Lola Kramer's Favorite Works from Frieze New York Viewing Room 2023

SANYA KANTAROVSKY

Snail with Hat, 2023

Oil on linen

31.5" x 23.5" (80 cm x 59.7 cm)

Presented by Modern Art

When I asked Sanya Kantarovsky if he had work at Frieze, he smirked and said, "Yes. It's a painting of a snail with an asshole. And he's wearing a hat." Later that night, I dreamt that this mischievous mad hatter was munching on the Lily of the Nile that my mother had planted around our mailbox. He had left a trail of slime up and down the driveway. He stopped to chat, and I taught him how to whistle with a blade of grass. (Important side note: Did you know that the writer Patricia Highsmith kept snails as pets? Occasionally, she would bring them out to a party where they would ride in her handbag on a piece of lettuce. True story.) What I love most about Sanya's work is that whether it's in a drawing, painting, or even a moving image work (like his most recent short film, A Solid House), the id, or super-ego, is always present. He's got a wild ability to capture the most buried part of our personality, what Freud might refer to as the unconscious instinctual component of our character driving our desires and emotional impulses. 

ISSY WOOD

Sentry 22, 2022 

Oil on linen 

8.27" x 11.81" x 0.79" (21 cm x 30 cm x 2 cm) 

Presented by Carlos/Ishikawa

I've always appreciated the subtle perversion woven throughout Issy Wood's subject matter, her tight compositions and feathered strokes that make everything appear as if under a macabre cotton-batted English sky. But Emma Cline's pairing of Wood with the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh for her publishing project with Gagosian, "Picture Books," coupling  the visual with the literary, pointed to a whole other texture I hadn't yet put my finger on. Cline puts it best when she says that Moshfegh and Wood share "a gothic, spiky humor and an attunement to the darker currents of the world, the hidden realms where shame and desire intersect." I had read Moshfegh's work before, but it wasn't until devouring her psychotic novel, Lapvona, that I fully understood what I couldn't articulate before. If you want to add another layer to the work, listen to Wood’s music on Spotify.

ZAK KITNICK

NBG, 2022 

Bronze, stainless steel, galvanized steel, and mild steel in aluminum artist frame 

8.5" x 12.52" x 0.75" (21.6 cm x 31.8 cm x 1.9 cm) 

Edition Unique 

Presented by CLEARING

Zak Kitnick once told me that as a child, if he misbehaved, his mother would send him to organize her closet. But unlike a typical child or even an adult, Zak loved the assignment. As an artist, the subject of his work has always been to challenge conventions of production and economy and question notions of distribution through seriality and reproduction. Whether he’s printing drastically enlarged pixelated images of olive branches across industrial steel (as in his exhibition "Friendship"), organizing the seasons into corresponding colored neon lights (as in The Weather), or mining the structure of the backgammon board as if it were a Carl Andre composition, the locus of the work usually comes back to ubiquitous examples of information presented as decoration. His ability to boundlessly cross categories of art, decoration, and utility –– while seamlessly integrating their shared properties confounds me every time. I’m more of a chess person, but it’s not really about that. 

MELVIN EDWARDS

Untitled, c. 1974

Watercolor and ink on paper

17.76" x 12.01" (45.1 cm x 30.5 cm)

Presented by Alexander Gray Associates

I read each sculpture in Melvin Edwards's series "Lynch Fragments" (1960s - present) as if it were a poem. “As a composer might experiment with sound, I was experimenting with form” Edwards says. I had never seen his drawings before, but I passed by this work on paper from 1974 in Alexander Gray’s booth, and it completely stopped me in my tracks. It was like seeing handwritten lyrics by my favorite musician. The negative space of chains pushes through a cacophony of color like it could be a scrap on the cutting room floor. Still, as with all of the work and each reference to this powerful symbol, as it relates to the history of our country and even to the vocation of Blacksmithing, it’s far too triumphant to be an afterthought. It made me think of this moment in a video where he says, “Maybe the whole of existence is an improvisation.” 

MAIA RUTH LEE

B.B.M 35, 2022 

Ink on canvas 

55" x 37.24" x 0.98" (139.7 cm x 94.6 cm x 2.5 cm)

Presented by Tina Kim Gallery and François Ghebaly

I first met Maia Ruth Lee through the experience we shared building Wide Rainbow, a contemporary art after-school program that brought art to under-resourced neighborhoods across multiple boroughs. One of my favorite photos of Maia was taken a moment before heading to the airport to present a library from the Sparkle Nation Book Club at the Printed Matter Book Fair in LA. In the photo, Maia is on the sidewalk, tying a 300 sq ft. quilt that a group of us had handmade (the night before) in the Sixth Street Community Center's auditorium. The quilt she’s tying is in the same style as the Bondage Bags that she has since turned into a tool for mark-making. With her windswept hair and determined attitude, the photo not only captures the grassroots efforts that went into our work with Wide Rainbow, but also the care and dedication that I have always admired in Maia. 

About Lola Kramer

Lola Kramer is a curator, writer, and editor based in New York City. She is the curator of Liz Magic Laser's Frieze Project at Frieze New York 2023, and is known for her essays, profiles, and interviews with pioneers of creative disciplines. She is the curator of 7 Gardens, a public art exhibition throughout the community gardens in the Lower East Side, conceived as a journey connecting local community space to the practices of established and emerging artists working to represent ideas of nature and community engagement. She was recently selected by Cultured magazine as one of 8 young curators to watch and a leading expert and advocate for the next generation of artists and change-makers.

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Frieze New York returns to The Shed in Manhattan from May 17 to 21, 2023 and promises to be an unmissable event. With an unparalleled selection of galleries and artists, alongside a critically acclaimed curated program the fair is a highlight of the global art calendar.

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