Frieze New York

Alex Da Corte’s A Modern Love, 2022, is one of the latest iterations in the artist’s ongoing series of wall-mounted works depicting windows illuminated in neon (beginning in 2017). Existing as a gateway between public and private spaces, Da Corte focusses on the window as an evocative, everyday leitmotif, mining its potential psychological, social, and cultural associations.

Initiating with the notion of the ‘Bad Land’, a term often used to describe the artist’s neighbourhood in Philadelphia, and the broken windows theory, used to determine invisible criminal activity in certain low income areas, the works in the series point at the window as an unexpected cypher for assumed meaning, perverse or otherwise.

The series draws upon various depictions in Western cultural history, from the desolate window scenes of Edward Hopper’s 1930’s America to the all-consuming paranoia of Alfred Hitchcock’s Unlocked Window (1965). In A Modern Love, Da Corte depicts an upturned flowerpot, the flower, its petals and soil spilling out across the sill. The work draws reference to the romanticised concept of the American Dream, in which the perfect ‘white picket fence’ notion of home is so often pitched as a shorthand for success.

Set in contrast with the alluring Pop aesthetic, the upturned contents of the flowerpot evokes a metaphoric rejection or undermining of its ethos. Set in contrast to the tranquil domestic scene and the alluring aesthetic of the neon, the upturned contents of the flowerpot evoke the subtlest suggestion of aggression, a seductive yet ultimately empty promise. 

The short video features an actor dressed in exaggerated stage make up, slowly crooning along to the popular 1934 Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart ballad. The actor holds a silver crescent moon and is surrounded by a constellation of cut-out stars, conjuring a surreal, cosmic karaoke as the lyrics light up the bottom of the screen.

Celestial forms act as a recurring motif within the artist’s work – most recently in his Horoscope series and As Long as the Sun Lasts, the 2021 Met Roof Garden Commission – as symbol for romance, aspiration and melancholia. Here, their flattened forms recall commercial signage and theatrical stage settings, both seductive and surreal.

In Blue Moon Da Corte reflects upon the enduring cultural fascination with finding love, as depicted in popular and commercial entertainment, conjuring a simultaneously wry and romantic vision of this search. The presentation mirrors this exploration of the commercialised representation of human experience. The work is displayed as a video sculpture, encased within an electric blue steel structure designed by the artist; its abstracted modular form resonating both with the art historical legacy of American Minimalist installation and subtly redolent of box-like family TVs that emerged within the song’s era.

The sing-a-long presentation likewise encourages the audience to participate in a collective experience. Of which the artist has stated: ‘The karaoke stage is a perfect melting pot for the good and the bad singers of the world to be what they want to be or what they don’t want to be without recourse. It is a safe space.’

Sarah Lucas’s Bunny Gets Snookered #13, 2019, is a recent incarnation of Lucas’s now iconic Bunny sculptures. First conceived in 1997, Lucas’s Bunny sculptures evoke female nudes reclining on chairs in states of abandon and vulnerability. Employing the same everyday materials as in the beginning, the soft sculptures animate feminine biomorphic forms made from stuffed tights, fluff, clamped to found seating. The slumped stance and splayed legs amount to ambiguous expressions of either sexual availability of vulnerability, echoing the ambivalent connotations of Hans Bellmer’s dolls and mannequins. The use of everyday ‘readymade’ materials is characteristic of Lucas’s work. The chairs function therefore as stand-ins for the human body, just as furniture is used elsewhere in Lucas’s work as a metaphor for the body and revealing the (often sexist) clichés that are employed to depict and discuss it. For the exhibition Bunny Gets Snookered in 1997, Lucas installed a group of Bunny sculptures on top of and around a snooker table, conjuring associations with the archetypally ‘male’ world of the snooker hall.

In his aluminium panel from the series, all Untitled, 2019, Jordan Wolfson returns to the Star of David formation, appearing to gesture towards his own Jewish heritage, raising the question of how he fits into this constellation of American mythologies. The artist’s irreverent presence is felt in the various defacements of the collaged imagery, through digital warping, recurring bumper stickers and graffiti style moustaches, transforming JFK Jr., scion of an Irish Catholic dynasty, into a kind of Groucho Marx proxy. In this new iteration of the composition, Wolfson has punctured the central plane with a large heart, creating a negative void within the imagery and revealing the structure behind – again referencing the artist’s hand and control in the representation of the imagery. In every other pointed facet of the remaining surface, Kennedy Jr. is accompanied by a cartoonish, faced witch – simultaneously collaborator and product in the development of Wolfson’s practice. An allusion to the long history of witch representations, found in varying forms, and with various, developing roles, throughout the artist’s oeuvre: the murderous hag depicted in Riverboat song (2017), for example – a parallel to the wicked step-mother or governess, stepping in to intervene and discipline in often harrowing ways – or the ghoulish Halloween mask worn by Untitled (Female figure) (2014) – the dancing, animatronic figure violently spotlighting abject desires. Presented here in her interactions with Kennedy Jr., the familiar fairy-tale figure – at once comic and grotesque – embodies a duality prevalent throughout Wolfson’s work: the panels become double-edged entities of childish humour and innocence, and containers for darker thoughts, desires, or concerns.

