Art
Artsy Editorial
This week, on opposite sides of the globe, The Armory Show 2024 and Frieze Seoul 2024 have brought together over 350 galleries in their respective venues. These art fairs—expansive surveys of the commercial art world that attract international droves of collectors and art professionals—are opportune moments for galleries to introduce their artists to new audiences. That could mean spotlighting young talents new to the gallery’s program or foregrounding artists who are not yet known internationally.
As both fairs kicked off this week, our editors were on the ground in New York and Seoul to scope out new discoveries. Here, we share the standout artists who caught our attention across The Armory Show and Frieze Seoul 2024.
B. 1932, Helsinki. D. 2022, New York.
Showing at The Armory Show with Harper’s.
Iria Leino should, in my opinion, be among the top highlights of this Armory Week. A new solo show at Harper’s in Chelsea, plus a few works on view at the gallery’s Armory Show booth, are marking a noteworthy art world debut for the late Finnish artist, bringing to the fore her previously little known life story.
After earning an art degree in Helsinki, Leino moved to Paris to attend the École des Beaux-Arts. To earn money while in art school, she became a fashion correspondent, and her beauty caught the eye of influential figures like Karl Lagerfeld. She went on to become a successful model, walking runways for the likes of Pierre Cardin and Dior. She tired of the fashion world, though, and in the mid-1960s moved to New York to pursue her art. She enrolled at the Art Students League and studied under key figures of the downtown scene, like Larry Poons.
In 1968, after a life-changing head injury left her in a coma for weeks, Leino embraced Buddhism. Spirituality came to profoundly influence her paintings. Her “Buddhist Rain” series, for example, features luminous compositions of acrylic and pastel, punctuated by dashes of color that sweep down the canvas. These timeless works harness the spirituality of the natural world and the cosmos. (One such piece featured at The Armory Show, Explosive Thunder, 1970, sold for $40,000 on the fair’s preview day.)
Leino worked in solitude in a SoHo loft for decades and never showed her work during her lifetime. Still, her works feel completely attuned to the major abstract art movements of the late 20th century. Following her death in 2022, her estate approached Harper’s to begin showing and selling her work. In her studio, they found a trove of works that had never been shown in public. Harper’s show, “Iria Leino: 1968–1970,” is clearly just the first chapter of a rich, moving oeuvre that we can expect to see more of in the years to come.
—Casey Lesser
B. 1983, Paris. Lives and works in Seoul.
Showing at Frieze Seoul with Arario Gallery.
I was immediately drawn to these animal skin works from French-born Korean artist Yohan Hán’s “Drum Series.” I particularly fell for the smaller works, where the skins are dyed with natural pigments in bright shades of green, purple, and red, tanned into leather, stitched together, and stretched around an uneven hand drum shape. These works beg the viewer to touch them, evoking the intimacy of both tactile and sonic communication.
Now based in Seoul, the artist is interested in the similarities between our phone screens and these traditional instruments. He sees the tip-tap, percussive elements of each as both hypnotic and a way to reach out to other people, a representative of the gallery explained. This connection is drawn out in The Dialogues (2021–2), a choreographed performance by three dancers. A video of the work’s performance at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea in 2021 is on view at Arario Gallery’s booth.
—Josie Thaddeus-Johns
B. 1993, Mexico City. Lives and works in Oakland, California.
Showing at The Armory Show with pt.2.
After darting through the Javits Center with my buzzing phone in my palm and the pressure to see all 200-and-something exhibitors on my shoulders, I could have used a reminder to “touch grass.” While not literally actionable in Hell’s Kitchen (little grass to speak of), the metaphorical objective is one I aspire to. To touch grass is to stay grounded and in community with the world around us.
This is the philosophy embodied by Liz Hernández’s graphic aluminum works and acrylic-on-paper paintings. Her pieces are being presented at The Armory Show by the Oakland gallery pt.2 alongside works by her husband, Ryan Whelan. Hernández’s subjects do more than touch grass: They sprout roots from their heads and leaves from their bodies, bathe in rivers, cultivate anthropomorphic plants. Hernández is concerned with the concept of utopia, which she envisions as a world where humans and nature are radically interconnected. Her minimal, line-drawn style, influenced by medieval illustrated herbal manuscripts, suggests the blissful simplicity of this way of life.
