Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
The inaugural edition of a new Art Basel fair opened in natural gas-rich Qatar in February with a novel artist-curated format consisting of 87 dealers presenting focused, biennial-style displays by individual artists. The ruling Al Thani family, worth $200bn, toured the fair before it opened and reserved numerous works, leaving dealers to spend the next few days wondering if and when those reserves would convert into sales.
"This festival, 'Embrace Winter,' is now in its 14th year. We've hosted several events throughout the season, and this is our final one. Today we're here celebrating art, culture and community all coming together."
"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
First in a Chinatown mall beneath the Manhattan Bridge and then in a nondescript third-floor room nearby, Francis Irv exhibited a heady, multigenerational mix of artists from the United States and Europe, variously established, obscure, and on the rise. Megan Marrin showed alluring paintings of 1960s celebrities (replicas of photo souvenirs shaped like clothes hangars) last fall. Win McCarthy placed bricks, plastic takeout containers, and bedding on the floor in a charged, melancholic 2024 exhibition.