| September Strategies, By Anthony Barzilay Freund and Serena Stanfill Tufo
Even if the calendar says otherwise, for most of us Labor Day is a threshold: once we’ve crossed over we’ve bid farewell to summer, if not officially then at least symbolically. For many art dealers in New York City, the weeks after Labor Day are when they stage their first big exhibitions of the season, signaling to collectors and critics that the time for play is over and it’s time to get down to business. Since the period between September and December is when the art market sees the majority of sales for the entire year, it’s vital that a gallery makes a strong showing out of the starting block.
SENIOR AND SHOPMAKER
In an effort to learn more about a gallery’s “September strategy” and what calculations are behind the showing of a particular artist, we decided to get the run down from some of 1stdibs’ fine art member galleries. “While September marks the beginning of the art season, it’s also a somewhat transitional time as people refocus after the summer holidays,” explains Betsy Senior, a partner in the Chelsea print gallery Senior & Shopmaker, which is showing “Alex Katz: Figure/Ground,” from September 16 through November 5. “We opted to open the season with work by a very solid, mature artist and a perennial favorite, whose work evokes a very visceral pleasure but nonetheless retains an ability to surprise. Alex Katz has been making prints since the 1950s and our show includes some rare pieces from the 1980s as well as recent editions.” “Figure/Ground” coincides both with the publication by Hatje Cantz of the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s prints and the IFPDA Print Fair (at the Park Avenue Armory in early November), so it’s an excellent moment for examination and reappraisal of Alex Katz’s work.
Sikkema
“While the audience for September shows is huge as people welcome the energy New York City galleries generate in the fall, the reality is that our serious clients are still preoccupied with travel, summer homes and getting their kids back into school,” explains Brent Sikkema, of Chelsea’s Sikkema Jenkins, which is presenting “Pictures of Magazines 2,” large-scale color photographs by Brazil-born artist Vik Muniz, from September 9 through October 15. “So we try to start the season with an artist who has a long-term history with the gallery and a stable collector base to ease the transition.” Muniz’s recreations of familiar images and text that have been literally torn from books and magazines are simultaneously seductive and confrontational, perhaps the perfect recipe for a September smash.
Yancey Richardson
“There are so many factors that influence who we open with in September,” says Yancey Richardson, the photography dealer a few doors down 22nd Street from Sikkema Jenkins. “The decision’s sometimes as much pragmatic and logistic as it is strategic.” This September, Richardson is opening with new works by the Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene, who is known for her powerful and intimate portraits of teenagers. “She’s an internationally recognized artist whose last show also opened in September, in 2009, and was a great success. Then, in the project gallery we are presenting portraits of rugby players from Princeton and Yale by Amy Elkins, one of our youngest artists, whose work deals with male identity. The portraits were made in a daylight studio set up on the field directly following the match and show these future ‘masters of the universe’ elegantly posed in all their bloody glory.” (Both shows run September 8 through October 22.)
Bonni Benrubi,
One can’t forget that this September also marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and Bonni Benrubi, the photography gallery in the Fuller Building on East 57th Street, is marking that symbolic date with “Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan,” an exhibition of images by gallery artist Simon Norfolk, opening September 15 (it runs through December 3). Also seen in an accompanying book, published by Dewi Lewis, and at a recent exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, Norfolk’s images of the ongoing Afghanistan conflict are a response to the work of 19th-century photographer John Burke, who documented the Second Anglo-Afghan war in the 1870s. “We always show a major artist from our stable to open the season,” Benrubi explains. “And the fact that this show coincides with 9/11 hopefully proves that art can heal and educate and be visually beautiful and compelling at the same time.”
Eleven Rivington
“September is a fairly competitive month, as everyone is coming back and there is a very eager viewing public,” says Augusto Arbizo, the director of Eleven Rivington on the Lower East Side, which recently opened “Andrew Gbur, Keltie Ferris, Jackie Saccoccio,” (September 7 – October 16). “I generally base the first show of the season on the rest of the year’s exhibition program so that there is a general arc or narrative about the artists we will present. Jackie Saccoccio is a gallery artist who will have her third solo exhibition later in the spring 2012 and so we chose to platform that show by placing her work in the context of a three-person painting show with two other artists who are not represented by the gallery.”
Noncommercial events can also sometimes color a gallery director’s programming. “I’m also very excited about the upcoming de Kooning retrospective at MoMA,” Arbizo admits, “so I guess I was in a painting frame of mind when I put the September show together.”
Edward Tyler Nahem
When asked about the gallery world’s “September Strategy,” Edward Tyler Nahem, of the eponymous 57th Street gallery said, “I can’t speak for the rest of the industry, but we have been working on Erik’s solo show for two years and I believed that it would be a strong start to the season.”
Nahem is referring to “Detouring,” a show at the gallery of Erik Benson’s dynamic paintings, which runs from September 22 through October 21. “Erik’s work presents a clear-eyed view of the intersections of the urban environment and nature — the winners and the losers of this quotidian struggle between ‘development’ and nature, ‘progress’ and tradition,” Nahem explains. “In an almost ironic landscape, we see the push/pull between these forces, how they at once inexorably clash with and embrace one another.”
Salomon
“September is a great month because there’s a ‘back on campus’ feeling in the air,” says James Salomon, who is showing “Michael Combs: Be All That You Can Be” in Chelsea from September 8 through October 22. The show of sculptural works by a young artist consists of trophy mounts (kudu heads painted with racing stripes) and sports equipment (football helmets made with fragments of hornCK MATERIALS), among other pieces. “Michael can deliver a show that’s provocative and exciting with a sense of humor,” Salomon explains.
Mitchell-Innes and Nash,
Of course, there are some galleries whose September Strategy translates quite simply as Business as Usual. “Paul’s a wonderful painter and the schedule just worked out this way,” says Jay Gorney, director of Contemporary Art at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, which unveils on September 15 a showing of British artist Paul Winstanley’s haunting works that explore the relationship between painting and photography. (The show runs at the gallery’s Chelsea space through October 22.) “The art world is becoming increasingly year-round so I think these ‘debut’ slots don’t seem as important to us as they may once have been.”
Michael Rosenfeld
This attitude is echoed by others in the field. “The gallery is active for twelve months of the year, so for us, each and every time slot is valuable,” says Halley Harrisburg, TK TITLE at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery on West 57th Street. “Given that our interests in American Art are broad, we schedule our season to represent all areas of expertise while honoring the need to consistently showcase those artists we represent.”
According to Harrisburg, “Evolution in Action” (September 10 – October 29), is “a pairings exhibition that allows us to explore two areas of interest — American surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Fourteen artists are included in this group exhibition and each artist is represented with an early work (the 1940s with roots in American surrealism) and a later more “signature” example from the 1950s or early 1960s (Abstract Expressionism). Each of the fourteen artists — many the gallery represents and/or have featured in past solo exhibitions, i.e Charles Seliger, Boris Margo, Alfonso Ossorio, Beauford Delaney, Norman Lewis — have contributed greatly to both aesthetic movements.”
Cheim & Read
“I don’t think that there is any good or bad time to look at great art — it’s always worthwhile,” says John Cheim of Chelsea’s Cheim & Read. The gallery is featuring Milton Resnick (1917 – 2004) in “The Elephant in the Room,” which runs from September 22 through October 29. “Resnick’s paintings from the 1960s to the ’80s are the profoundly beautiful works of one of the last great Abstract Expressionists,” Cheim concludes matter-of-factly.
So long, summer!
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