Hernández’s practice is shaped by her Mexican heritage. In her Armory Show presentation, she uses amate, a traditional Mexican bark paper, and embossed metal, referring to her country’s folk art traditions. Previous work has examined her family’s religious and cultural practices, as well as the scenery of Mexico City, where she lived until age 19.
Hernández, who is represented by pt. 2, has exhibited at museums including the De Young Museum and SFMOMA, and at galleries including Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Bim Bam Gallery, and Hashimoto Contemporary.
—Olivia Horn
b. 1972, South Korea.
Showing at Frieze Seoul with Gallery Chosun.
Sunghong Min’s sculptures and wall works are made of materials left behind after people are evicted from their homes. Yet, given their intricate, careful aesthetic, they appear anything but disheveled. In the “Exercise for Variability” series, the artist fills irregular picture frames with paper ink works, criss-crosses them with ballpoint pen marks, and then folds and sews them to create tiny paper seams. Threads of beads hang from the bottom of the frame, reappropriating these discarded items as objects of desire: carefully crafted with love.
Two hanging sculptures, meanwhile, from the “Skin_Layer” series, act as mobiles with a kind of ghostly bodily presence, and are made from door handles, banisters, and threads of beads. Though he has exhibited for decades in Korea and is collected by major institutions here (like Seoul Museum of Art and Korea’s National Museum of Contemporary Art), he has rarely exhibited in the West, so this was a rare treat for a European like me.
—J.T.J.
B. 1998, London. Lives and works in New York.
Showing at The Armory Show with Kasmin.
In Kasmin’s Armory Show booth, amid works by art historical greats like Robert Motherwell and Morris Louis, it’s a delight to also find a painting by the twentysomething rising British painter Emil Sands. His work Ramblers (2024) depicts a serene yet enigmatic moment shared between five figures, seen from behind, as they wade through shallow waters before a lush backdrop of trees and sky. (Priced at $18,000, the piece sold in the early hours of the preview day.)
Ramblers is a taste of a larger body of work, titled “Salt in the Throat,” which will feature in Sands’s debut solo show with Kasmin in January 2025. The artist blends figures and landscapes, charging them with vulnerability and beauty, and at times invoking the weight of masculinity. Though he’s based in New York now, it’s compelling to consider Sands within the ripe lineage of British painting. His dreamlike compositions recall forebears like Peter Doig.
Given the deeply introspective and narrative quality of the works, it’s not surprising to learn that Sands is a deft writer, too. He’s currently working on a memoir based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic in 2023, reflecting on his experiences with cerebral palsy.
The upcoming Kasmin show is the next in a string of solos for Sands, including recent exhibitions at JO-HS in Mexico City and Tibor de Nagy in New York. The young painter is certainly one to watch.
—C.L.
B. 1996, Washington, D.C. Lives and works in New York.
Showing at The Armory Show with Gaa Gallery.
Following a hot tip from my colleagues on Artsy’s curatorial team, I went into The Armory Show anticipating excellent figurative textile works. Kimathi Mafafo, Akea Brionne, and Kandy G Lopez were on my must-see list, but I was particularly drawn to the woven city scenes by new-to-me artist Malaika Temba. At Gaa Gallery’s booth in the fair’s Presents section, Temba is showing jacquard tapestries based on images of Tanzania, where her family has roots. Using soft pastel shades, she flattens bustling street scenes with a posterized effect, creating imagery that is both decorative and documentary in nature.
Temba’s work is inspired by her peripatetic upbringing: Born in Washington, D.C., she spent time in Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, and Morocco as a child. Across these contexts, she took note of the cultural significance of textiles—such as the East African kanga—which is what drew her to the medium. Her practice broadly considers ideas about global trade, gendered labor, and cultural identity.
Currently in residence at Silver Art Projects, Temba previously completed residencies at Art Omi and MASS MoCA. She holds a BFA in textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has had solo shows at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Lilia Ben Salah Gallery, and Gaa Gallery.
—O.H.
