Villa Warsaw Joins NADA as the ‘Fair’ Expands Internationally
From the hallowed halls of a former Yugoslavian Embassy to the lapping shores of environmentalist enclave Governors Island, this fall NADA (New Art Dealers Association) provided tandem opportunities for emerging international dealers through their curated exhibitions at Villa Warsaw and NADA House Governors Island. Unlike NADA Miami and NADA New York, NADA’s Houses are not your standard art fair, which typically prioritizes sales in a venue where the architectural character is negligible. When sales do occur at NADA Houses they are embraced to offset participation fees as exhibitions are curatorially driven and secondarily for sale.
NADA’s Executive Director Heather Hubbs shared via email that “both events provide an opportunity for participating galleries and artists to exhibit work in a unique setting and reach new art audiences” of not just collectors but also architectural enthusiasts and anyone curious to be admitted into otherwise restricted sites. Continuing that “they are very kindred programs…set in historic buildings which are often inaccessible to the public” capturing a unique opportunity to peer into the architectural past and its implied distant occupants.
At Villa Gawroński (Villa Warsaw), May 16–19, 2024, 44 galleries from 25 cities presented work across varying representations of a bodily form’s curving silhouette or figures inhabiting different degrees of dissociative states amid muted pastel-inflected palettes, from the sensually reproductive to emotive trauma-tinged portraits of the everyday. An independent curator, New York’s Yulia Topchiy presented a solo booth of poignantly cinematic paintings by Polish artist Julia Medyńska. Scenes of quiet or quotidien moments take on cinematic depth as the artist explores the promise–and limits of–the medium’s ‘stills’ format. A familiar stillness reaches beyond the canvas frame for viewers to question each vignette and find traces of themselves within these palpable scenes of fraught states: from longing to nostalgia, all the way to isolation and disquieting anxiety. Breathing, 2024 is a closeup of a figure laying on the floor of an interior space at night, perhaps having been crying recently or fully lost in rumination, the gravity of the scene (literally and figuratively) is as palpable as the emotional distance between the viewer and this main character.
The building that stands today was rebuilt with its construction completed in 1948 and is currently privately owned by the Gawroński family, as its name suggests. Having housed diplomatic delegations from the Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and the former Yugoslavia, it feels like fittingly international soil for NADA to raise its flag upon, and an additional homecoming of sorts for KIN (Brussels), RAVNIKAR (Ljubljana), and the slew of American galleries. Glimpses and incomplete views of both corporeal and architectonic forms fittingly bridge the event’s location situated within a historic villa into conversations of the exposition’s art offerings as well.
The corporeal sensations of the body, its emotive capacity, and its contradictory structural and metaphysical duality were explored as the central discussion of re-populating the villa with bodies: those of the artworks as well as of the viewers. The expressively understated sculptures by Nerijus Erminas are titled Seaweeds from 2018 and capture the distinctive emphasis on stylized almost subconscious bodily forms, here sculpted in seemingly draping marble. These are presented by the Lithuanian gallery AV17, who paired them with Andrius Erminas who also interplays decorative architectural motifs with abbreviated vistas of the body from his aptly titled “Bodies” series of the same year.
Russian-born Topchiy notes the “decay of the space in Warsaw seemed to underscore the tension between the presence and absence of these bodies—bringing focus to the fragility and resilience of both structure and spirit in the physical and emotional aspects of being”. Generating a distinctive atmosphere in which “many Polish visitors recalled memories of Communist-era Europe” Topchiy recalls these as the palpable traces that remain of the former Yugoslavia as “the ghosts of a country that no longer exists linger in the space, and some of the works engage with that void”. Re-envisioning the use of such a space for events, open bars, and activations brought much-needed life back into the space while offering moments of reconnection.
As a first edition, many member gallerists weren’t sure of what to expect in terms of engagement with local art supporters. Most were positively surprised, Tbilisi-based The Why Not Gallery’s co-founder Gvantsa Jishkariani noted: “It was incredible to see such long rows of people [waiting to enter] outside every day.” This introduction to the Polish cultural scene was impactful as Jishkariani “was quite impressed and thrilled that people there are so enthusiastic about contemporary art—it was truly inspiring”. This volume of engaged visitors allowed many international exhibitors to cover their participation expenses, or better with some booths selling multiple works and some even half their inventory.
