The Best Booths at NADA New York, From Whimsical Sculptures to Tar Paintings

Founded in 2023, Mexico City’s Naranjo 141 has a model that exists somewhere between a gallery and a residency program. For its first presentation at NADA New York, it brought works from one of its most recent residents, Pauline Shaw, who considers the nature of scientific inquiry, the natural world, and the tension between perception and truth.

According to the gallery, after Shaw learned that much outer-space imagery is colorized by NASA scientists and researchers, she decided to reinterpret the publicly available images through her own imagined palette. In these works created during her residency, Shaw reimagines Jupiter and its moons through fiber works streaked with rich color and inset with silk “scars.”

The four artists presented by Tribeca’s Dimin act as a “cross-section of the gallery,” founder Robert Dimin explained to ARTnews. “But I try my damnedest to have it make sense, even if its just to me,” he said, adding that he wanted to create a “textural conversation.”

There’s Ye Zhu, whose blends acrylic painting with found materials like tree roots, mass-produced plastics, and semi-precious stones to create intricate works referencing classical Chinese paintings and Buddhist reliefs. On an adjacent wall are works by Taj Poscé, who mixes industrial and building materials like tar, plastic, and roof coating to create spiritual compositions that sit unstably between representation and abstraction. (Many of Poscé’s family members, according to Dimin, were builders and construction workers.)

Brennen Steines, meanwhile, uses what Dimin called a kind of “alchemical process” to create a textured limestone or calcium base onto which he then paints. Rounding out the group is Michelle Im, who has on view a ceramic sculpture of a Korean flight attendant. She has recently created sculptures of Asian domestic and service workers to reflect on labor, performance, and individuality.

Western Catskills–based KIPNZ has dedicated its presentation to absurd and comic drawings and sculptures by Simone Mantellassi, a self-taught Italian artist now based in Gilbertsville, New York. The brightly colored works are assembled from half-formed references, jokes, and ideas. In the drawings, Mantellassi alludes to Surrealist art, comic books, and artists from David Lynch to Philip Guston, pairing seemingly unrelated objects to humorous effect. The sculptures appear like dioramas and are composed of everyday objects painted in bright garish hues. They poke fun at the “artifice” and “strangeness” of everyday life, as he put it.

Canadian artist Jude Griebel explores our relationship with the natural world, food, and farming practices with whimsical sculptures of animals, many of which carry protest signs. Created during residencies at the Leitrim Sculpture Center in Ireland and elsewhere, the sculptures are made of hand-carved wood that is then overlaid with air-dried modeling clay and acrylic paint. For works serving as harbingers of ecological collapse, they are surprisingly playful and humorous, recalling in style and expression the animals from folklore and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Garrett Klein, cofounder of the Lower East Side’s Massey Klein gallery, told ARTnews that this is on purpose.

“[The aesthetic] provides a familiar entry point to these works that are talking about the environment and our entanglement with and encroachment on it,” he said, adding that the scale of Griebel’s sculptures far exceeds what could fit in a NADA booth. “We once had a seven-foot chicken in the gallery.”

Tatjana Pieters, a dealer based in Ghent, Belgium, brought two artists for her fourth presentation at NADA New York who both juxtapose, reinterpret, and question historical imagery with popular culture. Mae Dessauvage’s paintings recall medieval and early Renaissance icons, altarpieces, and frescos in both form and shape, but feature manga-like feminine “dolls” that reference Dessauvage’s experience as a trans woman.

“I always like to take recognizable elements that have a kind of iconic status and then make them personal,” Dessauvage told ARTnews. “Anime figurines are kind like statues of the Madonna, right? But also, the dolls are like trans women. They speak to transitioning, to fluidity, to the objectification of the body.”

The center of the booth is dedicated to a sculpture by Charles Degeyter of his father’s former home in southern France where he once spent summers. The structure appears like a dissembling dollhouse, surrounded by artifacts referencing a childhood long past, and overtaken by threatening crab sculptures. Like Dessauvage’s work, it resists easy interpretation, finding multiplicity in its exploration of childhood, memory, and what we hold sacred.

839, a new Los Angeles gallery founded by art historian Liz Hirsch and artist Joshua Smith, features two artists in its first presentation at NADA New York: Olivia Gibian and Andrés Janacua. The latter creates wall-hung works from woven toquillo (plastic lanyard) formed from different colors in custom-milled hardwood frames. The frames, like the works contained inside, question the boundaries between utility and decoration, labor and luxury. Mostly, they are tactile and beautiful. Most impressive is Big Thighs (2024), which initially appears to be woven from a single black hue. As you move back and forth, patterns emerge as light hits the interwoven black and charcoal threads. Gibian’s paintings similarly split the difference between figuration and abstraction for works that sometimes appear floral or like landscapes, but which can just as easily slip into gestural waves of color.