Articles & Features
Highlights of ENTER Art Fair, 2020
Open this weekend at Tunnelfabrikken in Copenhagen’s Nordhavn, the second iteration of ENTER Art Fair has the disctinction of being possibly the only live physical fair to take place in a Fall season decimated by the coronavirus pandemic. We at Artland previewed the Fair for you, taking a tour of the 60 international galleries who have brought their wares to share. Take a socially distanced tour in person this weekend, or visit the entire fair in Artland 3D. Check out some of the highlights that caught our eye below.
George Bolster at Ulterior Gallery
Irish multi-disciplinary artist George Bolster shows a group of embroidered tapestry works in the booth of Ulterior, a highly progressive young gallery from NYC’s Lower East Side. His work investigates the opposition between belief systems and science, using the language and visual tropes of science, history, and science fiction to examine our most prescient societal and species-wide challenges, such as climate change and rising sea levels. Dealing with issues of long term cultural preservation and conservation in the face of environmental disintegration, Bolster deftly juxtaposes the opposing aesthetics of homespun craft and high science. Somehow appearing simultaneously retro and new, the beautifully rendered object quality of his works evokes both warning and optimism in equal measure.
Visit Ulterior Gallery, ENTER Art Fair Booth here
Mads Gamdrup at Nils Stærk
Danish artist Mads Gamdrup has been a long time student of scientific colour studies, following Newton and Goethe’s theories with an Albers like zeal. His paintings on stained glass examine both the transparency and texture of colors, and the manner seemingly dissonant tones can be allied perfectly together. The colored glass ground retains the essential traits of the medium, evincing a hand-crafted quality and characteristic translucent luminosity. The overpainted circles themselves show the artist’s hand in the accumulated surface impasto, but with a dense opacity that counters and challenges the refractive nature of the ground. The resultant oscillation between materiality, texture and colour creates a unique optical spatiality — object-paintings that are deliciously simple yet compellingly sophisticated.
Visit Nils Stærk, ENTER Art Fair Booth here
Adam Parker Smith at The Hole
New York based sculptor Adam Parker Smith shows a selection of his signature cast resin inflatables with The Hole, pushing at the Koonsian defined boundaries of what contemporary sculpture can be. His mylar balloons, simultaneously weightless and leaden, mimic the classical poses of contrapposto and proportion with humour, wit, and no small measure of camp kitschiness. Literary and art-historical references abound in Parker-Smith’s work, but they owe their greatest debt to the many and varied lineages of works addressing consumerism, advertising and mass-media propagated in the post-pop period. Impossibly cool, but technically mature, Smith’s works are juvenile and grown up in the best of ways.
Visit The Hole, ENTER Art Fair Booth here
Louis Reith at Charlotte Fogh
With a clear interest in graphic design, architecture, book design, geometric hard-edged minimalism and constructivism, Dutch artist Louis Reith sources printed matter for his drawings and collages of clarity and restraint. The highly balanced compositional rigour is almost mechanistic in its apparent precision, whilst the painstaking laboriousness of the handmade collage elements is evident upon closer scrutiny. Black and white in tone, the sharpness of which is mitigated by the dustiness of the colors (a pleasingly ‘vintage’ charcoal and ivory), Reith’s elegantly poised works play with both the flatness of abstraction and illusory perspectival space.
Visit Charlotte Fogh, ENTER Art Fair Booth here
Friedrich Kunath at Avlskarl
Kunath’s hybrid pictorial narratives are embodied in a specatular recent painting showing at Avlskarl. His archetypal, yet ironic, reinterpretation of German romanticism is fused with a particular kind of laid back humour one finds in the West Coast attitude of L.A, home to the artist for the last 15 years. Variously referencing the romantic sublime of Caspar David Friedrich, clichés of the picture postcard landscape, and suffused with nostalgia, irony, comedy and pathos, Kunath communicates love, loss, yearning and hope with a teenage idealism. Packaging bravura impasto with the levity of song-lyric optimism, Kunath’s Beach Boy Baroque is perhaps unique in both its diversity and sophistication of reference and relatable candour.
Visit Avlskarl, ENTER Art Fair Booth here
Relevant sources to learn more
Enter Art Fair – Website
Enter Art Fair – Virtual Fair
Artland Interviews Jeff Lawson, Founder of UNTITLED, ART