Frieze New York 2022:
Advisory Selections

Al Held at White Cube

Al Held brings a pop of colour to White Cube's Frieze presentation with three fantastic watercolour on paper mounted board works.

Born in Brooklyn, Al Held is today heralded as a pioneer of hard-edged abstraction. Having attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he befriended the likes of Joan Mitchell and Ellsworth Kelly, Held returned to New York in the 1950s where he began producing his widely recognised compositions.

Ibrahim Mahama at White Cube

Half of a Yellow Sun, Ibrahim Mahama's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong recently closed at White Cube.

International thief thief echoes the works shown in this presentation—wood panels collaged with sections of Dutch wax cloth that the artist collected from traders working in Ghanaian markets.

Originally printed and traded by colonial Dutch companies working on the West coast of Africa, the inclusion of this historic cloth seeks to celebrate national and pan-African identity, while shining a light on past and present Ghanaian political and cultural tropes.

Alex Da Corte at Sadie Coles HQ

Informed by Pop Art and Surrealism, Alex Da Corte creates exploratory and fantastical works that combine high and low-brow American cultural references.

A Modern Love is a continuation of the artist's use of window imagery, which caught the attention of crowds at Sadie Coles HQ's booths at Art Basel in Basel and Frieze London last year.

After you've soaked in Da Corte's neon light sculpture at The Shed, head over to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his video installation ROY G BIV is on show for the museum's Biennial.

Jesse Wine at The Modern Institute

Persil is one of two Jesse Wine sculptures being shown by The Modern Institute at Frieze.

Speaking with Ocula Advisory on the conceptuality behind his limbed sculptures, Wine explains, 'Limbs have become the conceptual scaffolding of most of the things I make. Despite the many science-fiction predictions about what the world would look like in 2021, each and every human is housed in a body—it's a universal starting place.'

Wine holds an MA from London's Royal College of Art, and has since relocated to New York.

Julia Chiang at The Modern Institute

The Modern Institute present this new diptych painting by Julia Chiang. An intricate web of carefully constructed patterns, Chiang builds her paintings through layers of translucent paint to achieve a feeling of both tactility and stillness.

Born in Atlantic City, Chiang lives in New York with her husband KAWS. Chiang's meticulous visualisations have been shown at The Modern Institute in Glasgow, New York's Fridman Gallery, Half Gallery, and more recently The Journal Gallery, among others.

Francis Picabia at Michael Werner

Untitled (ca. 1939) exemplifies one of Francis Picabia's more abstract works, produced around the time of the start of the Second World War.

Having befriended Marcel Duchamp in 1910, the Dada movement continued to influence Picabia's painting practice alongside Cubism, of which the artist was a key figure.

Alongside his feature in Michael Werner's Frieze presentation, Picabia's work is currently being shown in Cheim & Read's group show Some People, as well as Helene Bailly Gallery's upcoming two-man show with the Dutch Fauvist Kees van Dongen.

Florian Krewer at Michael Werner

This stellar Florian Krewer painting is showing in Michael Werner's strong Frieze New York presentation.

Taking both photographs and memories as his starting point, Krewer has gained notoriety for his effervescent style defined by loose brushstrokes rooted in the artist's personal experiences.

Reporting on the Pinault Collection's acquisition of six works last year, Ocula Advisory explained, 'Krewer's hazy and saturated paintings often incorporate animistic tropes and explore the life of New York's queer and trans communities'.

The artist studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 2011 to 2017 under legendary painter Peter Doig, whose artistic influence permeates through Krewer's saturated palette.

Simon Fujiwara at Esther Schipper

Esther Schipper's solo presentation of British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara focuses on his ongoing project 'Who the Baer', which focuses on a cartoon character with no gender, race, sexuality, or nationality developed during the 2020 lockdown.

In Who is Kissing Who? Fujiwara combines the drawings of 'Who' with Gustav Klimt's iconic 1907 painting, The Kiss.

Fujiwara has had solo exhibitions in many top European institutions, including Fondazione Prada, Milan (2021); Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d'entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris (2018); and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2021), among others.

Paula Siebra at Mendes Wood DM

Paula Siebra is a Brazilian painter from the northeastern city of Fortaleza, Ceará. Born in 1998, the young painter has already been the subject of two solo shows with Mendes Wood DM in both their New York (2021) and São Paulo (2020) galleries.

Her reduced tones are instantly recognisable, and this 2022 is no exception, continuing her exploration into the still lifes, portraits and landscapes inspired by her Brazilian hometown.

Siebra has participated in numerous group shows in institutions both in Brazil and abroad, namely, the Brazil National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro (2017); Fábrica Bhering, Rio de Janeiro (2019); and Nieuwe Gentweg 21, Bruges (2021), among others.

Karlo Kacharava at Modern Art

Modern Art is staging a solo presentation of Georgian artist and cult figure Karlo Kacharava, introducing a selection of his works produced in the late 1980s and early 90s.

Weaving both fictional and real-life narratives, his paintings and drawings imagine a world interconnecting American Pop Art and German Expressionsim with the lyrics of Nick Cave, among other titans in global cultural history.

As a Georgian native, Kacharava places Tbilisi as the cultural nexus of his artistry.