mounted works that camouflaged into the interior of the Estonian House felt the most rewarding.
The Estonian House was not built to host art fairs, which makes it the perfect location to place one. Esther II breathes some life back into the fair circuit—while it’s true that many of the participating galleries also took part in larger, more traditional fairs this week, Esther II allows for curatorial dynamics and an atmosphere that aren’t always addressed in a larger fair.
— Meinzer
NADA
Starrett-Lehigh | 601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
May 7 – 11, 2025
Installation view of Booth C104 at NADA, featuring the work of Floryan Varennes and Hanna Umin. Courtesy of the artists and Xxijra Hii, London.
At Booth C104, London-based gallery Xxijra Hii presents the work of Floryan Varennes and Hanna Umin. Varennes’s blue-tinted, translucent PVC sculptures evoke natural forms despite the choice of materials being fundamentally industrial and even clinical. In Stella Splendens 1.1 (Flower) (2025), for instance, PVC sheets are curved back, penetrated, and forced in place by stainless steel fasteners and medical tubes to form a radial, symmetrical six-petaled flower. Pristine and armor-like, the work is inspired by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s proposition that all technology has “a pharmacological dimension”—potentially therapeutic but destructive when abused, hinting at the militancy and incongruity within systems such as healthcare. Varennes exposes this potentiality for violence through the most poetic approach, drawing a parallel between human, botanical, and perhaps even robotic bodies in their state of passivity and submission under the regime of late capitalism.
Umin’s works communicate a similar ethos of destruction and restoration with an intuition of convoluting the psychic with the psychological, the mystical with the mythological. The use of materials such as blood, mouse pelt, fingernail clipping, and phlegm explores abjection as an inevitable underpinning of physio-social existence. Umin also incorporates found objects to create witchy, whimsical charms such as Aegisthus (2024) and Haemon (2025). Both are titled after mythological characters, and the works double down on narrative ambiguity and the obscurity of agency in processes of introspection. Such themes as misanthropy, disgust, and dissociation are performative, but, more than anything, are formative. At the booth of Xxijra Hii, art objects are simultaneously ceremonial, relic-esque, and playfully dichotomous.
Amber Toplisek, Narrowing (2025). Video stills, glass, copper, solder, lead, and resin. Courtesy of Mimo Gallery and the artist.
Mimo, an artist-run gallery founded by Carlos Nuñez, presents the work of Atlanta-based artist Amber Toplisek at Booth A102. Toplisek’s practice abstracts and materializes images that would be distributed otherwise through digital, intangible channels, subverting expectations and assumptions about dimension, texture, and meaning in photo-sculptural display.
In her work, video stills and photos extracted from archives—many of which zoomed in to the point of being unrecognizable—are reincarnated on glass and then affixed within the confines of organically shaped frames. Hovering over the wall, the pieces cast soft, crystalline shadows behind them, creating a chiffon- or mesh-like illusion. The amorphous dance of red, green, and black in Narrowing (2025), for instance, reminds me of colored light passing through closed eyelids, allowing for a hedonistic way of perceiving that centers on the transmittance of light alone, with or without opening the eye. Decipherability, then, becomes secondary. Toplisek interrogates what looking can mean, if not for the inescapable desire to see and to situate oneself within specific narrative, syntactical, or representational contexts.
Pieces like Particles (2025) assume a window-like format, bringing the viewer into an altered state of (un)consciousness—an intimate, fractured fever dream. Readable motifs such as a birds-eye view of a grass field and a body of water are juxtaposed with cryptic listing photographs from an online auction. The impossibility of meaningful access to each snippet’s larger whole homes in on how vision is a matter of impression, that images are ever-fleeting and can be captured without the storage of information as an end. Here, decipherability becomes something of a falsity and a pretense for remembering.
— Xuezhu Jenny Wang
1-54
Halo | 28 Liberty St
May 8 – 11, 2025
Installation view of Ashanté Kindle’s work at Kates-Ferri Projects booth. Photo by Matilda Lin Berke.
1-54 spirals around the glass-walled central oasis of Isamu Noguchi’s Sunken Garden in the Financial District. Like the garden itself, designed to represent an impression of nature rather than reproducing it in miniature, the fair’s strongest offerings are not easily defined or explicitly representational; they translate the multiplicity of the contemporary African diasporic experience through essential material qualities rather than a reliance on recognizable imagery.
Though it is evident that the work is semiotically dense and historically loaded, it is not immediately apparent what much of it is about. This is one of 1-54’s successes: for the most part, it successfully resists the trap of monolithic narrative codification.
In a Proustian expansion of personal and cultural memory, Ashanté Kindle at Kates-Ferri Projects transfigures arrangements of quotidian objects—hair knockers, barrettes, shells, and other accessories associated with the distinct rituals of Black hair—into topographic, circular forms that gleam in brilliant shades of metallic purple and blue. Though these pieces protrude from the canvas like terrain maps, they come to resemble otherworldly portals.
