Taylor Zakarin's Top 5 Picks from Frieze New York Viewing Room 2024

Beatriz Cortez, Temporary Home/Hogar Temporal, 2023

Steel, 45 × 51 × 26 cm. Presented by Commonwealth and Council. $10-20k

I love how Beatriz Cortez’s sculptures feel like time travelers, simultaneously visiting us from a deep, geological past, and a dystopian future. The mollusk shell is commonly associated with early organisms and fossils, but when rendered here in hammered steel, it reminds me of Blade Runner, or a futuristic shelter that’s been scraped together by some post-apocalyptic survivor, looking to the efficiency and sacred geometry of nature. Cortez’s work grapples with her personal experience of migration, suddenly leaving San Salvador as a teenager due to war. This idea of the shell – a home that moves with you – is particularly poignant.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Lateral Dive Orange, 2024 

Oil on canvas, 217 × 166 × 7 cm (framed). Presented by White Cube. POA

I’ve visited Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s studio a few times over the years, and I've always left inspired. He layers color and form, meaningfully filling every inch of the canvas, so that you feel a spinning sense of rhythm, movement and energy. I love the way the figure in this work looks out at us in a way that is quite confrontational and disorienting. We’ve seemingly interrupted them, though it’s unclear where we are in relation to them. Above? Below? A massive work of Adeniyi-Jones’s is installed on the ceiling of the Nigerian pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, which I can’t wait to see. Many ceiling paintings traditionally depict Greek mythological figures and stories, and Adeniyi-Jones often talks of his work as an effort to depict and celebrate the Greek’s West African mythological counterparts.

Holly Hendry, Ungrammatical Anatomy, 2024

Jesmonite, ceramic, steel, oak, bronze and glass, 80 × 75 × 12 cm. Presented by Stephen Friedman Gallery. $10-20k

Worker and work have melded into one, and the human body is replaced by to-do lists and post-it notes. I just finished reading Balzac’s Physiology of the Employee. Although it’s 200 years old, it’s a strikingly relevant depiction of the workplace and bureaucracy, and Ungrammatical Anatomy feels particularly apropos. I’ve most recently seen Holly Hendry’s large public installation work; it’s lovely to see something at this scale, so intimate in comparison. I like the way she's toying with materiality here. It’s fun to see the playfulness and experimentation.

Kelly Akashi, Foraged Life Forms, 2024 

Lost-wax cast bronze, 20 × 14 × 14 cm. Presented by Tanya Bonakdar. $20-50k

I always want to touch Kelly Akashi’s work. This disembodied bronze hand, particularly rendered in this patina, looks like the gnarled base of a tree trunk, serving as host to a colony of fungus. I love the unnatural angle and bend of the hand, and that you can’t quite tell if these mushrooms were picked and are being held or carried, or if they’re growing directly out of her palm.

Sanaa Gateja, Much to Say, 2023

2.1 × 1.3 m. Presented by Karma. $50-100k

I just saw Sanaa Gateja’s solo show at Karma in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, and I felt a bit like Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off looking at the painting by Georges Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago. Gateja achieves a sort of material pointillism: small beads made of rolled recycled paper of various colors and patterns come together to form vibrant and evocative figurative and geometric works. As you approach the work, your eyes begin to recognize and comprehend each individual element that, from afar, coalesce into the overarching composition. Suddenly, you’re close enough that the work disappears, and all you can see is a tiny single newsprint letter at the edge of one small bead. It’s great when art slows you down like this.

About Taylor Zakarin

Taylor Zakarin is Associate Curator of High Line Art. Prior to her current role, Zakarin worked in London as Director of Operations and co-curator at Incubator, an emerging art space and as Director of Partnerships for ArtDrunk. From 2014 to 2020, she served as Curator and Manager of Arts Programming for the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection at NorthPark Center in Dallas, Texas, which receives over 26 million visitors annually. During this time, Zakarin organized more than twenty exhibitions and oversaw the installation of hundreds of paintings, prints, photographs and large-scale public sculpture. Zakarin holds a BA in Art History & Visual Media Studies from Duke University and an MA in Curating the Art Museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. 

About Frieze Viewing Room

Open to all from April 24–May 10, Frieze Viewing Room is the online catalog for the fair that gives global audiences access to gallery presentations coming to Frieze New York 2024. Visitors can search artworks by artist, price, date and medium, save favorite artworks and presentations, chat with galleries and much more.

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^{Main image: Taylor Zakarin}