The new art fair wants to be a “change agent” with more collaboration, global locations and a hyperlocal New York scene.
Credit...via Cary Whittier
New York’s newest art fair, Future Fair, intends to serve as a change agent — toward “an art market where people are collaborating and co-curating,” said Rachel Mijares Fick, who co-founded it with Rebeca Laliberte.
The fair, which holds its first in-person edition at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, is compact, with 34 galleries — and just 16 large booths, as presenters have been paired (in two instances, tripled) and encouraged to combine forces, on logistics or on a joint artistic offering. “You could be on an awkward date,” said Benjamin Tischer, of New Discretions, quickly adding that his booth-sharing, with the Istanbul gallery The Pill, was going just fine.
The Pill has the fair’s standout: the fast-rising French painter Apolonia Sokol’s lucid, generous seminude portraits of women, cis and trans, of various races; all of them are people she knows. Her art wears its plural feminism with ease. Tischer is showing ceramic vases scrawled with splendidly neurotic verbiage by the New York artist Cary Leibowitz, plus paintings of glassware and distorted faces — a little spooky, a little kitschy — by Jacopo Pagin, an Italian artist with whom Tischer bonded over Instagram.
The most realized duo joins the New York galleries Swivel (Bedford-Stuyvesant) and Trotter & Sholer (Lower East Side) — both founded since the pandemic. Their presentation reads as a unified show. A circle of porcelain sculptures by Derek Weisberg anchors the space: The figures channel Greek Classical melancholy and line-drawing sharpness, and the pedestals are studies in arrested decay. Mixed-media works by Pajtim Osmanaj, from Kosovo, and Luján Pérez, from Spain, augment the somewhat Gothic gravity. It’s a fair booth, but you want to stay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/arts/design/future-fair-contemporary-art-collaboration.html
