Tracey Emin, Pierre Huyghe, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Zoe Leonard, Jordan Wolfson and more

While the fair’s curated sections For Your Infotainment, Frame and Spotlight are each given over to one-artist booths - over 60 in total - it’s not only here that solo presentations can be found at Frieze New York. For 2018, galleries across the fair are taking the opportunity to draw attention to a single artist. Ambitious solos presentations at Frieze New York 2018 offer a survey of the most exciting and influential artists in the world today, from the critically acclaimed and most recognisable names to more recent discoveries - spanning Tracey Emin, Pierre Huyghe and Theaster Gates to Arthur Jafa, Zoe Leonard, Jordan Wolfson and many more.

Leading the pack of institutionally-recognised artists enjoying solo attention at the fair are figures including Pierre Huyghe, whose mesmeric L'Expédition Scintillante Act II (Light Box) (2002) is presented by Marian Goodman Gallery (C21) following Huyghe’s acclaimed installation at Skulptur Projekte Munster 8 and ahead of a new installation at London’s Serpentine Galleries this October. Meanwhile, experience the ‘perverse, pressurized’ photography of Torbjørn Rødland (whose exhibition ‘The Touch That Made You’ recently travelled from the Serpentine to the Fondazione Prada, Milan) in a solo presentation at David Kordansky Gallery (B15).

Back in NYC, Zoe Leonard, whose work is surveyed at the Whitney Museum until June 10th, has her rarely exhibited ‘Aerial’ series displayed at Galeria Raffaella Cortese (A7). Following his recent retrospective at the Met, meanwhile, veteran British artist David Hockney, is the subject of not one but two solo presentations at Frieze - by PACE (L4) and Offer Waterman (F4). Concurrent with his retrospective in the city at DIA, François Morellet is the subject of a solo presentation by The Mayor Gallery (A16). Informative context for Morellet’s installation at DIA:Beacon, No End Neon (1990/2017), is offered at the fair in the form of Almine Rech’s stand (C24), which surveys the neon works of legendary Conceptualist pioneer Joseph Kosuth.

Besides links to institutions, several of the solo presentations at the fair tie in to solo exhibitions at galleries around New York - part of the cultural moment that is ‘Frieze Week’. Jordan Wolfson’s ‘Riverboat Song’ opens at David Zwirner’s West 19th Street space on May 2: three new wall-based works by the artist premiere at the fair with Zwirner alongside an original series of paintings by the gallery’s newest signing, Josh Smith - two solos in one booth (D29). Elsewhere, the solo presentation of Matthew Brannon’s new silkscreen works at Casey Kaplan (C1) runs alongside his ‘Concerning Vietnam’, opening at the gallery on May 1. Finally, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (C9) dedicates its booth to new work by Arthur Jafa, whose ‘Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)’ opens across all floors of the gallery’s Harlem space on May 4.

One of the most acclaimed recent chroniclers of the conditions, experience and expressions of Black life, Jafa’s work is part of a current of work at the fair examining urgent contemporary questions of justice and identity - including the Chicago-based Theaster Gates, famed for his direct interventions into the city’s South Side, whose work is given the solo treatment at the fair by Richard Gray Gallery (A1). The fabric of the American urban landscape is also scrutinized in the work of Charles Harlan, whose epic Bird Bath (2017) - based on the form of a mass-produced church baptistery - forms a solo presentation, made jointly by first time Frieze New York exhibitors JTT and Kayne Griffin Corcoran (D16). As JTT’s Jasmin Tsou comments in a video interview, Harlan is interested in the way in which industrial materials reflect the values of a culture; Kevin Harman, whose solo presentation is with Ingleby (D33), almost making their fair debut, approaches similar themes in a different form - before the fair opens, Harman will source a large dumpster from around Manhattan, rearranged its contents into a sculpturally beautiful form, and ship the resulting sculpture for display on the booth. This will be the Scottish Harman’s Stateside debut.

Frieze New York 2018 runs May 3-6.

Another UK export, ceramicist Jesse Wine, enjoys a solo display of new works in a solo at Mary Mary (D38). Displaying a similar interest in process and the development of mateiral and inspiraiton into artwork, the Brooklyn-based Wine brings aspects of everyday life and the studio into his delicately and sometimes deceptively finished clay forms. Romanian-born, identical twin brothers Gert & Uwe Tobias show new ceramcis and paintings in Rodolphe Janssen’s solo presentation (A5), while alternative approach to painting, no less informed by historical precedents, can be found in the work of Belgian-Syrian Farah Atassi, whose stand François Ghebaly Gallery (D1) is dedicated to. London-based Alex Dordoy frames the solo booth he has designed for GRIMM (D34) around a new painting series, while finally, the iconic work of Tracey Emin is given fresh nuance as she debuts new paintings (as well as drawings and bronzes) at the booth of Xavier Hufkens (D25), following her first show with the gallery late last year.

Emin’s solo presentation resonates with the strong presence of female artists and feminist positions across Frieze New York. Paul Kasmin Gallery (E4) surveys works from the 1990s to today by Tina Barney in a solo stand of intimate portraits of New York cultural figures, including Joan Didion, Robert Ryman and Michael Stipe. In Focus, David Lewis (D35) devotes his stand to Barbara Bloom, a key ‘Pictures Generation’ artist whose work interrogates the gendered, economic and political currents of domestic display and furniture, refusing, in the gallerist’s words, ‘easy answers’. Another allusion to interior space can be found in Andrew Edlin’s solo presentation of painter Summer Wheat (C7), whose large, dense, fibre-like works will cover the gallery’s booth in the manner of medieval tapestries.

Historical counterpoint for such work can be found in the practice of Patrick Saytour, which, while wildly diverse, includes experiments with painting on oilcloth and other domestic fabrics: Ceysson & Bénétière (F10) offer a solo presentation for the curious. Like survey shows in small scale, solo booths like these offer a chance to consider artists in all their individuality and uniqueness. So it’s no surprise that some of the most distinctive and indeed uncategorizable talents are among the individual presentations at the fair this year. Fredericks & Freiser (A23) for example will show only paintings by Thomas Trosch, whose exuberant paintings of society matrons the artist rarely allows to be exhibited.

Over at Focus, Martos Gallery (A8) dedicates its stand to the late Dan Asher, whose complex, even enigmatic output - the presentation includes video footage, drawings and sketches on paper - was the result of an anthropological perspective influenced by the aritst’s suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

Frieze New York 2018 runs May 3-6.