Editors' Picks: Architecture-Inspired Work at the New York Art Fairs

A fabric room by Do-Ho Suh at the Lehmann Maupin booth.

An installation titled Cockpit (2013) by Marianne Vitale installed among the booths at Frieze.

The Galeria Elba Benitez booth won the Frieze Fair’s stand prize for a solo installation by Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga.

A massive work by Ugo Rondinone at the booth of London gallery Sadie Coles HQ.

Work by Steve Bishop at the Carlos/Ishikawa booth.

Fiona Connor at the Hopkinson Cundy booth.

A giant balloon dog by Paul McCarthy apes Jeff Koons while guarding SO-IL’s Frieze tent.

David Shaw’s Collider (2013), a “room” demarcated by aluminum coated in a holographic laminate, at the NADA fair.

Work by Danish collective A Kassen in the booth of Paris’s New Galerie.

A Kassen’s work frequently begins with images of architecture that the group alters with their frames and presentation. The 2011 work, Flatten Image, plays with PhotoShop-style layering in physical space.

At Cut.log, Paris-based Galerie Olivier Waltman showed Jean-Pierre Attal’s voyeuristic images of offices after hours.

An architecture firm with offices in Marseille and Los Angeles, Sériès & Sériès presented a playful series of ideas for a cubic museum hovering above an L.A. freeway.

David Alexander Flinn’s steel-and-concrete See You There (2013) staked a claim inside the former school building that hosted Wish Meme.

Joseph Burwell’s drawings of modular forms at Wish Meme.

A fabric room by Do-Ho Suh at the Lehmann Maupin booth.
A snaking white tent designed by Brooklyn firm SO-IL kept out occasionally torrential rain at the second New York edition of the Frieze Art Fair, which opened during a break in the clouds on Thursday. Despite the weather, crowds made the trip to Randalls Island to check out work on offer from some 180 dealers and a series of related programs and exhibitions.
Elsewhere in the city, a roster of other fairs also opened their doors in time for the weekend, including NADA (the nonprofit New Art Dealers Alliance fair), PULSE, and the Collective.1 Design Fair, among others. Cut/log, a three-year-old Paris fair making its NYC debut, set up shop in an former school building, as did Wish Meme, a curated show of mostly emerging artists that opened in conjunction with the New Museum’s Ideas City festival, and both used their respective venues to great effect.
All in all, there was a lot of art to see, some of the best of which referenced architecture, urbanism, and ideas about the built environment. Click the image above to view some highlights.