“Discovery beyond age or exposure”—Lumi Tan’s “Focus” at Frieze New York 2024

As Frieze New York returns to The Shed this May, the Focus section includes galleries from across Brazil, China, Portugal, the United States and Canada, curated for the first time by Lumi Tan. A curator, writer and Curatorial Director at Luna Luna—the revived art amusement park that first opened in Hamburg more than 30 years ago—Tan’s selection offers a similar trans-historical cross-section, where contemporary practices are joined by those of under-appreciated artists, now emerging back into recognition. With four new participants—Central Galeria, Kapp Kapp, Madragoa and Patron—the Focus section offers, says Tan, “a chance to recognize innovators who have long represented stories and perspectives overlooked by dominant culture.”

“This year’s Focus section promotes an expanded definition of discovery beyond age or exposure. It’s a thrilling opportunity to bring those who have been steadfast in their position for decades together with younger artists who share in their artistic and societal concerns”—Lumi Tan

Frieze New York 2024 marks Hayley Tompkins’s first solo exhibition at an art fair, presented by Matthew Brown. Tompkins shows a new series of panel works, including her largest painting to date, and an installation of acrylic-drenched everyday objects, such as shirts and school chairs. Oscillating between angular, repetitive marks and sensuous brushwork, Tompkins’s paintings are richly layered spaces that contract the distance between the physical and the pictorial.

Seeking to “draw the character-force-energy-state that precedes form,” Sara Chang Yan disrupts the surface of her work with cuts, reliefs and translucent layers. Presented by Madragoa, Chang Yan’s series “Alinhamentos” develops her interest in space and visibility, which she also explores across her video, sound and installation work. The drawings evade a fixed vantage point, their irregular contours offering multiple dynamic orientations. 

Spotlighted by Central Galeria, Carmézia Emiliano’s practice is rooted in the land and life of the Macuxi peoples, and in particular the Maloca do Japó community, which lies in the Amazonian tri-border area of Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana, where the artist was born. Emiliano paints the landscapes, mythology, celebrations and objects of her culture. She foregrounds the role of women in the communities and their connection to their natural surroundings, presenting the Amazon as an active subject in this relationship. Pointing to the ongoing obliteration of indigenous culture, Emiliano positions memorialization at the core of her approach. She says of her work: “I paint indigenous culture so as not to leave myself behind.”

Historically, New York photographer Stanley Stellar has only shown black-and-white photographs, but at Kapp Kapp’s booth, the artist presents “The Piers in Color”—ten previously unseen color images of New York City’s gay piers of the 1970s–80s. The Shed’s location, just yards from the old pier structures, adds huge poignancy to the presentation, connecting directly to the queer history of the city. The photographs will be hung against a large-scale black-and-white image of an emptied pier, presenting the scenes Stellar photographed as a fleeting moment of queer utopia before the devastation of HIV/AIDS.

Hasani Sahlehe pours acrylic gel over raw canvas, guiding it into contrasting color blocks with his hands. Tif Sigfrids presents five recent paintings, which mark a new direction in Sahlehe’s practice towards a more performative and sculptural approach. The edges of his gestures are tremulous, sparking a rhythm both within and between his canvases. 

Activist, minister and self-taught artist, Reverend Joyce McDonald incorporates her experience of drug addiction and HIV diagnosis into tender figurative sculptures, which are presented at Frieze New York by Gordon Robichaux. Describing her role across ministry, advocacy and art as that of a “spiritual nurse,” McDonald uses sculptures, painting, poetry and song to help find healing. In small-scale works such as Beauty in the Midst (Victorious) (2024), she embeds her own life stories within a wider reflection on family, love, loss and illness. 

For New York-based conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston, the sense of precarity and collapse that underpins the materials of glass, photography and language make them a key means of exploring the social construction of Black interiority. In her new work, shown by Patron, Weston develops her “Black tactics of refusal,” presenting Black interior life and intimacy as sites of resistance. Weston articulates how Blackness disperses, shapeshifts and re-emerges despite the social and infrastructural politics of space and the culture of surveillance that threaten it.

Mitre Galeria’s presentation immerses audiences in the rich visual world of davi de jesus do nascimento. Working across painting, drawing, objects and photoperformance, nascimento draws from experiences and memories connected to his territory, community and family of fishermen, washerwomen and carranqueiros, on the banks of Brazil’s São Francisco River. 

Maureen Gruben’s solo show with Cooper Cole honors the life work of her late father Eddie Gruben, who, like her mother, was a traditional Inuvialuk knowledge-keeper. Gruben’s “Fresh Artifacts” suspends three resin casts of a wooden fox-skin stretcher used by Eddie, a renowned trapper. These structures reappear in Gruben’s series “Nakataq,” for which she hand-etches patterns based on Eddie’s stretchers and traps into a set of found photographic aerial survey prints that show the ice coverage in relation to oil wells in the Arctic Ocean. Reworking her father’s tools, Gruben transforms these items of historic value into complex, living forms. 

Tao Siqi takes Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) as the departure point for “Possession,” her latest series of paintings, presented by Capsule Shanghai. Tao mirrors Baudelaire’s search for beauty and innocence amid grotesqueness and immorality. Rendered in fluorescent, saturated hues and soft brushwork, Tao’s paintings are moments of pain, dependence, lust, longing and destruction—intimate vignettes that lure the viewer into a realm of fluid physical and psychological sensations. 

In Company Gallery’s booth, Leyla Faye creates an immersive installation of a Victorian-style dollhouse, with individual paintings depicting each room. Oversized automaton-like renditions of the artist inhabit this space, engaging in acrobatic rituals involving household objects as props. Faye uses these characters to navigate performance and belonging, and explore an allegorical collision of Black and white experiences.

Focus is sponsored by Stone Island, whose subsidy, in addition to Frieze’s existing support, enables galleries to participate in the fair and ensures that Focus remains a place to discover new talent.   

Further Information

Frieze New York returns to The Shed, May 1–5, 2024.

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Early bird tickets are sold out. Limited full-price tickets are available to purchase. 

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Frieze New York is supported by global lead partner Deutsche Bank, continuing over two decades of a shared commitment to artistic excellence.

^{Main Image: davi de jesus do nascimento, fishing-threat of wrecked boat or attempt to die with the river, 2016. Digital photograph. Courtesy the artist and Mitre Gallery}