Among the galleries debuting at Frieze this year is Sargent’s Daughterswith a single presentation of Mexico City Yeni Maowhose works were also distinguished in the Focus section, all priced between $8,000 and $15,000. The stand presents the artist’s charged sculptural language as an exercise in embodiment and deconstruction, casting and reshaping the body and infrastructure, where bodily memory, architectural tension and material transformation fold into each other. Mao’s work carries the remains of structure and ritual at once, turning fragments, props and forms into objects that feel both excavated and newly armed, suspended between personal mythology and a wider language of displacement, protection and pressure, and the presentation precedes the artist’s solo exhibition at Museo City a20.
Also debuting at Frieze, Campeche presents a solo show by the Mexican artist Abraham González Pachecowhose works draw on archaeology, historiography and indigenous narratives to distort official histories and foreground sectors rendered invisible by cultural hegemony. Made with natural pigments, graphite and concrete, the works feel fossilized through accumulation, as if each surface bears traces of stories that still resist erasure. Memory and ancestral traces operate here as poetic gestures, opening up into the gray areas where facts overflow at the edges of the collective and individual mind. Interested in the voids between the imperfect fragments that make up established narratives, González Pacheco suggests tools to excavate the collective imagination and find possible futures in its ruins. Also featured at the newly opened Carnegie International, his works cost between $8,000 and $15,000.
Gallery of Buenos Aires The floating island debuts at Focus with the liquefied paintings of Rosario Zorraquín, in which evocations of bodily movement and intra-human contact dissolve into each other through filigrees, soft smudges and sketch-like narratives. Occupying a fluid space between figuration, intimate storytelling and healing, the works expand through the cabin via their transparent surfaces. Prices range from $6,000 to $20,000. Working to strengthen its institutional strands, Frieze also this year secured the support of the Sherman Family Foundation, which has committed to a five-year acquisition initiative dedicated to the Focus section. Providing $50,000 annually, 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 some of the funding goes directly to the artist — not just acquisition, but also production or studio support. It’s about investing in future careers,” Messineo told the Observer. Through the fund, the Brooklyn Museum acquired two works by Betina BY Ulrike: Traffic patternsfrom the series Phenomenological New York. (The artist award will be given posthumously in support of the documentation and preservation of her work) In addition, the Baltimore Museum of Art acquired three works: Reika TakebayashiS ‘ Both banks I BY Public GallerySeba Calfuqueo’s PILLAN SIKILL 1 by W Galería and Joanne BurkeS ‘ Festival 7 BY Soft opening. Each artist will receive an unrestricted prize of $5,000.
The endurance test of New York Art Week continues today, with Independent AND TEFAF next opening. Stay tuned.
