Inside Frieze Week New York 2025: Eight Highlights

Lesley Bodzy, Halcyon vertigo, 2024 latex, resin, acrylic pigments. 48 x 27 x 3 inches. Courtesy of Criss Collaborations. 

By ANNA MIKAELA EKSTRAND May 6, 2025

Are there really enough collectors to support the growing number of art fairs out there? Probably not, but there are certainly enough galleries. Under Ari Emanuel’s leadership, Frieze has opened new fairs in Seoul and Los Angeles and acquired The Armory Show and Expo Chicago, and his recent acquisition of the company for $200 million indicates that he continues to believe in the business. This week, Frieze, several other art fairs, and the spring auction sales are taking place in New York; gallerists, artists, and auctioneers are putting their best foot forward to engage collectors in their work. Commenting on the uncertainty of the market, the international shipper Franz Dietl recently shared in an interview with Art Basel that some might want to “park their cash in a quality artwork.” And, given the declining dollar, European and international collectors buying in New York “just became 20% less expensive.” A positive take that I hope holds true. If you see something you like, buy it, and don’t be afraid to ask for a payment plan—support living artists and their gallerists.  

At the Fairs…

Katie Commodore and Lesley Bodzy at Criss Collaborations at Future Fair

Lesley Bodzy. Indelible sagacity, 2025. Latex, resin, acrylic pigments 35 x 35 x 16 inches. Courtesy of Criss Collaborations.

Curator Erica Criss, presents, through her advisory Criss Collaborations, textile works by Katie Commodore and sculptures by Lesley Bodzy. Unifying the presentation are the artists’ engagement with the female body, which Erica Criss thought about during her curatorial process: “it is like thinking of an exhibition as an artwork,” she commented. Bodzy’s balloon works are abstract, but sagging, deflated, and coated in shiny materials like resin or injected with foam, they allude to the body and its modifications, and also lead to intangible associations. The press release for her most recent solo-show, Levity and Depth at M David and Co at Art Cake, stated that she is exploring the abyss, I would add ‘and having fun with it.’ Indelible sagacity, for instance, pancakes in its form, but its surface is inviting with acrylic pigment specks. As a sculptor, Bodzy’s work traverses 3D printing, acrylic paint pours, latex, and silicone, It is in these material explorations that the strength of her artistry comes forward. Bodzy is having a moment; the fair comes on the heels of her solo show, which Flaunt featured in a splashy editorial feature (that I penned). Commodore’s work of delicate figurative water colors on ivory, where she has painted her friends in intimate settings, in the nude or their underwear, and two digitally woven tapestries, one Kelly and Rodrigo, of a couple in bondage, embracing, are celebrations of desire, sexuality, and one’s own body. They are, in Criss’s words, “a rebellion to reclaim the female gaze” and refreshingly feminist. Commodore recently finished a residency at Wassaic and teaches printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

Katie Commodore. Kelly and Rodrigo, 2024. Mixed media on digitally woven tapestry, 50 x 55 inches. Courtesy of Criss Collaborations. 

The presentation is a continuation of Criss’ exhibition Womanhood 102, staged at Space 776, where she first showed the two artists together. She also showed Bodzy’s golden acrylic paint pours in her SPRING/BREAK booth as part of the Naked Lunch thematic. With its unique exhibition design, works hanging at all eye levels, Criss’s Future Fair booth is a beautiful and inventive exercise in form and the female experience. May 7-10 Booth U12 at Future Fair. 

Kathie Halfin at Daniela Mercuri Gallery, Future Fair

 Kathie Halfin. Climber's Awakening, 2025. 25 x 17 x 4,5 in. Courtesy of Daniela Mercuri Gallery.

Criss Collaborations shares their booth with Daniela Mercuri Gallery, which is showing Kathie Halfin, a Ukrainian textile artist, whose work explores sensuality, touch, and healing through the lens of shamanic practice. Using sisal, flax, and handspun paper, she weaves using basket weaving and other, sometimes ancient techniques into plant-like forms. These sculptures, textured and vibrant gems, each a character itself, extend the artist’s shamanic performance practices where she uses plants, dyes, and movement to incur healing, especially related to the war in Ukraine. I curated her performance work into The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, and I follow her work closely. This is Daniela Mercuri’s second time participating in the fair, and her female-only program continues to be strong and driven by interesting materials. May 7-10 Booth U12 at Future Fair. 

