The plane to New York was half empty. Appreciative of the extra legroom, it also triggered a sense of unease. Where was everybody? This peculiar blankness accompanied me on the LIRR to Penn Station and my arrival at the hotel, which, like the airline, has opted for automated check-ins. Without any local conversations to ground me, I felt overwhelmingly lonely. I had terrible premonitions of a wordless dystopia where mute workers unthinkingly follow AI instructions like bees in a hive. After all, New York is like a giant honeycomb, buzzing with high-performance – and I had been looking forward to some fast-paced, punchy exchanges (and not).

This initial silence, which partly reflects a refusal to engage in the endless clickbait of politics, became a palette cleanse before three near-perfect days attending the many openings, art fairs, and happenings scheduled for New York Art Week. The conversations I had about the things I saw were so refreshing. I can honestly say I love the Big Apple more than ever. The politicians might not save you, but if you dare to look up art, you certainly will – and I don’t just mean the visual arts. Not only did I find many cultural sweet spots, but if we stick to the honeycomb metaphor and liken artistic production to honey, this city is positively oozing the good stuff. My journey was also an important reminder: don’t be fooled by the news stream on your cell phones; go into the real world and witness things for yourself.

Day 1

Wide awake at 6 am and ravenous by 8, happily, our location on Orchard Street (opposite Gallery Perrotin on 130) was walking distance to top-notch brunch venues, starting with some serious schmaltz and scrambles, with lox, eggs and chisel rye, at Russ and Daughters https://www.russanddaughterscafe.com This set us up nicely for a walk-through Greenwich Village, after a reliably rude cab driver dumped us there, ahead of Frieze New York https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-new-york at The Shed.

Sparser and more streamlined than London, we had time for the art. On the main floor, Victoria Miro’s booth was like a mini museum of greatest hits by Jules de Balincourt, Hernan Bas, María Berrío, Chris Ofili, Inka Essenhigh, Eric Fischl, Chantal Joffe, Doron Langberg, Alice Neel, Celia Paul, Grayson Perry, Paula Rego, Sarah Sze and Flora Yukhnovich. Curated to emphasise connections to writers and literature, two mixed-media works of complete wonder by Chris Ofili capture his fascination with William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603–04). Small wooden doors carved with a figure opened to reveal the same painted visage reflected on the mirrored surface inside each door. A work that simultaneously captures the many faces of an individual also reflects the viewer, depending on how wide you open the doors. We are reminded that our identities are intertwined with our perception of others. Chantal Joffe’s recent, large-scale portrait of the art critic and writer Hettie Judah lounging in a bikini evidenced a deeply intimate relationship, whilst a major historical work, Marathon (Running II) by Paula Rego, was inspired by the dramas of city life in New York during the early 1980s. Its relevance was amplified by the strange elision of current political events, unimaginable decades ago. https://www.victoria-miro.com/art-fairs/111/

The art world tends to seek new perspectives further afield: Focus Stand Prize, sponsored by Stone Island and curated by Lumit Tan, was awarded to Mitre Galeria from Brazil for its solo presentation of Luana Vitra, whose sculptures, ceramics and works on paper reflect the landscape and history of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. For me, Malo Chapuy stole the show, particularly a strange little icon, its medieval subject confusingly dressed like a futuristic beekeeper, replete with black gloves. The perfect counterpart to Ofili’s work, and so portable – the adage of buying works that fit in a New York elevator has been reduced to a Hermes Kelly bag https://www.hermes.com/uk/en/content/106196-kelly/. On that, I spotted a miniature Frank Walter seascape as I left.

Out of the fair in under three hours, we had time to catch a few openings that evening, including one of the many Japanese exhibitions that proliferated New York Art Week, highlighting the power of international relations and pointing to strategic partners in the China Sea. We met with the new team at GOCA Gallery, opening with Ibuki Minami, curated by Masaki Nomura, a Harvard researcher in Philosophy who wrote the most poetically abstract thesis on “the essential form of the totality of being”. Later, we would meet Takura Suzuki, the Paul Smith Art Prize winner, at his opening ‘In Praise of What Fades’. I fell hard for his work “Build Tomorrow Today”, which borrows phrases from advertising campaigns and embeds them in bucolic pastiches from art history in mixed media. If you use words in your art, make it cinematic and play against the image. Influenced by the Japanese aesthetic mono no aware, his work reflects the transient nature of our digitally enhanced lives – and how vulnerable we are to advertising imperatives (https://www.paulsmithsfoundation.org/blog/news/and-the-winners-are-international-art-prize/)

Now starving, Ray, the lovely manager at Paul Smith, recommended Lure Fish Bar (https://www.lurefishbar.com). Unbelievably, we walked in without a reservation and were given two seats at the bar, next to a regular from Arizona, who insisted on sharing his Tuna Tacos. Whilst the ongoing tariff fiasco continues to gut tourism, dining out at impossible-to-get-into venues was a guilty pleasure. It was also a painful reminder that people would spend anything to be able to consume in public, yet procrastinate and haggle with a work of art, a transaction that can be life-changing, not ephemeral. I have a belly full of questions.

