Frieze New York

Material tactility, its possibilities, limitations, and transformation form the core of Kelly Akashi's practice. Often using her own hands as a subject, the artist captures momentary gestures, casting them into perpetual existence. Drawing attention to the fluidity and interconnectedness of the media she uses, Akashi aims to capture the tension and physicality of objects in her practice.

Kelly Akashi’s solo show Infinite Body is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York through June 10, 2023.

In the 1990s Barth deliberately blurred the focus of her camera to create images that destabilize the viewer's expectation of a photograph.

The atmospheric urban scenes depicted in the Field series relate to film production stills like those used in storyboards Barth has likened the works to location scouting, an activity closely associated with Los Angeles and the film industry. Rather than literal descriptions of specific places, these photographs are suggestive of a mood.

Over the past decade, artist Math Bass has developed a lexicon of symbols—letters, bodily forms, architectural fragments, animals, bones—arranged in a variety of scores, each symbol an empty space of meaning, filled in by the context in which it finds itself. Repetition of these symbols, rather than codifying them into one solid signification, exposes the difference at the heart of each iteration; there is always a gap in meaning, something unnamable left out of and left over in the viewer’s reading—a jouissance. It is this gap in the symbolic where Lee Edelman states queerness lies —not as an easily categorized liberal identity but as a process of unmaking and undoing that leaves (gendered) subjectivity as we know it in question. That these symbols are familiar only heightens our unsettling; the negative space of these compositions, a major player in Bass’s practice, adds further to the gap.

Among the most important artists of her generation, Monica Bonvicini’s evocative and thought-provoking sculptures, installations, texts, photographs, videos and public projects explore the relationship between architecture, gender and power.

As sculptural and performative object, the mirrored surface of Love Is Blind (1115) invites the audience to act out their voyeurism in seeing and being seen. The viewers experience a roller coaster of impressions: from fascination, and acting and posing in front of the mirroring surfaces, to a chill in the face of the seemingly impermeable and cold character of the sculpture. Decorated with chains and handcuffs, Love is Blind reflect on design ideas, dogmas, and utopias that are also inscribed in Museums, Galleries and Art Fairs.

Since the early 1990s, Sandra Cinto has developed a rich vocabulary of symbols and lines to create lyrical landscapes and narratives that hover between fantasy and reality. Using drawing as her point of departure, the artist renders intricate and mesmerizing seascapes, rainstorms, and celestial skies that frequently engage with the surrounding architecture to create seemingly weightless, immersive environments. Evoking stories of human hardship and redemption, Cinto's fantastical imagery serves as a metaphor for the human odyssey, while also pushing the limits and possibilities of drawing.

This work exploits the inherent visual confusion of the ellipse, which, depending on the context, can give the illusion of a circular disc viewed in perspective. Here, the ellipses shift upon their axes as well, creating the sense that the disc is rotating and tumbling at the same time. Ripples and bubbles in the handblown glass enhance the overall effect of fluidity and movement.

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s new series of sculptural flowers offer a fragile beauty and an untamable, organic logic of their own. Constructed from mixed media – employing modelling clay, paint, fabric and resin – the sculptures recall real species of lilies or orchids, as well as fantastical floral arrangements in other-worldly colors and forms. Flowers recur in Djurberg & Berg’s practice due to their abiding interest in the fleeting nature of human emotions and their shared symbolism for human themes of love, joy, desire, sadness and vulnerability. Representing the circle of life, from a shy bud to a beautiful blossom to a withering plant, the flower form has been a constant interest in Djurberg and Berg’s practice.

In 2009, the artists created their first major work inspired by flora and fauna, a subversively surreal and immersive Garden of Eden, entitled The Experiment, for the 53rd Venice Biennial, for which they were awarded the Silver Lion for best emerging artists.

Lisa Oppenheim’s starting point for Entartete Kunst, Gelbe Tulpen, 1909/2023 (Version I) was an image of a 1909 painting of tulips in the catalogue raisonné of works by Max Pechstein, a German expressionist painter and member of the Die Brücke group. More than 300 works by Pechstein were removed from German museums during the Nazi era and were deemed ‘degenerate’ by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. A selection of the seized works were shown at the infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, which opened in Munich in 1937 and subsequently toured across the Reich. This painting was recorded as stolen and was never restituted. Oppenheim transforms the archival image and solarizes the photograph by hand with firelight, using her signature smoke technique.

Dana Powell's small-scale oil paintings depict moments of transition and anticipation. They take the shape of night drives, full moons, swimming pools, elevator doors, still lifes with fruit, explosions, and peep holes. Unrelated at first look, these subjects prove malleable apparatus in demonstrating the unsettling power of the ordinary, and emotive potential of small shifts in formal painting strategies. Considered austerity is applied to Powell’s tableaus of the everyday, offering a window to the familiar and its undertow.

Sherrill Roland’s work 168.815, gives visual form to vivid memories of the ten months he spent wrongfully incarcerated. In this white steel sculpture, Roland recalls the experience of spending day after day in prison, when he would often pass the time by tracing the outlines of the white cinder blocks, which measured 8 x 16 x 8 inches and formed his two-man cell. Running his fingers horizontally and vertically, back and forth along the spaces between the blocks, he would take note of the difference in texture; the soft, smooth mortar contrasting sharply with the cold, hardness of the cinder blocks, providing a rare source of sensory stimulation. The repetitive, tactile action became a form of meditation that offered a mental escape to the freedom beyond the physical confines of the prison cell.

In 168.815, Roland recreates the idea of the soft area between cinder blocks by filling the steel channels with acrylic paint mixed with Kool- Aid, a beverage readily available in prison. This colorful, sweet drink brought back memories of Roland’s childhood when it was served at family gatherings to kids, a time of innocence which he often reflected upon during these moments of meditative escape. By tracing these areas around the cinder blocks, he was able to imagine leaving through the cracks and returning to the free world outside, demonstrating the power of touch and action to transport our minds elsewhere.

Sherrill Roland's solo exhibition do without, do within is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles through June 24, 2023

Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. This body of work continues Saban's investigations into the relationship between paint, pigment and canvas. In this work, thin layers of dried acrylic paint is woven through the linen, physically embedded into the fabric of the painting.

Aeolic Cluster 10,700 advances Saraceno’s long-standing artistic inquiry Air-Port-City / Cloud City, a proposal for for airborne habitats as a new, alternative form of urbanism. This work is composed of a number of interconnected modules constructed from mirrored hand-blown glass, a material that, like clouds, exists at the intersection of air, water, and earth. In nature, matter floats through the atmosphere until it clusters together to form groups of clouds. The irregular facets of the sculpture are inspired by the geometry of the Weaire-Phelan structure, found in the way foam and soap bubbles form. The reflective surfaces illuminate an aqueous world of gold and silver, where boundaries become fluid and human spatial coordinates are challenged. What alternative ways of being emerge through a momentary immersion in this floating, shimmering world of light?

Interested in language and its inevitable abstraction, Lisa Williamson leans into the formal considerations of sculpture to create works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. The artist’s idiosyncratic practice follows a logic that is associative; compressing internal experience into forms that are both tangible and resistant at once. While there is a significant level of reduction and abstraction throughout the artist’s work, aspects of architecture, landscape and the figure remain visible throughout.