sculpture

The PULSE Art Fair

The PULSE New York fair has it all sculpture, photography, mixed-media, painting. The layout this year with 63 booths is much more manageable territory at the Metropolitan Pavilion than at the other fairs dominating Manhattan this week. Some of the best photography at this fair is at the booth of Munich’s Galerie Andreas Binder www.andreasbinder.de. Dieter Rehm’s “Casserta Stairs” and his “New York Public Library Reading Room” are both showstoppers. Rehm is the President of the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and his work is greatly admired in Europe and the U.S.

Polixeni Papapetrou is an Australian artist who uses her children as models, placing them in isolated, yet stunning locations. The children wear animal headdresses, apparently stemming from the artist’s discovery that in Spain you are restricted from photographing children under certain circumstances. This photo-based artist explores issues of identity which in this current series involves a lot of whimsy and fun.

Christian Chaize at the Jen Bekman Gallery booth is another young photographer well worth following. Since first vacationing in Portugal, Chaize has developed an entire collection of work based on images of a small stretch of the Portuguese coastline. Yet each image has its own special quality although they are all of the same location. Chaize is a Paris-based artist who says in one of his bios that he tries to see “with new eyes” each time he approaches the same “still-life” scene. You gotta love Lizabeth Eva Rossof.

Rossof is a conceptual artist whose large soldiers are almost six-feet tall. The smaller ones sell for about $1,500 each. She is represented by the Charlie James Gallery where the opening for her soldiery spoof was in the L.A.Chinatown. At the Fred Torres Collaborations booth, the mixed-media work of Detroit-based artist George Rahm dominated.