Also on view were other artists from the gallery’s program, many of whom Edlin has championed beyond so-called outer circles, including the visionary work of Abraham Lincoln Walkerwhich he put in the spotlight at Art Basel Paris in October. “Visitors to our booth were blown away by the paintings of Abraham Lincoln Walker and Domenico Zindato. This is also our first year to feature Nicole Appel, who is universally loved,” said Edlin.
One of the highlights on the other side of the fair are the playful but slightly grotesque ceramic characters Wesley Andereggfiled by Boise, Idaho-based Stewart Gallery. Although never formally trained—and therefore identifiable as an outsider artist—Anderegg already has a career spanning more than 25 years, with a remarkably consistent exhibition history: 24 solo shows and extensive group exhibitions across the United States have brought him into major public collections, including the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian and the Mining and Crockert Museum of American Art. At the fair, pieces were offered in the $1,760-$9,800 range, with a small number already set, reflecting collectors’ abiding interest in a practice that sits between the folk craft tradition and a more spontaneously imaginative yet socially attuned sculptural language.
Directly, a full wall of portraits by Earle T. Merchant, presented by the Holyoke, Massachusetts gallery PULPit was already marked by a constellation of red dots, each priced at $750. A self-taught artist from Gloucester, Massachusetts, Merchant spent more than 40 years practicing law after graduating from Boston University Law School, turning to painting only in the early 1960s, when he began portraying hundreds of local residents. An active figure within the Rockport Art Association, he organized life drawing groups as he developed a disciplined yet intuitive practice, meticulously labeling the back of each work with the person’s name, date and often age.
Mostly small oil paintings on panel, these portraits—naïve but psychologically charged, with awkwardly rendered hands and a restrained palette—eschew any canonical idealization. Instead, they capture something much more elusive: the inner worlds of their subjects, weaving into each face the quiet complexity of lived experience and the particular trajectories each figure carries.
