The New Art Dealers Alliance (Nada) has returned to Chelsea with no shortage of sibilation for the 2024 edition during New York’s Frieze week. To mark its tenth anniversary, the member-driven fair is featuring 92 galleries on four jam-packed floors at 548 West 22nd Street. Weird, wonderful moments abound throughout: buoyant abstraction, moody realism and a wide array of works by known quantities and up-and-comers alike. Of special note is the preponderance of wall-hanging sculptural works that bring the immediacy of painting into three dimensions, using a variety of unexpected materials to create a new, fresh kind of spatial presence.
On the first floor, the Chelsea-based Dinner Gallery is showing serpentine, wrought-iron-reminiscent clay works ($4,000-$9,500) by the Brooklyn-based Chinese artist Wen Liu. Liu uses moulds fashioned from found furniture combined with resin-encased prescribed herbs to comment on the simultaneous precarity and ingenuity of the immigrant experience. “The work is about loss and abandonment, but also about renewal,” says Celine Mo, the gallery’s owner.
Rachel Uffner’s stand makes quite the sculptural splash with an earthenware floor piece depicting a romantically rendered business binder titled Taxes, 2021 (2022; $18,000) by the Brazilian-American artist Sacha Ingber. “That’s a copy of her actual W-2!” says gallery assistant Lucy Liu. “She likes to pair very serious, difficult subjects with more playful elements.”
Next door, at the Montreal gallery Bradley Ertaskiran’s stand, the Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Stephanie Temma Hier has encased a realist oil painting of a winning hand in a charming ceramic turtle, which appears to crawl slowly up the wall.
Bradley Ertaskiran features a ceramic turtle by Stephanie Temma Hier
Steven Molina Contreras
Over at the Athenian gallery Dio Horia’s stand, the UK artist Ally Rosenberg is showing a series of zany, ceramic tile-based pieces that navigate the thin line between taboo and disgust. “Each of the pieces has a different story behind it,” says the owner Marina Vranopoulou. “This one is about a myth he heard growing up about how popping a soap bubble would make a fairy die.”
The Lower East Side’s No Gallery has brought along a delightfully skeevy, hirsute life-vest sculpture by the Florida-based artist Todd Lim, while Brooklyn’s Swivel Gallery is featuring an elegant beaded metalwork piece by the South Korean artist Dew Kim, priced at $4,000.
At Toronto gallery Franz Kaka’s stand, the Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Lotus L. Kang finds provisional beauty in the queasiness of the flesh with her cross-disciplinary odes to becoming (priced at $7,500). “Her practice is tied to the history of photography as an analogue for the history of the body,” says the gallery director and artist Aryen Hoekstra. “The work is made by pouring silicone into a photography-darkroom tray and engaging the photographic chemical process in sculptural terms.”
Biological process
The most moving display at this year’s Nada is the New York-born, Detroit-based artist and curator Jova Lynne’s turn on the stand of Matéria Gallery (formerly Simone DeSousa). Lynne’s presentation, Mitosis, mines themes of physical and emotional rejuvenation through reverent photographic portraits and dynamic sculptural works. The title refers to a biological process by which a single cell divides into two daughter cells, a reference to the god-like and often painful legacy of Black women’s creativity.
“Mitosis is a reflection on identity and loss; she lost her mother, and the person depicted in the photographs is her mother’s twin,” says DeSousa, the gallery’s owner and director. “This work is about what gets passed down in a network of existence.” Nucleus (2023, $10,000)—a beautiful, white fan-like piece made from wood, wax and aluminium—invites the viewer into a spellbinding one-to-one relationship, prompting onlookers to consider the emotional interconnectivity of history.