Lauren Cohen and Aliza Howard at Loft Projects, Future Fair

Lauren Cohen. Gallerina, 2025. Oil mounted on wood, 11 x 14 in. Courtesy of Loft Projects. 

“Artists play a specific role in our history and culture as documentarians, creating, through pictures, something we can talk about. That makes you stop and look around, especially when everyone is looking at their phone,” Leslie Weissman, founder of Loft Projects, astutely commented about the role of art in an interview with Lois Whitman-Hess. Certainly, Aliza Stone Howard did just this at her booth at SPRING/BREAK in 2024, where she invited visitors not only to see the work but also to sit down in the all-pink booth and talk, offering fortune cookies with lines from films as ice-breakers. Her painting practice investigates nostalgia, girlhood, and the role films play in self-discovery through film stills from iconic pictures like Legally Blonde and Clueless. Lauren Cohen’s work also extends beyond her artworks; she has created ceramic, video, painting, drawing, and installation works based within multi-year performances involving performative personas—the latest, a gallerina, that she presented at Ace Hotel in partnership with Powerhouse Arts, and has continued to develop. Howard and Cohen are unapologetic, frank, and sincere in their approach to exploring femininity and power.

At Loft Projects booth, Weissmann presents four paintings by Howard, Ballistic (2025), depicts Clueless’s Cher (played by Alicia Silverstone) on her cell phone, and two works by Cohen, Gallerina (2024), a painting of a larger than life woman wearing Mondrian-patterned shoes, along with 31 female artists in her salon-style booth A Room of her Own. May 7-10 Booth SP2 at Future Fair.

Maya Perry at RAINRAIN, NADA 

Maya Perry. A recollection mounted to the back of the throat, 2025. Oil on panel. 12 x 16 in. Courtesy of RAINRAIN. 

The Heat of a Mirrored Image, a solo-presentation of a dozen oil paintings and a couple of ink on paper works by Maya Perry, represents the Chinatown gallery RAINRAIN’s debut at NADA. The immersive booth, lit by candles, is a domestic mise-en-scene, the works of intimate objects and spaces are painted in light colors, but have dark undertones as represented by Kafka-esque insects and lizards and jarring titles, like A recollection mounted to the back of the throat, or, a hairbrush, The habit of repetition in the form of lying still. These suggestive titles paired with painted snapshots of a bathroom, a living room, someone in bed with crumpled sheets—everyday life at home—point to the heaviness of depression, domestic abuse, or other traumas and delicately create opportunities for reflection and rebuilding. 

Suchitra Mattai at Roberts Projects, Conductor 

Suchitra Mattai. she walked in reverse and found their songs, 2024. Found tapestry, embroidery floss, beads, bindis, sari, and faux gems, 72 x 51.5 in. Courtesy of Jennifer and Christopher Roberts, Los Angeles, California, photo: Nicholas Lea Bruno.

Suchitra Mattai centers her painting, drawing, fiber, and collage work around migration, often incorporating vintage saris, beads, and embroidery to honor female labor in her work. She is Indo-Guyanese, and her ancestors, along with many other Indians, Chinese, and Portuguese, traveled to British Guiana as indentured workers to fill labor shortages after slavery was abolished. (Indentureship is an extension of slavery, as people worked toward their freedom for no pay.) Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, her solo show Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs is currently on view in Seattle and investigates the country's past. I fell for her work when I saw one of her tapestries at The Armory Show some years back. Mattai will be the focus of Roberts Projects booth at the newly minted Conductor at Powerhouse Arts, an art fair focused on artists and galleries from across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Indigenous Nations. May 7-11, 2025, at Powerhouse Arts. 

At auction…

Carol Bove and Olga de Amaral at Phillips

Olga de Amaral. Imagen perdida 27, 1996. Hand-woven linen and gold leaf. Courtesy of Phillips. 

