As New York City’s art week ramps up with six fairs plus a series of major auctions, Esther returned yesterday (May 12) for its third chapter at the Estonian House with 22 exhibitors and special projects. With a strong mix of Eastern European galleries, New York spaces and other European projects, it offers a more intimate, boutique and context-specific experience than most other fairs, with works staged against the elegant interiors of a four-story Beaux-Arts building. On opening day, Observer ran into Esther co-founder and dealer Margot Samel on the J train. She was carrying the Esther-emblazoned carpet that would be installed this year for the last time in the Estonian House’s entryway. Running a fair and a gallery during the busiest week of the year is a challenge, she said, adding that while it has always paid off, three editions felt like the right number for a fair that set out to do something different. “Rather than trying to create a conventional art fair environment, Esther has always leaned into the peculiar character of the Estonian House and allowed galleries to respond to it in unexpected ways. That tension between architecture, history, and art is really the heart of the project. As the final edition of Esther, it felt important to leave on a high note.”
There may be fewer international visitors this year—and, as Samel admitted, it was a challenge to bring in some of the smaller experimental galleries she had hoped for from abroad—she was hopeful that New Yorkers would show up. And they did. This year’s opening day was especially busy, with a strong flow of collectors, curators and artists moving through the building from start to finish, and by the end of the day multiple dealers, particularly local ones, reported sales. As at the Venice Biennale and other recent biennials, several artists presented here are engaging with natural materials, nonhuman time and cycles, or otherwise reflecting on the future relics of our contemporary daily lives, moving through questions of transience, revisitations of the past and explorations of dreams, the psyche and inner realms. We identified a few artists worth seeking out as you visit the fair, which remains open through Saturday.
Bank presenting Alice Gong Xiaoweng
Tara Downs presenting Nick Jansen
Tara Downs is showing the magical realism of London-based Nick Jensen, whose hazy canvases constantly drift and slip between figuration and abstraction. Building imagery in layers, the artist engages in a subconscious, emotional exercise, reconstructing a dream by returning again and again to the same subject. Through intuitive layering in tempera and oil, figures begin to emerge from abstraction, led by the alchemy of colors and textures that replicate the phenomenological process by which we see, transform sensation into symbol and meaning, then interiorize it as memory. Yet that memory can blur back into fading shadows and untamed sensations that hint at events, where the feeling precedes its formalization into language. Jensen’s work enacts this continuous back-and-forth between sensation, symbol, language and memory that shapes our experience of the world and the self. The presentation sold out by the afternoon, with prices ranging from $6,000 to $32,000.
Longtermhandstand presenting Kata Tranker
Longtermhandstand-.jpeg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”A paper-pulp sculpture of three primordial figures stands on a sarcophagus-like structure in a pale blue neoclassical room, surrounded by small relief works.” width=”970″ height=”728″ data-caption=’Kata Tranker presented by Longtermhandstand. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy the artist and Longtermhandstand</span>’>
Management presenting Willehad Eilers
Management is presenting the visceral paintings of German, Amsterdam-based artist Willehad Eilers, also known by his pseudonym Wayne Horse. Eilers began his artistic journey in the German graffiti scene before studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, developing an eclectic practice rooted in drawing, painting and video that explores cultural and political behaviors with lyrical humor and expressiveness. Rendered in bloody, bodily tones, both his more intuitive works on paper and his more articulated oil paintings weave a personal mythology that dives deep into the abysses of the psyche, unearthing the most suppressed impulses, desires and obsessions. Here too we find a typically Freudian tension between Eros and Thanatos, translated into a symbolic language of archetypes closer to Northern European mythology and its grotesque figurative tradition. With prices ranging from $4,100 to $15,000, the booth sold out early, mostly to collectors from New York or L.A.
