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Inside, guests and gallerists varnished one another on an individual basis. A taut-skinned faction, obviously devoted to the cosmetological arts, even looked varnished. Deals were broached (“What’s your best price?”) and some apparently fell through (“This sucks!” one fireplug of a man opined, “and I’m gonna make sure everybody knows it!”). A clutch of large, rough-looking men with expensive suits and shiny hair looked like mafiosi at a money-laundering seminar. And octogenarian photographer Victor Skrebneski floated through it all like the doge of Venice making a progress down the Grand Canal.
If you’re hoping to be awed by close proximity to modern American masters, visit the Hill Gallery booth, where a big Alex Katz portrait hangs at right angles to a Philip Pearlstein nude and across from a Milton Avery landscape. The Jerald Melberg Gallery has a loose, lovely Romare Beardon image of Ulysses. And Chicago’s Richard Norton Gallery features restrained abstracts from the 1930s, painted by R. Leroy Turner and demonstrating what the style was once about. Leon Golub canvases are sprinkled throughout the fair and worth tracking down.
The Robert Koch Gallery has beautiful, horrific large-format landscapes by Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso. One in particular is reminiscent of heroic Soviet-era images, but subverts that mode by depicting a Romanian copper mine as an empty, ruined moonscape. For sheer shock value, check out David Lezama’s paintings at the Hilario Galguera Gallery booth; Lezama generates a grotesque personal mythology from Biblical, Greek, and ancient American sources. Also grotesque but a whole lot funnier is Lisa Yuskavage’s tryptich, outside the David Zwirner Gallery booth, suggesting Balthus as interpreted by John Currin attempting anime. And for a transcendence chaser, there are Gustavo Lacerda’s photographic portraits of albinos at the Catherine Edelman Gallery booth.
