I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t giddy for New York Art Week. This is my first time going to New York for the fairs, and I can’t wait to wander through the whole ecosystem - the polished, the scrappy, the overhyped, the genuinely moving, the thing you almost miss because it’s tucked in the back of a booth.
I also lived in New York right after college, briefly enough that I probably talk about it more than I earned the right to, but long enough for the city to imprint itself on me. New York has always held that charge of discovery, chance encounters, and the feeling that something could happen if you just kept walking.
Looking through the previews this week, I felt that same buzz.
Just like LA art week in February, Frieze is the anchor this week with international, blue-chip, museum-level art. The real density is spread across the city: Independent on the Lower East Side, NADA in Chelsea, smaller fair ecosystems like Future Fair and Esther III, plus the auction previews at Sotheby’s.
I spent the last few weeks going through previews across all the fairs to figure out what made me stop and why. Each work I’ve picked here has at least one of three things going for it: a practice that rewards slow looking, a story that gives the work staying power, or a price point that means a real person could actually live with it.
These are my picks going in. I’ll be at the fairs all week and will update this post if anything shifts.
At New York Art Week, here’s what I’d buy.
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Bettina at Ulrik
Frieze Focus, Booth F4 — The Shed
Bettina Grossman
From the Series, Phenomenological New York, 1970s
Silver gelatin print
7 5/8 x 5 in.
$6,000
Ulrik, Frieze Focus, Booth F4
Bettina Grossman, who went by her first name only, was a Conceptual artist whose work refused the idea of a singular fixed art object. She lived at the Chelsea Hotel for the last fifty years of her life and made work the entire time, much of it never shown during her lifetime.
A 1966 fire in her Brooklyn Heights studio destroyed everything she had made up to that point. She went to Europe, wrote “1970-Paris-Reborn,” and started over. Phenomenological New York is one of two major projects she made about the city in the 1970s and 80s, focusing on movement on the street as seen through distorted reflections in glass and metal. She was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2021 and has recently been shown at GTA Zurich, the Hessel Museum, and Stedelijk Amsterdam.
Why I love it:
I know it is so cliché, but the Chrysler Building has always been my favorite, and this image had me at hello. The building is one of the most photographed Art Deco icons in the world, but here it is refracted through window panes and adjacent buildings until it bends, warps, and almost dissolves.
It’s less an image of a building than an image of perception itself: the city bending, reflecting, refusing to sit still. Which, honestly, feels like the most New York thing possible.
The rest of the picks are for paid subscribers only - six more works I’d seriously consider, from a concrete wall object about colonial memory to a painting built from the floor plan of a vanished Chicago cabaret, a tiny crying ceramic blob, and a denim landscape that makes decoration the whole point.
Paid subscribers also get $20 off their first 1:1 Art Consult. Details about the subscription here.
