Fair and Fair Alike: Miami 2009. NADA

Fair and Fair Alike coverage so far:

. Scope

. Aqua Art

. Pulse

. The Big One, Art Basel Miami Beach

. An Overview Before the Individual Fairs

. Art Bloggers at Art Miami

. Are We Out of the Woods?

. A Little Gossip

. Art? Or Not Art?

. Nosing Around

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With venues already divided between the beach and the mainland, triangulating the geography with yet another distant location seemed absurd. I thus arrived at the Deauville Beach Resort, this year’s location for NADA— via taxi since the shuttle was nowhere in evidence—with a chip on my shoulder. But a big comfy lobby and sweeping views of the beach nudged the chip off by the time I reached the ballroom.
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Yes, you heard me: ballroom. In what has to be the oddest coupling of art and venue, the event took place in the chandeliered-with-a-capital-C ballroom, subdivided into a warren of booths. NADA, as I'm sure you know, stands for the New Art Dealers Alliance.

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The odd pairing of art and venue: NADA in the ballroom of the Deauville Beach Resort

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There was a variety of work, but if I had to categorize it, I would say Crafty. There was a lot of consciously handcrafted work constructed--or reconstructed, or deconstructed--from recycled materials. There were also a lot of small works, all the better for intimate viewing; some strong geometries (I’ll give you a peek here, saving other images for a big Geometry post coming up); and, oddly, a couple of stacked sculptures involving beer cans and malt liquor.

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Cut and stitched: Larissa Nowicki at Man & Eve, London

Detail below:

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Hilary Berseth, Programmed Hive #10; at Eleven Rivington, New York
The artist/beekeeper set an armalture into his hive and let the bees do the rest. There's a big element of chance, but the results are oddly spectacular. I saw work from this series last year in the Lower East Side gallery, where the sculptural hives were shown without the plexi cover

Closer view, below

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Dianna Molzan's deconstucted paintings; at Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles
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Cardboard? Or paintings of cardboard? Both. Marti Cormans, Untitled (cardboard), oil on cardboard; at Jose Bienvenu Gallery, New York
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Reconstructed: Dario Escobar, Obverse and Reverse, leather soccer balls; also at Bienvenu
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Below, a quick pic to show you the scale
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The craft table: George Herms, Ida Ekblad; at The Journal, Brooklyn
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Plain geometry: Michael Rey; at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles
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Below, a quick pic to show you the scale
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One of the pleasures of viewing a lot of art in a concentrated space is seeing how currents cross and merge. Within just a few paces, I saw the work of a young painter, Ben Berlow, in two galleries. I liked the little geometries, modestly--almost naively--painted on scraps of cardboard or torn-out book pages. In one gallery they were affixed directly to the wall; in the other, they were framed. In both, they were all sold (the prices were in the low three figures).

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Berlow at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco (with Erwin Wurm's resin-cast gherkin; sorry a detail of the little sculpture is too blurry to show you)
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Below, detail of Barlow's painting




Same artist, different booth. Here Berlow's work is framed. It loses its immediacy but none of its playfulness; at Callicoon Fine Arts, Callicoon, New York (wherever that is)
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In situ, below
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Misa Inaoka sculpture; at Johansson Projects, San Francisco

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Closeup below
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Two's a coincidence: beer sculptures. (Add the two at the Rubell Collection--the Budweiser room and a curtain of cans'n'six-pack plastic rings--and I guess you have a trend).

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Above, Henry Taylor; at Galerie Carlos Cardenas, Paris

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Below, Tony Matelli; at Leo Koenig, New York
(See the "weeds" in the background? I wrote about them here)

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Another section of the fair featured solo-artist presentations

.Views above and below

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A separate wing held the galleries that devoted their booths to a single artist. There was no theme here, but a lot of good stuff. A couple of galleries sold out, leaving the dealers to go through the motions of being interested and involved when, I’m sure what they really wanted to do was be at the beach.

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As I mentioned in the other posts, some of the work from NADA will find its way into thematic posts, which will follow as soon as I’ve reported on Red Dot, Art Miami, and the Rubell Collection.
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Malevich meets Gee's Bend: Sarah Crowner's pieced-and-stitched geometries, framed as paintings; at Nicelle Beauchene, New York
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Op, aught style: Geoffrey Todd Smith, Eroticize Your Eyes, oil on panel; at Western Exhibition, Chicago
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Sandra Vasquez de la Horra was featured at ABMB. Here she has a solo at Galerie Rupert Pfab, Dusseldorf
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All the work is pencil on paper dipped in wax.

Below, one work
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Brendan Fowler installation; at Rental Gallery, New York
According to The Art Newspaper, which published a Miami daily edition during he run of the fairs, the entire booth sold out
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Fairgoers were the only visitors to Miami who got to the beach and turned west.

Here, for a moment, looking east
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If you want to see some live-action from NADA, click here for a two-minute report from Lindsay Pollock, via her Art Market Views blog.
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Next up: Red Dot

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