Frieze New York Opens Strong, But The Real Experiment Is Just Beginning

Among the galleries debuting at Frieze this year is Sargent’s Daughters, with a solo presentation by Mexico City-based Yeni Mao, whose works also featured in the Focus section, all priced between $8,000 and $15,000. The booth presents an artist-engraved language billed as a work of assimilation and dissection of the body, broadcasting and re-broadcasting the body and infrastructure, where body memory, structural tension and material transformation come together. Mao’s work carries the residue of structure and culture simultaneously, transforming fragments, bases and making objects that feel both excavated and newly weaponized, suspended between personal legends and the broader language of migration, protection and pressure, and the presentation precedes the artist’s solo exhibition at Museo620 City of Aulitum20 in Mexico City’s upcoming.

Also debuting at Frieze, Campeche presents a solo exhibition of Mexican artist Abraham González Pacheco, whose works focus on archaeology, history and indigenous narratives to distort official histories and reveal invisible aspects of cultural history. Made with natural colors, graphite and concrete, the works feel fossilized by the accumulation, as if each surface holds traces of stories that still resist erasure. Memory and ancestral tracing work here as a poetic touch, opening up the gray areas where truths overflow at the edges of the collective mind and the individual mind. Interested in the voids between the incomplete fragments that make up the invented narrative, González Pacheco proposes tools to excavate the collective imagination and find possible futures in its ruins. Also included in the recently opened Carnegie International, his works are priced between $8,000 and $15,000.

Buenos Aires gallery Isla Flotante debuts in Focus with the fluid paintings of Rosario Zorraquín, in which the evocation of body movement and inner human contact melts through watermarks, soft spots and painting-like narratives. Occupying a fluid space between figures, intimate storytelling and healing, the works expand through the booth through its transparent space. Prices range from $6,000 to $20,000. Working to strengthen the chain of its institutions, Frieze also confirmed this year the support of the Sherman Family Foundation, which has committed itself to a five-year acquisition program dedicated to the focal point. Providing $50,000 per year, the fund supports two acquisitions at $20,000 each, with an additional unrestricted award of $5,000 directed to each selected artist for production and studio support. “What’s important is that part of the funding goes directly to the artist—not just the purchase but the production or studio funding. It’s about investing in future work,” Messineo told the Observer. With this fund, the Brooklyn Museum acquired two works by Bettina from Ulrik: Traffic Patternsfrom the series Phenomenological New York. (The artist award will be presented posthumously to support the documentation and preservation of his work) In addition, the Baltimore Museum of Art received three works: Reika Takebayashi’s. Both banks I from the Public Gallery, Seba Calfuqueo’s PHILAN SIKILL 1 from W Galería and Joanne Burke Festival 7 from Soft Opening. Each artist will receive an unrestricted prize of $5,000.

The New York Art Week endurance test continues today, with the Independent and TEFAF opening next. Stay tuned.

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