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Why Going Solo Was a Smart Choice at Frieze

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Elena Platonova is an art advisor, curator, and artist liaison in New York and London. Her Instagram handle is @ElenasArtAdventures.

Frieze Art Fair is now over. 200 galleries from 30 countries vied for collectors’ attention in an airy white tent on NYC’s Randall’s Island. With such an overwhelming multitude of artworks to take in and select from, one-person gallery booths presented a respite for an overstimulated eye.

Two separate sections of the fair—Frame and Spotlight—featured exclusively solo projects. But a number of galleries in the Main section chose to showcase a single artist’s oeuvre, an approach yielded a number of benefits. One strong voice is more likely to linger in viewers’ memories than a stream of syncopated sounds in a group presentation. In the case of well-known names, this strategy seems to increase the number of sales by allocating more wall space for crowd-pleasing inventory. A single-person booth can also be a savvy way to promote a lesser-known artist—think a mini one-man gallery exhibition with tens of thousands of visitors from around the globe passing through.

Here are five galleries that reaped the benefits of a one-person presentation:

Dieter Krieg at Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese

German artist Dieter Krieg (1937-2005) forged a unique blend of Pop Art, German and Abstract Expressionism by rendering food, mass-produced household products and, yes, animals, using vigorous gestures with an intensity bordering on religious fervor. Well-respected in his home country both for his art and his influential teaching at the Dusseldorf Arts Academy, Krieg was featured in several important group shows abroad, but he did not receive due recognition outside of his native Germany. Krieg passed away in 2005 and Berlin dealer Klaus Gerrit Friese, who runs the artist’s estate, is intent on bringing him into the international spotlight posthumously. 

John Currin at Gagosian GalleryContinue Reading

Dear Occupy Museums, Stop Watching Bravo’s Work of Art

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Frieze Art Fair is launching in New York later this week. The fair has been targeted by an Occupy Wall Street offshoot called Occupy Museums ostensibly for setting up on Randall’s Island to skirt the city’s powerful unions. But the movement also resents the fact that art collectors’ payments are not more equitably distributed. One of Frieze’s co-Founders blames this mistaken notion of equality on the false promise of Bravo’s reality show competition for artists, Work of Art:

“Over the last 10 years, the art world has tracked global economic change. In America there is a more politicised awareness of inequality between class and wealth. At the same time, more people have decided that art can be a career. They’ve seen art reality TV shows and they think they can make a career purely out of their work. That’s an unrealistic expectation so a lot more people feel disenfranchised,” she says.

London Frieze braves backlash to fly the flag of British culture in Manhattan (Guardian)

Full Up with Frieze

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The Frieze New York art fair will open in between two major sale cycles in Manhattan prompting Georgina Adam to gather this comment from art advisor Lisa Schiff:

“There is just too much being offered in a short period,” Schiff says. “The calendar is jam-packed: there are the auctions, then Frieze New York, then Hong Kong, then Art Basel, then the London sales. I know the collector base for art is growing, that the market is bullish, but there must be a limit to how much inventory can be absorbed in two months.”

Breath of Fresh Air—or Ill Wind? (Financial Times)

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