At LIS10 Gallery, Kenyan artist Agnes Waruguru approaches the weighty concepts of haunting and différance indirectly, through ethereal watercolors on paper and handwoven cotton that come in pairs: after pigment is applied to one of the two surfaces, the foundation for both works is produced by pressing them together (water, which is arguably the most essential part of Waruguru’s practice, is noticeably absent from the materials list).
Some connections are made explicit. Houston Maludi’s (Gallery Article 15) “Monochromique Cubism Symbiotique Quantique” interprets Cubism through the lens of contemporary life in Kinshasa, a bustling economic and informatic hub. If that isn’t clear enough on its own, exchange rates are buried in a few paintings as both timestamps and sly nods to the constant subterranean flow of globalized commerce. At Larkin Durey, Ivorian artist Aboudia’s Ie Gbairai (2025) suggests Basquiat if only through convergent evolution: Abidjanaise youth street culture, local graffiti, and found materials form the literal and figurative base of the work.
Other standouts include Jerome Lagarrigue’s evocative Night Swim (2024) at Fridman Gallery; Hazel Mphande’s photographs at Berman Contemporary; and the fluid, dynamic compositions of Leasho Johnson at at TERN Gallery.
— Matilda Lin Berke
TEFAF
Park Avenue Armory | 643 Park Avenue
May 9 – May 13, 2025
Anna Weyant, Spring Florals, 2025. Oil on canvas, 36 ⅛ × 24 ⅛ inches (91.8 × 61.3 cm). Image courtesy of Gagosian, New York.
A distinctly American characteristic is the blatant exhibition of desire to speak both for and to the world; in New York, where money talks, money also listens. This object-oriented marketplace has not always been conducive to the stateside production of beauty—hence the local penchant for Europhilia—but it continues to define and support the infrastructure of its consumption.
At The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) New York, even in the face of economic headwinds, the relationship between beauty (expressed ineffably) and desire (expressed financially) sublimates itself into the circulation of beautiful objects. I love Anna Weyant’s new series at Gagosian, which distills the artist’s intimate understanding of surfaces and commerce into spotlit, jewel-box paintings: illusionistic bracelets, earrings, and necklaces featuring stylized daisies and pearls. Like the rest of her work, these pieces reference the tones and textures of the Dutch Golden Age in a lush perversion. Spring Florals (2025), the booth’s sole large painting, arranges naturalistically rendered blossoms with flattened representational forms—striking, cloying, conceptually promiscuous—a vanitas for the age of images and screens.
There are at least superficial parallels between Weyant’s jewels and Kim Tschang-Yeul’s water droplets at Tina Kim, placed meticulously against a similar tan, burlap-style background. High-contrast forms like these photograph well—their prevalence makes sense in a flat-image-forward market—as do pseudo-digital works that, especially in photographs, look like they were originally rendered on a screen. Some of these pieces engage explicitly with image technology and some don’t, but in today’s context, they suggest it: Anish Kapoor’s concave portals at Galeria Continua and Lisson Gallery, the Waldemar Cordeiro 100th Anniversary collaboration between The Mayor Gallery and Luciana Brito, Yves Kleins at Sean Kelly on the basis of their blue. At Ben Hunter, Christopher Page’s Pale Fire (2025) stands out as a more sensitive, emotionally inflected offshoot of the genre; the artist works in reflections and deceptions, melancholic tricks of light.
TEFAF shines in its presentation of historical context alongside the commercial: this year, a brace of Surrealists grounds the trompe l’oeil that informs much of the above. An early Magritte at Robilant+Voena highlights its own proscenium; a smaller work features the first appearance of Magritte’s bowler-hatted man in collage (Di Donna); La Place au Soleil (1956) at Van de Weghe inserts a fourth-dynasty Egyptian scribe (handily pictured next to the painting) like a copy-paste. In other antiquities, the well-curated Charles Ede booth sets Greek and Roman marbles against grayscale mid-century French paintings for an interesting neoclassical effect that happens to echo a few nearby de Chiricos.
More broadly, Lucio Fontana is well-represented across dimensions, on canvas and in sculpture. Calder suspensions are omnipresent, hanging from seemingly every exhibitor’s ceiling like soothing baby mobiles or non-functional omnidirectional compasses, with a matte black stabile (Van de Weghe) planted in the center of the main floor, anchoring both us and them.
Tense, delicate pieces seem to float above the volatility—the Calders, of course, but also found metal objects woven into a wire net by Gjertrud Hals (Galerie Maria Wettergren) and breathtaking, intricate, alternately avian and aeronautical Lee Bontecou structures at Ortuzar and Marc Selwyn Fine Art.
— Matilda Lin Berke
Edited by Jubilee Park