Minter, Met Breuer, and more: our ultimate guide to the fairs, shows, parties, and happenings that will have collectors' tongues wagging this week in New York.
No less a wit than T.S. Eliot proclaimed that April is the cruelest month. But diehard art fans might rightly feel that the honor should go to March, when a plethora of art fairs, museum and gallery openings, and happenings descend on a still-frigid New York, where wind whips off the Hudson River or barrels up Park Avenue, and Ubers seem punishingly few and far between. Encompassing the mammoth (Armory Show), the museum-worthy (the ADAA Art Show), and the emerging (Volta, Independent, Pulse, and Spring/Break, among others), this week’s slate of art events offers something for every collector. Read on for a curated hit list to spare your soles.
Scatter Shot
Everything’s going to pieces in the David Nolan booth at the Art Show—but fret not, that’s the point of Switch, 1967/2016, a giant felt-based “scatter” installation by Barry Le Va, which takes up the whole space. Born in California in 1941, Le Va arrived on the scene in the mid-1960s, as Minimalist sculpture courtesy of Donald Judd was reaching its peak power. Veering in the opposite direction of objecthood, Le Va, using materials like felt, dust, and shattered glass, began making process-based compositions on the floor. Partly sculptural installation, partly deconstructed painting à la Jackson Pollock, partly a performance vacated by the artist, partly the scene of a violent crime (Le Va has a documented interest in detective novels), not even Artforum had any idea what to call Le Va’s work—a November 1968 cover story dubbed it “distributional sculpture,” for lack of a better term—but today, it’s safe to dub it a watershed moment, with reverberations seen in such contemporary artists as Sarah Sze.