Peach and Pear, 2016, forms part of a microcosm of small-scale hand-painted and raw bronze sculptures. Here a life size version of a cast peach is perched precariously on top of a pear, in a gesture that is both witty and playful. The intimately scaled sculptures are like poetic vignettes that depict unusual interactions: they are delicate yet at the same time imposing, comical and shadowy as if they were hiding an allegorical secret. The humorous reveries take the form of a satirical play on ordinariness that build a kaleidoscopic anthology of Fischer’s imaginary, drawn from fragments of his career and aesthetics.

Ugo Rondinone’s the sun at 2 pm, 2020, is a circular sculpture rendered in brightly gilded bronze and cast from vines twisted together in a circular formation with blunt obtruding twigs. The work is part of a wider series of rings of various scales, in which the artist meditates on the sun and its radiance as a motif and metaphor. Subtly raised from its supporting wall, the piece retains an illusory quality of being suspended mid-air, evocative of celestial bodies - the simple circular structure itself standing as an eloquent void symbolic of eternity and universal connection. The artist has specifically chosen vine branches for their symbolic function in depicting the sun, acting as a symbol of renewal, following the vine’s life cycle from growth to dormancy and rebirth to a fruitful state every year – reminiscent of the solar cycle. The formal structure and symbolic references within the series speak to Rondinone’s continuing preoccupation with the natural world, time and space and humanity’s relationship between the world and the inner life. The contemplative spiritualism evinced within the work also positions the work within the artist’s ongoing exploration of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) – the title itself paying homage to Friedrich’s landscape paintings.

Victoria Morton’s, Apertura, 2022, is a new, large-scale painting by Victoria Morton rendered in oil on canvas.  Combining researched-based techniques with intuitive process, Victoria Morton’s distinct multi-layered approach to image making is located at the intersection of performative action and psychological expression. Within her paintings Morton tests the potentials of her medium. Variously amassing freely formed pools of colour, interwoven with linear structures and pointillist accumulations of brushstrokes, she constructs multi-chromatic landscapes that oscillate between readable figuration and abstract representation. Throughout her large-scale and small canvasses, colour are applied as a potent stimulus for sensory interpretation. Overlapping hues of jewel-like colour and form channel multiple experiential realities, that in turn play upon notions of cognition, rhythm and memory.

Yu Ji’s Flesh in Stone – Rema Rema 2112, 2021, is part of a larger ongoing sculptural Flesh in Stone series, which began in 2012. The series comprises an array of fragmented bodily forms, generated from live sittings and rendered in cast concrete, often tightly bound or held aloft by ribbons of iron. Flesh in Stone – Rema Rema 2112 embodies a small-scale fragment of a contorted figure comprised an upper torso constructed from concrete and soap together with a leg and elongated concrete form resembling male genitals bound together with an iron armature.

The vulnerability and physical awkwardness of the posture denoting an underlying psychological tension. In each piece Yu Ji investigates the human form, interrogating and eschewing traditional realist polished representations that derives from the scientific approach of the Renaissance and Asian classical sculpture. Resembling hybrid human-organic life forms, the complete anatomy of the figures are obscured, rendered devoid of heads, hands and feet – inhabiting a brutal and unsettling sort of beauty.

Yu Ji treats her practice as a labour-intensive craft, during the process of creating pieces in the Flesh in Stone series Yu requests her models to test the limits of their bodies to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. During these sittings she refrains from recording the postures through drawing or moulding, rather generating clay models after the event from memory. From these recalled observations she creates resin moulds which are later filled with cement. Raw and inexpensive materials, such as iron rods and concrete, are employed throughout her practice for their nonprecious and non-traditional qualities, as symbolic of our time. Typically used in construction of post-brutalist high rise buildings and relating to the mass urban development experienced in China over the past few decades, these materials are at once robust and durable, brittle and delicate. As can be found elsewhere in her practice, Yu retains a sensual roughness the connection between man and material, maintaining the markings that emerge through the casting process, signifying the performed labour within the final form.

