Lesley A. Martin’s Top 5 Picks from Frieze New York Viewing Room 2024
The Executive Director of Printed Matter selects works by Ghada Amer, Christine Sun Kim and legendary New Yorker Kembra Pfahler
The Executive Director of Printed Matter selects works by Ghada Amer, Christine Sun Kim and legendary New Yorker Kembra Pfahler
Five pieces by five women; a quick selection featuring “women’s work”—a phrase evoked by Ghada Amer, whose embroidered piece WITCHES: My Body My Choice speaks most directly—and defiantly—to core women’s issues. I’ve cast a broad umbrella over these works, all of which speak to me of enchantment, ceremony and spellcasting in one form or another.
Rose Salane, City Hall, Marriages, December 29, 2023, 2024
C-print mounted on aluminum, framed, 70 × 105 × 5 cm. Edition 3 + 2 AP. Presented Carlos/Ishikawa. Under $10k
This is one of a series of eight photographs documenting the residue of City Hall wedding ceremonies—discarded confetti, glitter and colorful streamers that the artist gathers and photographs. I find these deeply melancholic and yet oddly satisfying—a memento mori to the perpetual optimism of romance and its rituals.
Christine Sun Kim, One Recent Past, 2024
Charcoal on paper, 50 × 65 cm. Presented by François Ghebaly. $12,000
There’s something very blunt, yet forward-moving in this gestural work by Christine Sun Kim. One Recent Past, among many (other pieces in the viewing room include similar works entitled One Small Past, for example). In today’s multiverse-obsessed world this piece feels as though it both anchors us in a concrete past while simultaneously opening up alternate possibilities for the now and for the future.
Kembra Pfahler, Isis Water, 1998
Photograph and collage on paper, 74 × 58 × 3 cm. Presented by Emalin. POA
Kembra Pfahler, aka the legendary performance artist behind The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, was a larger-than-life presence in the 1980s and ’90s Downtown scene. This handmade mock-up for a flyer promoting a show at CBGBs in the late ’90s is a raw and mesmerizing piece of recent history.
Sarah Jones, Screen (after Beardsley) (I), 2023
C-print from B/W negative mounted on aluminum, 60 × 48 cm. Presented by Anton Kern. $15,000
Sarah Jones evokes the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. The figurative elements the illustrator is best known for are absent. It’s a controlled and pared-down set of references; the invocation of an ethereal ethos through pattern and form.
Ghada Amer, WITCHES, My Body My Choice, 2023
Embroidery on muslin, 45 × 52 × 4 cm. Presented by Tina Kim Gallery. $10k–$20k
Clear, defiant, yet also delicate—this is a work that speaks directly to our times, sadly, as much as it does to the past; an unalloyed and distinct moment of protest in an otherwise aesthetic sea of beautiful works across the viewing galleries.
About Lesley A. Martin
Lesley A. Martin is Executive Director of Printed Matter. Formerly, she was the creative director of Aperture and founding publisher of The PhotoBook Review. She has been a visiting critic at the Yale University Graduate School of Art since 2016.
About Frieze Viewing Room
Open to all from April 24–May 10, Frieze Viewing Room is the online catalog for the fair, giving global audiences access to gallery presentations coming to Frieze New York 2024. Visitors can search artworks by artist, price, date and medium, save favorite artworks and presentations, chat with galleries and much more.
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Main image: Lesley A. Martin