Day 2

Our second breakfast in New York involved Dudley’s Ricotta Hotcakes: soft, fluffy pancakes smothered in honeycomb butter and maple syrup

https://www.dudleysnyc.com/menu/ . This we balanced with a brisk walk through the West Village and a detour via the paper and pen specialist @topdrawer, where we met comedian Mary Mack @marymakingnoise, who occasionally illustrates poems in their doodle pads. On this day, a golden goose was flying over Mary Oliver’s poem, which begins with, “You do not have to be good…” When I asked if I could buy the piece, her eyes widened like saucers in disbelief. Uncertain about whether she could cut the drawing out of the book, as it technically belonged to the shop, her watchful manager suggested I buy it. But I didn’t want to lug around the whole book; I just wanted this work of art and to buy it from the artist. Eventually, I solved the dilemma by buying a pen and a postcard and then giving the artist cash, who could draw another doodle in the book which stayed there. This exchange got me going with creativity and capitalism, like who determines when a doodle becomes art, how context impacts its legitimacy, and why the gatekeepers decide what it is worth. Perhaps more importantly, our encounter gave meaning to my day, and I briefly experienced a sense of belonging again (is that what I am seeking?).

On our way to NADA (https://www.newartdealers.org), we took a detour through some of the blue-chip galleries in Chelsea via the gargantuan Willem de Kooning show ‘Endless Painting’ at Gagosian https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2025/willem-de-kooning-endless-painting-curated-by-cecilia-alemani/. In ‘Proximity’ (around the block) was a collection of monumental works in cherry and walnut hardwood by Thaddeus Mosley (b. 1926) at KARMA https://karmakarma.org/artists/thaddeus-mosley/. Sharing a generational language with Martin Puryear, Mosley began sculpting wood in the 1950s, carving felled trees by hand using only a chisel and a gouge in his Pittsburgh studio. These strange totems, redolent of Simon Allison’s ‘Spin Cycle’ sculptures, had a kind of ancient preciousness, as if we had jumped back in time. Perhaps this feeling came from the durable and solid hardwood, having taken such a long time to reach the fullness of life.

From here, we headed to NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance, founded in 2002), a not-for-profit collective of professionals working with contemporary art who believe the adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art has run its course. This is a superlatively friendly affair and the perfect place to start a collection. Immediately, I stopped at MIMO for Amber Toplisek’s wall-mounted sculptures, like stained glass photography. Embedding fleeting images into tangible structures, she aims “to amplify the potential for images to coalesce within the viewer’s physical body”, and she succeeds. Next was a brightly coloured triptych of works by Laurie Nye at the

Philip Martin Gallery, and a sensational lineup for ceramic miniatures – dubbed ‘slab glaze paintings’ by Los Angeles artist Raina Lee at Stroll Garden, which were all sold out.

Then two significant topographical works, in gentle gradients of spring colours, caught my eye at https://tappetovolantegallery.com/exhibitions/bascha-mon-solo-show

Forty-seven years after her last exhibition in New York, the “artist’s artist” Bascha Mon was rediscovered by Tappeto Volante Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her relative obscurity can be partly attributed to her former gallery closing, but more truthfully to the incompatibility of family life with artistic ambitions in the 1960s (ahem and still is). Somehow, she persisted; formative classes with Adolf Konrad taught her the art of perception and helped refine her artistic vision before she took the bold step of commuting to New York City to study at the Art Students League. There, Marshall Glasier played a pivotal role in unlocking her artistic voice and resourcefulness; when Mon ran out of paper, she collected discarded newspapers on the commute home for drawing pads. Her lucid paintings capture the literal and metaphorical distance she had to cover. They feel expansive, like landscapes seen floating in a hot air balloon. They soothe with pastel tones but reward closer inspection to reveal elements of figuration embedded in the landscape – fragments of memory in a painted tapestry.

For all this cultural satisfaction, we had to fill our bellies and follow the beautiful Taryn Cox to Manuela’s, named after Manuela Wirth, who co-founded Artfarm with her husband, Iwan Wirth, on Wooster and Prince Street. It was full of art addicts, eating reasonably priced food (by NYC standards) and surrounded by masterpieces from their private collection, including a Louise Bourgeois spider climbing the walls. The bartender stopped me on the way out and asked me what I thought of the large George Condo – I said I looked at it through a semi-transparent lens of images from art history, in particular Picasso, who famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” https://manuela-nyc.com

Day 3

After brunch at https://www.lamercerieny.com, we raced to Independent, stopping in Harlesden High Street Gallery for its slick solo booth of monumental abstract expressionist paintings by Savannah Harris in oil, oil stick and sand on canvas. Something in their composition called to mind the rarely seen work of elusive artist Phillip Hunt; then I noticed the piece was entitled ‘Drift’, the exact title of the London show Hunt had been in. Often, the eye is drawn to the familiar, and new imagery is overlaid on what your mind holds dear, resulting in a strange – sometimes delusional – tapestry of memories which Gaston Bachelard calls ‘The Poetics of Space’ but is otherwise known as magical thinking. It is a fantastical reward cycle for the visually orientated. Upstairs, I fell in love with a small woodland scene by John Mclean at the Approach Gallery – a stand of Aspen trunks in soft pastel tones; and Alicia Adamerovich’s total studio, replete with a hand-laid floor mosaic, in naturally dyed wooden cubes.