Resting casually on an upturned Nidecker snowboard, Wilhelm Sasnal’s Untitled, 2022 shows a carefully rendered figure set against a stark snowscape, created with sweeping gestures of paint. Drawn directly from a photograph and cropped, the image alludes to a narrative situation, which is ultimately unknowable.

Sasnal regularly employs photographic imagery taken directly from the media, films, reproductions of art, or his own phone as the starting points for his paintings, which then undergo various levels of recontextualising, distortion, simplification, or abstraction. His work often addresses weighty themes, familiar pop-cultural icons, as well as the people, places, and objects around him. Sasnal continues to create an idiosyncratic, astutely observed and highly attuned creative output.

Paul Anthony Harford (1943-2016) trained at Byam Shaw School of Art in London as a mature student in the late 1960s, before moving to Southend – a sea-side town on England’s Southeast coast. Harford lived at different times in Southend and Weymouth, and worked variously as a schoolmaster, cleaner, bin man and hospital porter. Over the course of his life, he completed hundreds of drawings – virtually all of them in pencil and graphite stick – which he kept stacked around the walls of his attic studio. Only a small fraction of these survive. Within and between drawings, Harford moved between social realism – capturing and caricaturing fragments of reality – and wry, wayward surrealism.

Characterised by a minutely detailed style and subtle tonal range, Harford’s drawings frequently evoke the life and atmosphere of the seaside towns in which he lived: promenades, pubs and pavilions serve as the backdrops to scenes of becalmed existence. Often, an air of desolation or ennui prevails.

Harford’s drawings of his mother show her seated and contemplative, or frail and asleep during her final days, as we see in this drawing Untitled (Mother asleep with masked child), ca. 1999. His forensic attention to surface detail – seen in the play of light across her sleeping face – poignantly amplifies the sense of mortality in these images. 

Mother and baby, 2021 by Nicola Tyson sees a ghostly, plum coloured figure cradling a pink infant with bright blue paws, set against a background awash with mint green and vibrant hues. The affectionate scene suggests an interior state as much as a physical one, conveying the idea of ‘embodied experience’ – that is, experience relative to the individual body. Through a combination of hard-edged colour and ambivalent form, she evokes the interplay of perception, thought and feeling that characterises such experience.

Tyson is best known for reimagining of the female figure in relation to concepts of identity and the social gaze, sets out to describe the female body as a lived experienced, rather than merely observed. Moving beyond a mimetic, objectifying approach, she explores the body as a constantly shifting set of felt coordinates.

Tyson’s art draws upon, and grapples with, that of artistic forbears as diverse as Maria Lassnig, Hans Bellmer and Pablo Picasso. (Her 2013 book Dead Letter Men verbalises this mode of combative engagement, in a series of missives to deceased male artists). Her practice has its roots in a 1990s moment when, as she has recalled, painting was considered “at best conservative and probably redundant,” and yet she continues to assert the vitality of her medium from a contrary feminist mindset.

In a new series of works in silver leaf on paper, all titled Edie, 2022, T.J. Wilcox reenvisages a portrait of the actor-model and iconic 1960s New York ‘It Girl’, Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971). Originally photographed in her apartment by Enzo Sellerio, the portrait appeared alongside an article hailing her a ‘Youthquaker’ in Vogue magazine, August 1965. The photograph captures Edie hovering momentarily in a light-hearted arabesque pose. Set against a galloping stallion drawn by her onto the wall, she is envisioned as an incandescent icon, youthful, glamourous, carefree.

In Wilcox’s recent iterations he has opted to redact the image, leaving only the monochrome apartment walls and stallion to signal her presence. Sedgwick – coated in silver leaf – is transposed as a sylph-like vestige, amplifying the whimsical lightness of the scene and simultaneously infiltrating it with the flickering impermanence of memory. The works in the series distil Wilcox’s enduring exploration of personal narratives and history as an ever-evolving construct, mirroring this pursuit in his film and video works. In which he often intertwines documentary and dramatic elements to render nuanced portraits of iconic historical and recent personae; ranging from the story of Roman Emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous, to Marlene Dietrich, Stephen Tennant and those drawn from his own life.

The imagery oscillates between a mood of nostalgia, romance, loss and longing. In shrouding the archival photograph with voided space, the portrait evokes the glamour and mystique surrounding Edie; that endures over five decades after her passing. Wilcox has commented that his work “takes a historical subject and revels in its details but ultimately makes that historical subject seem totally unfixed and unstable”.