Presenting textile work from the 1960s to today, Olga de Amaral’s retrospective organized by the Foundation Cartier now at ICA Miami truly showed the breadth of the artist’s work from her ingenuity of technique, borrowing from vernacular and pre-Colombian methods, and modernist experimentation (she studied with Anni Albers at Cranbrook Academy of Art) with grid and pattern. On the market, her hand-woven linen works that incorporate gold leaf are popular, and  Imagen perdida 27 (1996), with a $300-500,000 estimate, is a gorgeous example. The relief style dimensionality and iridescence of the de Amaral work lend it an air of sculpture rather than tapestry. Head of the Day Sale, specialist Annie Dolan wrote to Whitehot: “achieving a new auction record last May, underscores the long overdue market recognition she rightly deserves.” The collector who is offering it for sale bought it directly from the artist in 1996. In fact, most work offered at Phillips this season is fresh-to-market, Dolan continues: “90% of the works in our Evening Sale have either never appeared at auction or are making their first appearance in over 15 years.” Along with the de Amaral work, these also include Gerhard Richter's Mann mit zwei Kindern and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled from 1984 with interesting provenance, the first owned by Blinky Palermo, and the latter was in David Bowie’s collection. Dolan also highlighted their Joan Snyder piece. 

Another favorite of mine, with its appearance of weightlessness, is Carol Bove’s painted industrial steel sculpture Snake (2016), with a $400-600,000 estimate, which holds contradictions, scratching the brain nicely. Part of her collage series, junkyard-sourced scrap metal is combined with painted green steel, crumpled, like paper, they appear precarious, but are certainly not, as the sculpture weighs some 1500 pounds. Dolan commented that it “presents a rare opportunity for collectors, as this work is the only of its kind currently available on the auction market this season. A sculpture like it has not been at auction since 2023.” In the vein of abstract expressionist sculptors like Mark Di Suvero and Richard Serra, Bove’s work serves as an interruption in space. Viewing May 3-13, sale May 13 and 14, 2025 at Phillips. 

About town…

NADA Opening Party 

Nine galleries come together as hosts of the party celebrating NADA’s opening at Public Hotel’s rooftop. Among them are JO-HS, the Mexico City and New York-based gallery that is showing a painting by Mexico City-based Melissa Rios in NADA’s spotlight section, curated by Owen Duffy, and opening the group show Techne in Tribeca on Thursday, May 8. The gallery’s very hip founder, Elisabeth Johs, will surely bring an eclectic set of artists, jetsetters, and tastemakers to the party. Other hosts are Season 4 Episode 6, Cob Gallery, Chilli, Daine Singer, Con_, Franz Kaka, Xxijra Hii, and Third Born. May 7, 2025, at Public Hotel. RSVP essential.  

MAD About Jewelry at the Museum of Arts and Design

Monies. Courtesy of MAD. 

Fifty emerging and established jewelry artists will present at MAD About Jewelry, a pop-up sale at the museum, which, in its twenty-fifth year, supports the museum’s overall mission in presenting jewelry as an art form. Which, when seeing these pieces, is unquestionably a fact. “The internationalism of MAD About Jewelry is core to its DNA. Even for avid travelers, these unique designers may not be easy to find for tourists,” Carson Woś, MAD’s Associate Director of Donor Relations, wrote to Whitehot. Among the stand-outs is Sebastian Schildt’s newest collection, Beads and Stripes evokes aforementioned de Amaral’s modernist pattern and gridwork or that of Albers, gesturing toward pre-Colombian motifs, in sculptural form. These oversized pieces of intricate beadwork encircled by silver or gold framing push the boundaries of jewelry. The Swede’s work is collected by the Swedish Nationalmuseum, Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, and the Swedish royal family. Another Scandinavian house, Monies, from Denmark, is monochrome in its colors and architectural with its large stones in circular and angular shapes. French Flore Soria, who uses leather to craft her pieces and Christina Zani, more colorful, who is inspired by architectural shapes in her bench work are also jewelers who not only push the boundaries of form but also materials. May 3-5, 2025, at the Museum of Arts and Design.

And, of course, visit Frieze. WM