Four Writers Report from Frieze Week 2025

Amidst New York City’s busiest art fair week, Oceana Andries, Alexandria Deters, Aurelia Dochnal, and Anna Mikaela Ekstrand report back from Independent, NADA, Frieze, Spring/Break, TEFAF, and Spielzeug’s inter-fair exhibition-on-a-bus shuttle.

Indepedent
On view through May 11

Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s solo presentation of work by American performance artist Pope.L (1955-2023) was raw, humorous, and at times uncomfortable to admire. Pope.L pushed himself and his viewers with his performance and visual works, to make us question political realities and personal anxieties. Even with a small space, Mitchell-Innes & Nash has been able to expertly stagger these complexities in their curation of his work. Yancey Richardson presented a series of the enigmatic photographer and performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-1990), who died due to AIDS-related complications, self-portraits around New York City. One, wearing the iconic ‘Mao-suit’ from his series East Meets West (1979-1989). symbolizes the outsider feelings of trying to belong while still distinctly being ‘other’. It also foreshadows for me the tense relationship America and the U.S. have today, copying and mimicking one another, trying to collide but always being fundamentally different.

 

On the seventh floor, Jean Shin’s work celebrates everyday tasks attempted and completed at Praise Shadow Gallery. At first glance, you think it’s just a display of trophies with blown-up up detailed photos of them, shiny but not noteworthy. These were not newly made trophies created by the artist, but rather found ones, the plaques on each one giving away their previous intended purpose; a screw driver held up high, a man running to deliver mail, a 1998 Girls Soccer Championship—everyday achievements. Trophies like these find themselves discarded over time, and the pride associated with them fades. Shin gives them new life with a common twist that anyone can relate to.

-Alexandria Deters

Who Wants to Be Paris Hilton’s Best Friend? Spielzeug’s Exhibition on a Bus Shuttling Between Independent and NADA
May 8 and 9, and an exhibition opening at 1 Arion Place on May 10, 9PM – 1AM

Artist turned gallerist Evan Karas’s Who Wants to Be Paris Hilton’s Best Friend? caters to the public with an air of fuck-it-let’s-have-fun and 00’s edge. Little red tables staffed by gallerinas cat-calling fair-goers outside of NADA and Independent invite those who were not on his mailing list. A couple enticed by the cool crowd outside of the bus said it reminded them of buying work from Gracie Mansion out of a limo she parked in various places in SoHo or her apartment’s bathroom gallery in the 1980s. Liza Jo Eilers Sometimes the Blouse is Worth More Money Than Money is liquid activated, revealing breasts when a drink flies at it, Catherine Mulligan’s painting Bad Night shows an elderly pair in glitzy dresses, and Ruby Zarsky’s work promises to ‘shemalize’ celebrities and comic heroes, alongside works by Emma Beatrez and Precious Eseosa Star, who will be graduating from Bard’s BFA program next week, the artists investigate nightlife, the beautiful and frightful, and mediatized self-images. The work was chicly installed with overhanging lights on the bus’s windows—if Spice Girls’ Spice Bus (from their 1997 musical Spice World) had entered the artverse, this is what it would look like.

Celebrating the art world’s best (and imo not talked about enough features—its zany party-loving openness, self-aggrandizing, and world-building—the show likens navigating the art world to the reality show, Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, where the impresario socialite-entrepreneur auditions contestants, often making them to ridiculous tasks, to become her best friend. Also, the pink glitter digital blackberry bus tracker is a work of art in itself. So fun.

-Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Cub_ism_Artspace at NADA
On view through May 11

This is Dong Bingqing’s first solo project abroad. Recognized internationally, his work is in the collections of the China Art Museum, Shanghai, and Zhejiang Art Museum. In New York, Cub_ism_Artspace presents fantastical distortions with a muted color palette. Paintings and small sculptures are on view. The sculptures are integrated into the display, creating a dialogue between mediums that causes visitors to be engulfed in his practice. Bingqing contorts his figures and reality to question the gaze of the viewer and subject. Within the paintings is a question of mortality, whimsy, and self-discovery. Many of his ‘portraits’ feature only the hands of the figure. Their gaze is aligned with ours. Whether they hold hair, as in Counting, or a bleeding heart, as in Nailed It, the work’s tone is situated between distress and enlightenment with surrealist elements. Viewers are left questioning the subjects’ psyche and interjecting their own narratives.

With an illustrative style, figures either display complex emotions or are caught in complex circumstances. The story-driven work goes beyond the space of normality to examine the complexity of the human constitution. There is authenticity to his work as he pushes past the ordinary to reveal the emotional. Bingqing interjects the fantastical into figures weighted in reality to reveal an essence beyond the plain being.

-Oceana Andries

G Gallery at Frieze
On view through May 11

Opening Frieze’s Focus section, curated by Lumi Tan, at the intersection of the rest of the fair, Korean G Gallery’s booth transforms into a cardboard city. Flashing with iridescent close-ups of hands and mouths, strange slogans running across the paper screens, the installation jolts the viewer into a state of disorientation. Brooklyn-based South Korean artist Yehwan Song’s video sculpture, Internet Barnacles (2025), brings a nightmare vision of Times Square into The Shed. Song works mostly with web-based media, probing the Internet’s flat surfaces and claiming universality. In Internet Barnacles, she turns her attention to the physical structure of the city as both lattice and screen. Coming to a close is also Song’s show,  Are We Still (Surfing)? at Pioneer Works. Between sculpture and installation, between webpage and video, Song’s work challenges distinctions between the digital and the real. She asks us to interrogate our role as viewers—or web surfers—in an urban environment so mediated by images that strolling and scrolling become interchangeable.

