8 Must-See Booths at the Dallas Art Fair
In anticipation of the Dallas Art Fair, which will settle upon the city’s downtown arts district next week, we offer highlights from a handful of exhibiting galleries whose reputation for strong programming precedes them. And as expected, their DAF booths reflect that, including works from up-and-coming artists—even those shown for the first time in the U.S.—to art world superstars, to established artists whose work still feels as fresh as ever.
Named for two sisters who hail from Dallas—Rachel, the proprietress, and her younger sister Leah—the eponymous Churner and Churner Gallery is a small storefront space in Chelsea known for shows of emerging artists. Heading home to Texas for the Dallas Art Fair, Rachel brings with her works by three on-the-rise artists: from Elise Adibi, she’ll show new paintings made with oil paint and essential plant oils (recently compared to Agnes Martin’s iconic grids in Artforum); from Nick Hornby, a continuation of the artist’s reworkings of Michelangelo’s David; and from Scott Nedrelow, paintings made with a post-photographic process (airbrushing Epson ink onto photo paper) that appear to be portraits of shadows.
Co-founded by Al Moran and Aaron Bondaroff in 2008, OHWOW migrated from Wynwood, Miami to an iconic West Hollywood block in Los Angeles and is one of the city’s most talked about spaces—but the buzz goes beyond the local. Straight from Milan, the gallery brings a few of their best to Dallas: from Lucien Smith (who they gave a first solo show in the U.S.) a new set of “STP” paintings (“serve the people”); from Russian-born Kon Trubkovich, brand new, meticulous “Snow paintings,” equal parts VHS television static and flecks of falling snow; and in addition, wall paintings by Diana Al-Hadid and sculptures by Nick van Woert.
Moving from East London’s Bethnal Green in a row of terraced Victorian homes to the city’s upscale West End, Paradise Row Gallery kept its name (after the street where it first debuted) and added a new exhibition program downstairs—The Basement—exclusively featuring emerging artists. At the Dallas Art Fair, Paradise Row brings works by Sweden-based artist Anna Bjerger, whose intimate, delicate paintings are derived from photographs, books, and thrift store manuals—in this case, a door handle, a roll of paper towels, and a painting from the artist’s second solo show at the gallery, “Da Capo,” featuring an elusive man in a hat with his back turned toward the viewer.
Steven Stewart’s KANSAS Gallery, housed in a 1,400-sq-foot storefront on Tribeca’s gallery row, features primarily emerging artists—among them, New York-based artist Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, whose work heads to Texas for the Dallas Art Fair. There, he’ll unveil a new body of work, “Vacation Paintings,” in which custom-built Plexiglas boxes have been filled with suspended layers of spray-painted carpet underlaying netting; and alongside, an installation of “Kitty” sculptures, made of paper pulp and plaster.
Martos Gallery/Shoot the Lobster
A parking lot, a pharmacy, a restaurant—these are all past venues of Chelsea dealer Jose Martos’s infamously nomadic project space, Shoot the Lobster, which recently moved locations from a backroom in Chelsea to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At the Dallas Art Fair, the gallery will show an enamel painting by David Malek from his December exhibition at Martos, a systematic painting made by overlapping colors and textures where the stroke of a brush crosses that of a roller. Other artists on view include Aura Rosenberg, Agnes Lux, and Nicolas Roggy.
In 2012, Lower East Side gallery scene pioneer Canada Gallery moved from their original space—the former home and recording studio of the Beastie Boys—to a bygone print shop on Broome Street where it now shares a building with an offshoot of Marlborough Gallery. The gallery, known for off-beat projects (take their recent opening, for “The Weird Show,” where it recruited different sets of identically dressed, identical twins) will bring several artists’ work to Dallas, including artist and musician Sadie Laska, New York painter Lily Ludlow, and more.
From a 300-square-foot gallery space neighboring a Chinatown funeral parlor to its current space in New York City’s Lower East Side, James Fuentes’s eponymous gallery has carved a name for itself—not for the dealer’s stint on Jeffrey Deitch’s brief reality TV show, Artstar—but for a strong, largely multidisciplinary program. The Dallas Art Fair will be privy to Ryan Conrad Sawyer’s paintings made with black powder soot and the assemblage sculptures of Lonnie Holley, named the “Insider’s Outsider,” in a recent profile by The New York Times.
From its beginnings in 1980s Dallas’ Deep Ellum art hub to its current status, a fixture in the Dallas Design District, Conduit Gallery has been known to show provocative, up-and-coming Texas artists and nationally recognized artists, divided into three exhibition spaces—one of them, the Project Room, reserved solely for unrepresented young artists. At the fair, look for the first U.S. presentation of U.K. artist Sarah Ball’s work, which will include oil-on-panel portraits from her “Accused” series, painted after police mugshots of perpetrators from fire raisers to civil rights movement activists—among other artists.
