Looking Forward: Stefan Kalmár

It’s exciting to me when galleries use the fair as a platform to present parallel art histories. This year, that includes Gallery Hyundai, from Seoul, showing experimental Korean artists of the 1960s and ’70s like Seung-taek Lee and Park Hyunki, and Tokyo’s Taka Ishii Gallery, with a survey of materiality in Japanese postwar abstraction, including Gutai co-founder Yoshio Sekine. Both presentations will offer the chance to discover a more nuanced – hence just – understanding of art-historical developments, and question the (still) prevailing dominance of any singular (often Western) perspective.

A different kind of urgency is o ered by Galerie Lelong and P.P.O.W. Lelong is showing polemical work by the likes of Alfredo Jaar and Nancy Spero, while P.P.O.W will focus on key gures from ’80s New York, whose work addressed contemporary social issues like Anton van Dalen, Martin Wong and David Wojnarowicz. Though spanning different moments, all these artists’ practices speak to 
the political reality of the USA and the world today. For me, both galleries are models of responsibility that today’s dealerships are often lacking: in the work they do and how they conduct their business I sense the same urgency and integrity as I do in the artists they represent. Finally, I worked at Artists Space with Chrysane Stathacos, who was the Director of Education there for over 20 years, before reaching her retirement age in fall 2016. It will be a great pleasure to see an early work of hers, 1–900 Mirror Mirror (1993–96), recreated at The Breeder.

Tickets for Frieze New York 2017 are available here.