Expo Chicago’s first outing under Frieze draws bustling crowds and engaged buyers

Wrapping up its VIP preview on Thursday (11 April), the eleventh annual Expo Chicago notched a primary day corresponding to its final beneath impartial possession—a promising signal of enterprise as standard for the truthful, which was acquired by London-based artwork conglomerate Frieze final July.

This yr’s version options 170 galleries, representing 75 cities in 29 nations—just like final yr’s, and roughly the utmost stall capability attainable in Navy Pier’s Competition Corridor, Expo’s house since its transfer from downtown’s Merchandise Mart.

In line with a next-day report supplied by a spokesperson for Expo, hometown exhibitor McCormick Gallery and New York-, Singapore- and London-based Sundaram Tagore netted the VIP preview’s largest gross sales, promoting the late Mary Lee Abbott’s 1952 portray Imrie for $525,000 and a piece by painter Hiroshi Senju for $385,000, respectively. Different main gross sales included a Wolf Kahn canvas from Miles McEnery Gallery ($150,000), Chiharu Shiota’s Infinite Line from Gana Artwork ($121,000) and a big textile work by Marie Watt from Catharine Clark Gallery ($135,000).

In a latest interview with The Artwork Newspaper, Frieze chief government Simon Fox expressed a dedication to retaining the “identities, histories and cultures” of Expo Chicago and New York’s Armory Present, each acquired by the conglomerate final yr. For Expo president and director Tony Karman, meaning conserving the deal with Midwestern galleries and artists.

After we launched Expo Chicago in 2012, we wished to resume our place on the worldwide artwork truthful calendar, as Chicago all the time had, and likewise do what Chicago does greatest—and that’s collaborate with our establishments, our cultural neighborhood and amplify for the world what we’re doing,” he says.

Galleries from Chicago and the Midwest certainly claimed a few of the truthful’s most coveted actual property. Chicago stalwarts Rhona Hoffman and Corbett vs. Dempsey maintained their central areas on the Expo ground, proper subsequent to Brazilian artist Lucia Koch’s billboard-sized images centrepiece, 3X3 Pots (2024), introduced by Galeria Nara Roesler. Chicago- and Paris-based Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, returning to the exhibition after a yearlong caesura to open its Mexico Metropolis storefront, occupied a first-rate perch close to the truthful’s east entrance.

Pierre Lenhardt, Ibrahim’s associate in enterprise and life, says the consumers he has seen to this point replicate Expo Chicago’s standard demographics: Chicagooan, Midwestern and American collectors, in that order, with worldwide consumers as a definite minority. He observed a extra targeted consumers’ market in comparison with the “frenzy” instantly following the Covid-19 shutdown and a relative droop in 2023.

“It’s extra severe and targeted on amassing… [This year’s buyers] are those who didn’t disappear,” Lenhardt says. “It speaks to resilience—going past the flavour of the second.”

Repeat exhibitor Tandem Press, primarily based in Madison, Wisconsin, additionally reported eager first-day curiosity of their choices, which ranged from new works by Judy Pfaff and Suzanne Caporael to prints by Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson, who’s representing the USA at this yr’s Venice Biennale.

“It appears like the primary full yr again since Covid,” says Tandem Press director Paula Panczenko.“Since very first thing [Thursday] morning, there have been crowds of individuals coming via. There’s been no quiet occasions.”

A number of non-local galleries centred Chicago artists of their stands, like London gallerist Cynthia Corbett (displaying painter Ashley January) and Kinderhook, New York-based September (with a profession overview of Reginald Madison, a veteran of Chicago’s Black Arts Motion). Different stands benefitted from latest native spotlights of their artists. ACA Galleries from New York noticed a number of first-day gross sales of work by Religion Ringgold, the topic of a just-closed retrospective on the Museum of Up to date Artwork. Copenhagen-based Gether Up to date has a solo stand of aerated concrete works by Danish sculptor Sif Itona Westerberg, whose exhibition at Chicago’s Driehaus Museum culminates this weekend.

In certainly one of Frieze’s most palpable modifications to the truthful to date, stands within the Publicity sector—for galleries beneath 10 years previous—shaped a thick band off the centre of the Competition Corridor quite than being sprinkled round its periphery. Considered one of them, Bahamian exhibitor Tern, offered out its presentation of works by Kachelle Knowles, whose putting mixed-media portraits of Black males, rendered on brown paper, had been prominently displayed on the nook of two well-trafficked thoroughfares.

Inside Expo Chicago’s churning kaleidoscope, many works provide explorations of monuments and monumentality. Website-specific installations within the truthful’s In Situ programme, participatory works and particular person stands all toyed with, or challenged, the place of artwork in codifying unassailable historic narratives. Paul Stephen Benjamin’s Black Flag (2024)—a large, black-on-black replica of an American flag slouching on a too-short pole and sacrilegiously pooling on the bottom—current by New York gallery Efraín López, greets guests on the corridor’s west entrance. Because the preview went on, unwitting guests tromped throughout it, their pale footprints set in aid.

Additional inside, Colombian artist Iván Argote’s Bust (2021) references an earlier intervention by the artist in Bogotá, by which he lined a statue of Francisco de Orellana, a conquistador and “discoverer” of the Amazon, with mirrors. Cuban artist Ariel Cabrera—represented by Havana- and Madrid-based gallery El Apartamento, in its sophomore Expo displaying—additionally mined his nation’s colonial historical past in a collection of oil work depicting marble statues and Nineteenth-century army figures alongside trendy figures.

A couple of miles away from Navy Pier, down Michigan Avenue, the Colorado-based non-profit Black Dice Nomadic Artwork Museum is presenting Chicago-based artist Brendan Fernandes’s New Monuments | Chicago (2024). For the undertaking, Fernandes has sheathed a statue of normal John Alexander Logan—who, previous to his service within the US Civil Battle, spearheaded state-wide laws barring African Individuals from settling in Illinois—in scaffolding and mirrors. At associated assortment containers at Expo, Fernandes invitations attendees to jot responses to the immediate, “How can we turn out to be the monument?”

Since its begin as Artwork Chicago in 1980, Expo Chicago has turn out to be a neighborhood monument of its personal. To the aid of long-time attendees, nevertheless, Frieze’s interventions to this point seem minimal, even—tentatively—optimistic.

“A lot of what I do, and did, hasn’t modified in any respect,” Karman says of planning this yr’s truthful. “What has modified positively is the chance to be part of a wider crew that’s deeply dedicated to the service of the galleries and the artists that they signify, and that may additional broaden our attain.”

Expo Chicago, till 14 April, Navy Pier, Chicago