Out of all the art fairs being held in New York this week, the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair may be your best bet for genuine discovery. The event centers emerging enterprises, and this year has 92 exhibitors, about half of which brought some truly intriguing wares.
Percentage-wise, figurative painting ruled the fair, but the best works in that style bypassed camp and irony—the modes most commonly associated with it these days—for unaffected explorations of the self and our culture. Sculpture had a good showing, too, in particular the works by John Newman presented at Europa, the ceramic menagerie of Dorian Reid at Kapp Kapp, or the abstract design of Gérald Lajoie-Restrepo at Pangée.
The fair is on view through Sunday. Here are the booths you shouldn’t miss.
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Jongwan Jang at Foundry Seoul
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and NADA The squid-headed man in a lab coat has a goose, and it’s for you. In an alien landscape painted by Jongwan Jang, it’s business as usual on the giant fungus farm. Two technicians inject a fish with pink dye, another digs a hole, and a weasel stands in attention. Jang uses acrylic and gouache on Korean paper known as hanji, which is made from the inner bark of mulberry trees, and smoothly absorbs paint. The bubblegum pink is the only pop of color in a muted teal and green palette, heightening the otherworldly ambience. It’s refreshing how any metaphor is left unexamined, leaving the viewer to revel in utter oddity. That’s the stuff of enduring sci-fi; without the ‘why’ and ‘where’, we’re still capable of wonder. What could be better?
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Marigold Santos at Patel Brown
Image Credit: Courtesy of Patel Brown, photo by Mikail Mishin Each painting by Marigold Santos presented here depicts an aswang, a shapeshifting creature from Filipino folklore. In Santos’s paintings, women rise from floating roots with keen eyes or beckon with lips formed from sea shells. Santos’s sense for detail is impressive, especially in shroud abyss (skeletal ray as simulacrum), 2024, in which a set of bones, perhaps ones belonging to an aquatic creature, bloom like a night flower. Behind the cartilaginous shroud is a bare-chested woman with a ghastly but entrancing gaze. Per its mythology, an aswang is a predatory entity. Santos has reinterpreted its elusive, mutative nature in reaction to feelings of displacement. Without proper tending, the physical and spiritual self is unstable, ceaselessly shifting to survive its environment.
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Hunter Amos at Strada
Image Credit: Courtesy the Strada World and the artist In the sea of irreverent portraiture at this year’s fair, the sincere and atypical construction of Hunter Amos’s art shines. A roiling current of terracotta lines forms two life-size figures, whose expressions suggest subtle smiles. Amos has skillfully invoked the sculptural depth of carved wood or fresco: layers of paint on the panels create texture, while monochromatic shading mimics flickering light breaking through a deep, dark night. It’s possible to imagine an ecstatic dance in motion. Amos, an Australia-born, New York–based Parsons grad, is a standout on Strada’s young roster; the gallery’s booth suggests that this is an operation worth watching.
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Jova Lynne at Matéria
Image Credit: Courtesy Matéria Matéria’s booth is dedicated to a tender examination of love after loss by Detroit-based photographer Jova Lynne. Her mother died in 2020, but was survived by an identical twin sister, who appears in Lynne’s images with her face hidden behind leaves or with her entire body blurred. In one images, the camera focuses on her hand tightly gripping her sunflower yellow dress. The photography is accompanied by small sculptures—drums and a trombone wrapped in wax—and a large fan hung on the wall, all waiting for their purpose to be fulfilled. The overwhelming impression is of a beloved someone who is both nowhere and everywhere all at once, forever out of reach and present in the objects made precious by proximity.
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Hesse Flatow
Image Credit: Courtesy Hesse Flatow Hesse Flatow has assembled one of the most elegant and cohesive booths in the fair. Alina Tenser, Amanda Martínez, and Emma Safir engage themes of performative labor and materiality, the first two artists via wall-mounted sculptures and the third via mixed-media textiles. Each artist manipulates two-and three-dimensional space, variously suggesting and refuting the sense that their materials are soft and light. Make sure to also catch the solo show of Safir over at Blade Study, as her work rewards a second look. She weaves thread, silk, and upholstery foam into flat planes and in some, small figures are distorted, like a crashing computer screen or a reflection on water interrupted by ripples.
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Hydeon at Ricco/Maresca
Image Credit: Tessa Solomon/ARTnews A unicorn is ablaze but unbothered, an angel’s at the bad end of several bayonets, and a tricked-out Honda is parked on the grass. It’s not a dream, but the stuff of bombastic canvases by Hydeon (né Ian Ferguson), on display at Ricco/Maresca. The paintings are like Hieronymus Bosch meets Blade Runner, with mythological beasts that do battle and laser beams that fly. In his artist statement, Hydeon says that these scenes visualize his varied interests, which include the medieval era, fairy tales, and Victorian architecture. That’s relatable: there’s never enough mental space for all of one’s fascinations, nor is there enough time as an adult to properly indulge each. Why not have them all at once?