We got lost on our way to TEFAF, a good thing in New York. En route, a row of monochrome works, propped up on a red brick wall like a miniature skyline, caught my eye. Variously illustrating ironic observations, like a car having a nervous breakdown, I noticed the sign ‘no photographs.’ I introduced myself to the artist and said I was writing a piece on New York Art Week, where most of the art was inside sheds and tents, and I loved this street art display. Immediately, he pulled out a little drawing, ‘I’m in Tents’@johnwalter.nyc  – thank you for the ideal palette cleanse.

Unsurprisingly, TEFAF was immaculate in its presentation, if conservative, in the offering. Masterpieces stood out, particularly a wall-mounted textile work in undulating tones by the Japanese artist Mitsuko Asakura at Salon 94 (https://salon94.com), already promised to a museum. A small gold weave by Olga de Amaral at the Richard Saultoun Gallery (we reviewed her retrospective https://www.fondationcartier.com/en) shimmering amidst a cohort of pioneering female textile artists (Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buic, and Barbara Levittoux Swiderska) featured in the @themuseumofmodernart landmark 1969 survey ‘Wall Hangings’, to coincide with @moma current exhibition ‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’. These contemporary iterations reposition textiles as ‘fibre art’, weaving new meaning into old threads. (https://www.richardsaltoun.com)

All this, before Tribeca Art Night (https://www.tribecaartnight.com/lander) with so much to see, we had to triage and likely missed some gems – there is only so much art one can absorb. After a brief tour of Pierre Huyghe’s cinematic, institutional ‘In Imaginal’ at the Marian Goodman Gallery, we were seduced by a show at the Jane Lombard Gallery, Tribeca, Pirelli, let me count the ways [Part II], from the London-based artist Jane Bustin (Part I was in Copperfield); an emotive, layered, and profoundly sophisticated body of work, that softly, explores the loaded history and strange legacy of the Pirelli calendar. Using the 12 monthly pages as a conceptual framework, notably, the 1968 edition was inspired by twelve poems, each photograph reflecting the essence of a different poet, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In a text-based block print, Bustin re-writes and merges two poems by Browning, including the feminist Aurora Leigh, to create one poem – aptly typed in the Pirelli font, and by extension subtly weaves this her visual narrative, which then enfolds the work of Sarah Moon, the first woman to photograph for the calendar in 1972. Commissioned in response to the growing Women’s Liberation Movement, her gently subversive intervention staged models dressed as nineteenth-century bordello girls in the Villa des Tilleuls, the former headquarters of the Gestapo in occupied Paris.

Bustin’s series is a direct, month-by-month response to these original images by Moon, which lie beneath her abstract paintings under hand-blown coloured glass ‘as if the images had slipped off the surface of my paintings and landed in a puddle on the floor’ says the artist. Her paintings distil the atmosphere from these images, using natural pigment, porcelain, fabric, or wood in abstract, geometric grids that feature reflective copper tones. Glimpses of fluorescent paint, concealed at the edges, cast a luminous halo on the white wall. Unlike the calendar photography on the floor, these minimalist works embody Bustin’s Modernist philosophy: “Instead of painting what I see, I paint what it feels like to see.” This show also includes exquisite triptychs that feature lenticular nudie cards, partially concealed behind fine gauze flaps, that position us as voyeurs; the mirrored surface of a copper square catches our reflection. Like Bustin’s composite poem, these works, says Catherin McCormack, “echo the dichotomy between the passive nude women of the calendars and the active, often invisible, labour of women during that era. The phrase “let me count the ways,” which Bustin references in her title of the exhibition, is also the first line of Browning’s original sonnet. Conceptually linking herself, Sarah Moon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Bustin’s Pirelli, let me count the ways [Part II] is a resonant reflection of how women have been perceived throughout history and art history.” https://www.janelombardgallery.com

Completely in awe and visually saturated, we were now famished. Thankfully, my brother had arrived and made a reservation at Marea, where we devoured plates of fresh pasta and seafood, as good as, if not better, than my last supper in Milan. https://www.marearestaurant.com/new-york

PS – On the plane home, I was fortunate enough to sit next to Zoe Dubno, an art writer turned author who has just released her debut novel, Happiness and Love. Unsurprisingly, it is set in the art world and “the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa, entertains herself – and us – with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.” Here’s looking at you, Dubno – we cannot wait to read this!

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/461517/happiness-and-love-by-dubno-zoe/9781529930160

Visit

Tags

Frieze, New York Art Week, NY Art