While the architectural fabric of NADA House on Governors Island is more uniformly in visual disrepair than its villa compatriot, these physical layers of flaking paint and scarred drywall personify the layers of temporal framing within the conception of each artwork, in addition, the ethereal aggregations embedded in the site-specificity of Nolan Park House 17. The sixth edition of this longer-running show–open September 3rd through October 27th, 2024–presented 21 artists curated by 17 galleries and art spaces both inside and outside allowing the change of the seasons to be a vivid actor shifting the tone of the experience of visiting from savoring the last notes of summer to a melancholic autumn muse.
Kates-Ferri Projects showcased Karo Kuchar’s monumental fiber art sculpture that pulls layers of architectural debris from similarly vacant premises in Vienna. Space Suit VIII evokes a vintage cut of a bikini from the repertoire of Pop Art leaving the historically objectified female body notably absent. Utilizing translucent fabrics as a base structure allows light to dematerialize this familiar object, both aggrandizing it to an architectural scale and simultaneously hollowing out this iconic symbol as impermanent through its incomplete textural surface patterning. Summoning its use function as a shoreline staple for summer swimmers makes Governors Island an apt location to amplify the sculpture’s many semiotic readings, though it attempts to be an optimistic beacon that an earlier era’s strand of patriarchal dominance is now akin to a crumbling historical edifice.
Most directly invoking the specificity of Governors Island itself, Riitta Ikonen a mail artist, who worked in the island’s artist in residency program created unconventional postcards and packages that push the limits of which formats, object shapes, and materials can successfully reach their destination as the object category we call ‘mail’. These accumulations of organic materials such as crab claws glued into a rectangular structure or remnants of ferry boat anti-slip rubber floor tiles speak to various detritus that are home in its harbor ecosystem and environment as a former naval military base. Some gallerists showed both in Warsaw and on Governors Island, like Topchiy, who spearheaded the installation, reflecting that “the physical decay of the house and its maritime history seem to evoke a more abstract, distant form of memory less about the body and more about what remains after human presence has faded”.
Georgian artist turned gallery co-founder, Gvantsa Jishkariani of the The Why Not Gallery, spearheaded the presentations for their booths in both Warsaw and on Governors Island. Jishkariani’s fiber artworks made their Polish and American debuts alongside the artist collection Garbage Kids during gallery’s inaugural year as a NADA member. Thoughtful deconstructions of seemingly historical tapestries beaten by the sands of time, Jishkariani creates fiber works reminiscent of emblems from earlier eras of aristocratic governance and the expert splendor of royal weaving ateliers. These are remains that bear witness to a checkered past as survivors of revolution, economic downturn, or changing tastes. Emblazoned on its tattered surface all capitalized text reminiscent of graffitied commentary illustrates opinions, perhaps a seed of change responsible for these (materiality violent) upheavals. Brutal Honesty can be read both as a reference to the French Revolution, an anti-monarchy rhetoric acknowledging the inequalities of a broken political system, just as much as a visual juxtaposition of disjuncture between efficient ‘good’ design and historic decorative ornament. It is informative to note that the abandonment of archaic cultural systems has contributed to denigrating the object itself, paralleling the abandonment of these houses’ primary function and subsequent disrepair, as well as our memory as inhabited dwellings continue to fray.
Overall, NADA’s Villa Warsaw counters the growing homogenization of the fight for attention in the global art fair matrix. After the organization’s first foray into the Polish art market hopefully, greater numbers of its American members can gain confidence to participate more widely, providing a much-needed olive branch to emerging and newly appointed mid-tier galleries as pathways to decrease the financial stress typically associated with exhibiting abroad. From an optimistic viewpoint, it may even provide a new foothold towards financial sustainability by diversifying sales to international collectors, through cultivating deeper ties to global institutions and partnering with local galleries for new territories of artist representation. All the while without compromising on the quality of its curatorial frameworks as well as without sanitizing a mood of palpable history.
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