Temnikova & Kasela presenting Katja Novitskova
Tallinn-based Temnikova & Kasela is presenting Katja Novitskova’s deer against the neoclassical frame of the Estonian House piano room. Imagined as metamorphic, fluid entities, their translucent silhouettes integrate with their surroundings, fluidly shaped through the expansive properties of polyurethane—artificial and organic, digital and tactile, otherworldly and archetypal all at once. Novitskova’s work investigates the complexities and failures of technologically driven narratives used to depict the world. By collapsing distinctions between art, science and nature, her practice examines how biological territories are increasingly mapped from within the body through mediating technologies such as microscopes and brain scans, where datasets and biology merge to reshape both technological and organic evolution. As the artist suggests, “the look inside has somehow replaced the gaze into the future.” From parasitic organisms to algorithmically mediated systems of care, her sculptural environments evoke a near future in which the biological, symbolic and nonhuman realms are inseparable. Prices range from $35,000 to $38,000.
Pangée presenting Delphine Hennelly and Max Keene
From Montreal, Pangée presents the fairytale-like, thickly impastoed oil paintings of Delphine Hennelly alongside Max Keene’s micro-scenographies of repurposed materials, which seem to compress entire worlds into miniature formats. Both artists share an interest in capturing social patterns, performativity and constructions of the self. In miniature theaters of the absurd, Keene’s sculptures in particular express his interest in the “out of step” elements of the everyday, creating works that sustain an unsettling tension between the familiar and the enchanted. Prices for these delightfully uncanny compositions of deconstructed daily life range from $1,800 to $2,000.
Kogo Gallery presenting Kristina Ollek
Kristina Õllek’s practice moves across photography, installation and microbial and chemical processes to investigate aquatic ecosystems and human-altered environments. Presented by Kogo Gallery, her works combine photographic images of Estonian limestone cliffs with clay, textiles, Baltic Sea water, silicone and crystallized sea salt, creating organic portals into the natural flux of matter and energy that bring together the liquid dimension of water with sculptural frames of geological sedimentation and fossilization. Through this fusion of technological mediation and organic matter, Õllek attunes photography to natural temporalities and cyclical processes, where salt crystals and sediment-like textures slowly transform images into material archives of environmental change. Her works evoke fragile marine ecosystems while blurring distinctions between documentation, erosion and the living processes embedded within nature itself. Prices for mixed-media wall works and installations range from $3,500 to $5,000.
Gathering presenting Wynnie Mynerva, Stefan Brüggemann and Christelle Oyiri
Presenting for the first time at the Estonian House, London’s Gathering presents a tight booth combining a small, seductively abstract work by Wynnie Mynerva, a Stefan Brüggemann piece visibly inspired by the urban environment and a new work by Christelle Oyiri, who was at the center of the gallery’s highly successful presentation at Frieze London in October. I CAME, I SAW, I POSED, part of Oyiri’s ongoing TOURISTA series, brings together imagery reminiscent of retro travel agencies with satirical slogans that emerge from the artist’s critique of the commodification of remote destinations within contemporary travel culture.
Darja Popolitova’s jewelry and Isaac Haseltine’s chairchairchair
A special mention this year goes to Esther’s projects, one bridging the fair with design and the other with fashion and jewelry. Around the rooms, one notices the artful chairs designed by Brooklyn-based Isaac Haseltine, made from repurposed fragments of urban wood and carrying the same resourcefulness that creativity in a city like New York so often requires. Each chair’s description lists, as its medium, the address where its materials were found, turning the works into a sculptural cartography of the city’s fabric.
Downstairs, meanwhile, Darja Popolitova’s hybrid jewelry pieces are on view, with their intriguing in-between character. Fluidly merging archaeological fragments, fossils and hyper-technological instruments, they seem to originate from an unknown ancient civilization as much as from a yet-undiscovered future. Using jewelry, digital techniques and video, Popolitova explores how tactile experience can emerge from virtual culture and provoke broader social and cultural change. Working with innovative and sustainable materials, she transforms jewelry into speculative objects that blur the boundaries between ornament, device and sensory tool—a timely reflection on our relationship with both digital and physical presences and our constant oscillation between the two.