It’s impossible to look at Song’s work and not think of the sculptures of Sarah Sze, as my friend Camille Chang pointed out. Sze’s intricate installations feature prismatic projections on metal, paper, cloth, and wood. The technical ingenuity and intricacy of Sze’s works immerse the viewer in a meditation on materiality. In contrast, Song’s cardboard structure is reminiscent of an early-stage architectural model. The originality of Song’s installation consists in the urban dimension of her sculpture, but the sculpture feels rudimentary. On the wall at the corner of the booth, another work, Loop Hole, features three iPads arranged in a circle connected to the wall. Similarly to the cardboard sculpture, this piece feels incomplete, more like a study than a finished work. Song’s installation is a relevant exploration of the blurring of the urban and the digital, but ultimately does not take the concept far enough technically.

-Aurelia Dochnal

Public Gallery at Frieze
On view through May 11

On Wednesday, London-based Public Gallery invited visitors to sit in a swivel gaming chair to play Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s visual novella, a video-game style choose-your-adventure, No Space for Redemption (2024). Two hours long, the work traverses many themes and settings: a sex club where you can choose to interact with an old school friend or run off with an influencer you admire; a park where you are chastised by the police; a setting where you can choose to kill, be killed, or run—where the scenarios I was met with during my 2o minute visit. The artist is British, but currently based in Berlin, of which there are many clues in the work’s settings and aesthetics. At the center of Brathwaite-Shirley’s piece lies her mission to archive and present black trans experiences. With increasing violence and many sexual undertones, the work lets players navigate erasure and police brutality, but also jealousy and arousal. She has an upcoming solo show at Serpentine, perhaps I will be able to spend longer with her work there; nonetheless, it is strong.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s whole booth is maximally designed, plastered in wallpaper printed with personally hard-hitting questions like “Do you even like yourself?” and three black and white drawings, shifting toward the grotesque, are equally poignant and assertive. One character’s speech bubble says: You only support me if I say what you want me to! Why can’t we disagree and stay close?” And, a clothing rack with t-shirts. The gallery will rotate the participatory video work, something which often happens more discreetly at fairs, to maximize sales, but seems on trend to discuss curatorially. Trending in New York, as Still Life’s exhibition On Cue (also open through May 11 on 1 Kenmare Street) boasts a wall serving as host for works that are rotated every 45 minutes. It is definitely the fair’s coolest booth.

-Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Spring/Break Art Show 
On view through May 12

This year’s Spring/Break drew me back into forgotten childhood joy and memories; I enjoyed reminiscing and sharing one of my favorite memories about ice cream in The Ice Cream Confessional curated by Alexis Hyde featuring artist Richelle Rich, and hopping on a Kevin Largent’s reimagined adult-ready spring horse, The Anvil. It is with works and curations like these that remind me of the fun that can be found at art fairs. Artists (and twins) Sarah and Samantha Ferrer interpreted SPRING/BREAK’s titular concept, Paradise Lost + Found, by connecting to the glitz and glamor of their hometown, Miami. Populated by bright ceramics and paintings, the entire booth reminded me of The Birdcage (1996) and how the city continues through its kitchy tourist vernacular and art deco pastiche to keep its past alive. Glittery works by Ebenezer Singh show the precarious mental tightrope one must walk when confronting scientific fact with religious faith. ‘How would Jesus interact with the dinosaurs?’ I like to think it would be as astounding as Singh’s vision, a true display of shine and calm charisma taming and entrancing these long-extinct beasts.

 

Fruit and distance; what is more accurate to represent paradise? Historically, fruit was brought back from faraway lands to be shown off and tasted, to get people excited to move to a new land, a ‘paradise’ found on earth. In Distance Makes the Fruit Taste Stronger, sculptor Bianca Abdi-Boragi’s bronze sculptures—an old compass, phones with citrus fruits as receivers—were displayed inside vintage suitcases, deceiving the viewer into thinking they were light, but she soon placed one into my hand, and its weight was immediately felt. Combining sand from the Sahara, Bahamas, and Martinique, Abdi-Boragi has also created beautiful carvings in the suitcases. Although her work is inspired by her Algerian roots, it poetically explores broad themes of how colonialism, immigration, and travel continue to impact relationships and memory.

-Alexandria Deters

TEFAF
Open through May 13

Gladstone Gallery presents a salon-style booth with George Condo drawings from 1984-86. In his own distinct style, these colorful works on paper merge pastel and paint in what he calls “drawing-paintings;” seeing so many works together allows for a study in his exploration of references ranging from Picasso to the old Masters. Austrian gallery W&K-Wienerroither & Kohlbacher is presenting some beautiful Egon Schiele work on paper, reclining nudes, and dramatic faces painted with a beautifully light touch—his work. Modernity, a Stockholm-based gallery focused on Scandinavian modern design, presents an incredible brass Paavo Tynell chandelier whose undulating leaf-like forms beautifully play with light. The Finnish designer created it for a hotel in Finland; only six examples are known to survive. Galerie Marcilhac deep-dives into their Eugène Printz holdings, a French cabinet maker, with bookcases and cabinets combining palmwood and brass, some with adjustable shelving, and a stand-out desk boasting a multi-level rounded leg design. Gagosian’s booth with miniature Anna Weyant works of jewelry, some sporting price tags, is both fitting and engaging. We all wish we’d bought her work when she showed with Ellie Rines at 56 Henry.

Presenting an impressive selection of modern and contemporary art, design, and jewelry, in busily designed booths and welcoming visitors with lush floral arrangements (and oysters and champagne if you are there for the preview), TEFAF is a gem. Nearly every male gallerist is wearing a nicely tailored suit—lovely.

-Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

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