Bellwether had a successful looking single artist booth

Well Portland's galleries all seemed to do ok to great in Miami last week and the WWeek covered some of the social side of it. As far as the best fair goes Id have to give the award to NADA. For years they have looked like purveyors of minor art world insider jokes, amateur hour scribbles and a general leg humping attitude towards Matthew Higgs. This year they grew up with numerous single artist booths and a strange new preoccupation with modernist abstraction. Be it mirrors with AbEx gunk on them or outright references to Suprematism or De Stijl. What's more it wasn't completely ironic, there was a real love for minimalism, clean lines and rewarding aesthetic experiences.

It's like Dave Hickey has supplanted Higgs (both of whom have very different but somewhat equally narrow aesthetic preoccupations). The Scope fair was somewhat rough going and I'll tackle them last. In the past Ive been very critical of NADA but this time I really enjoyed it. I thought the Aquas were solid but lacked the charge that NADA had this year (many of Aqua Wynwood boths were kinda anonymous), maybe more single or duo artist booths would help Aqua reach the next level? Sure there was a lot of stupid hipster art at NADA but there was also enough good stuff to satisfy me and for once it seemed like there were legitimate intellectual problems being addressed as well..

NADA (best Miami art fair for 2007):


Derek Eller's gallery looked sharp


Portland's Small A Projects had an excellent mirror by Bob Linder... with a kind of AbEx existential treatment. Sales were strong.



Cohan and Leslie had more AbEx mirror treatments but not as good as Linder's



More Mirrored works from Roebling Hall... these referenced modernist furniture as well


Ratio 3 had lots of midcentury design furniture hooking up with Zaha Hadid-esque forms too. I think Dwell Magazine was exerting stong influence on this fair



Upstream Gallery was ironically De Stijl crazy after all these years... (sorry had to do it)



This video at Wallspace featured Richard Tuttle like sculptures moving around. With no ironic sayings, no trucker hats, no heavy metal kids... I liked this booth, I cant believe it was at NADA.


Grimm Gallery had Terry Haggery's work which I like... though it's better just painted on a wall instead of a canvas.



Yuken Teruya (Jose'e Bienvenu Gallery) always makes my day


Scope mostly left me bored with predicatble counter culture posturing but I liked:



Blanca Soto Gallery



Onetime Portlander and all round talented monster Joe Biel always looks good.


Sure many booths at NADA and Scope were trying way too hard but in general enough NADA galleries were exciting enough to keep me from art fatigue... I just tune out anything that looked like something from the old NADA fairs.

Thanks for the posts Jeff - The mirror piece, "Mirror Black" should be attributed to BOB LINDER (not will rogan). Thanks!

agh the 50/50 chance bites me in the ass. Ill fix... its a nice pic I thought