The Best of the PULSE Art Fair
The PULSE New York fair has it all --- sculpture, photography, mixed-media, painting. The layout this year with 63 booths is much more manageable territory at the Metropolitan Pavilion than at the other fairs dominating Manhattan this week. In fact, PULSE is the one fair not to miss. It is friendly, not at all imposing, a nice mix of hedge-fund deep pockets and young people, some even changing babies on cardboard arty currogated stools. Most important though is that the works are fresh and new. There's lots to buy at a wide range of prices and people on opening day were not hesitating to add to their collections.
Some of the best photography at this fair is at the booth of Munich's Galerie Andreas Binder www.andreasbinder.de. Dieter Rehm's "Casserta Stairs" (a palace near Naples) and his "New York Public Library Reading Room" are both showstoppers. Rehm is the President of the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and his work is greatly admired in Europe and the U.S.
Polixeni Papapetrou is an Australian artist who uses her children as models, placing them in isolated, yet stunning locations.
The children wear animal headdresses, apparently stemming from the artist's discovery that in Spain you are restricted from photographing children under certain circumstances.
This photo-based artist explores issues of identity which in this current series involves a lot of whimsy and fun. Papapetrou is represented by the Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
Christian Chaize at the Jen Bekman Gallery booth is another young photographer well worth following. Since first vacationing in Portugal, Chaize has developed an entire collection of work based on images of a small stretch of the Portuguese coastline. Yet each image has its own special quality although they are all of the same location. Chaize is a Paris-based artist who says in one of his bios that he tries to see "with new eyes" each time he approaches the same "still-life" scene.
You gotta love Lizabeth Eva Rossof. She is an L.A.-based artist who likes to riff on popular culture. She did the designs and models for her terracotta "soldiers" and then sent them off to China for fabrication.
Rossof is a conceptual artist whose large soldiers are almost six-feet tall. The smaller ones sell for about $1,500 each. She is represented by the Charlie James Gallery where the opening for her soldiery spoof was in the L.A.Chinatown.
At the Fred Torres Collaborations booth, the mixed-media work of Detroit-based artist George Rahm dominated. His double paneled work is plaster and collage on a wood board. Unlike his more bucolic work, the diptych at the fair was enigmatic with an almost magical quality. PULSE at 125 West 18th Street is open from 10 to 8pm and closes March 6.
Details at www.pulse-art.com for dates for other PULSE shows in other cities.
