I’ll start off this blog post with a necessary disclaimer. I’m more than a little bit biased about this years SPRING/BREAK Art Fair. My work is featured in FURY INC, a booth in this year’s show, thanks to curators Sarah Fuhrman and Chris D’acunto who have been long time friends and colleagues of mine. Naturally, one should take my oncoming praise of the show with some hefty grains of salt. It’s still a pretty neat fair, though.
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My first time venturing out to view SPRING/BREAK Art Fair was half a decade ago. The show, made up of mostly independent curators, struck a unique chord. The fairs now signature hallways of converted office space filled with manic post-internet video art, messy found-object installations, and playful interactive pieces presented a pent up burst of creative energy. It was a welcome push against the scrubbed-clean operations of more prestigious fairs on Armory week. Five years later the show has expanded in scope and notoriety while maintaining much of the scrappy weirdness that has consistently made it as interesting as it is.
SPRING/BREAK takes place on Madison Avenue this year in the former office headquarters of Ralph Lauren. It’s two floors and over 100 booths, making for a labyrinthian experience trying to see it all. The work ranges from expansive sound pieces in wide open hallways to large-scale paintings crammed into literal cubicles no bigger than a prison cell. The theme this year is IN EXCESS, prompting the artists to draw on themes of degeneracy, consumerism, and way way way overdoing it.
The theme of excess permeates the whole show, contributed by individual artists and teams of curators. Much of the curation celebrates our fits of creative hedonism in both form and content. Some overwhelm the senses and give a whole kitchen sink’s worth of eye candy, while others give themselves whatever limited breathing room they can to highlight specific works. Colin Radcliffe’s humorously tragic ceramics of past lovers splayed out on a desk in booth #1168, curated by Dan Halm. Scooter La Forge’s dinner table of fractured fairy tales in booth #1002. Natascha Wright’s slippery abstractions of the female figure hung on weathered fashion ads in booth #1115, curated by Ben Pritchard with SFA Projects.
One booth I found early on that eagerly plays with our consumer sensibilities is REPOSSESSED, booth #1013 curated by Brooklyn based artist Hannah Antalek. The group show brings together a deafeningly colorful array of paintings and sculptures by Anthony Iacomella, Alex Xerri, Nicole Dyer, and Gary Marecic. Hannah’s paintings depict hypersaturated images of childhood play broken up with graphic renderings of Lisa Frank stickers. A chunky, Minecraft-like sword by Marecic sits in the corner. Xerri’s racecar paintings appear lifted from memories of a metalhead child’s playtime, while Iacomella’s funky little ceramics conjure images of ashing a cigarette into Bart Simpson’s face. Dyer’s big painting fills a canvas with an utterly packed shelf of personal items. Medication, art books, slices of cake, and open jars of peanut butter hang out and free-associate in it’s jammed composition, and the painting itself sits on two hand-constructed and painted La Croix boxes.
Just down the hall in booth #1009 there is a group show similarly enamored with branding and high fructose corn syrup. JUST FOR THE TASTE OF IT, curated by Jac Lahav and Eli Bronner, manages to string together a show of 24 artists hyperfocusing around their collective fascination with, or in Lahav’s words, a “manifestation of my addiction to” Diet Coke. In one corner painter Paul Gagner renders a cheese-headed deadhead with a literal Diet Coke IV drip, fatalistically paired next to a shadowboxed shrine to death and soda pop by Kristen Racaniello called “Miraculous Fount”. The adjacent wall holds a pen drawing of a figure drinking soda with their feet. Lahav’s massive paper-mache Coke can with a stoned glazed smile sits in the back of the room, several smaller versions of itself with the heads of Garfield nestled in its blown out inner cavity. The cramped space is surreal, obsessive, and exudes a sugary sweetness tied inexorably to contemporary living.
Much of the curation at SPRING/BREAK this year touches on this same manic energy. A pleasure-seeking operation gone slightly awry, as pleasure-seeking operations often do. UNNATURAL INTIMACY, booth #1060 curated by Daniel Morowitz confronts us with the consequences of our pleasures. Heaven, hell, and purgatory in one space. Morowitz sinks his own work firmly in Hell, the paintings hanging on a wall marked with a massive pink pentagram. Paired with Morowitz is Paul Anagostopolous, whose computer-perfect gradients and direct reference to Greek male beauty sit comfortably in Hell next to Morowitz’s layered washes and obfuscated homages to snakes and gay pornography. In purgatory there is the pairing of Stephen Saliba and Nicole Basilone, whose work both radiate a brilliant earthy green. Saliba’s dramatically lit figurative paintings depict both chaos and repose while poking at a world ruled by cartoon logic. Basilone’s landscapes-verging-on-abstraction suggest a similar warping of one’s own visions. Heaven takes up the final wall and spills to the outside. A lamp by Anastasya Tarasenko and sardonic paintings by her and Sarah Furhman sit among worn out lawn chairs and patches of fake grass, hammering home a contentious relationship with the disturbed domesticity depicted in their work.
Two especially overwhelming booths are solo shows by Kate Klingbeil and Super Future Kid, organized respectively by Field Projects and Mindy Solomon Gallery. The two shows are exemplary of what a higher budget and gallery support can bring to the inherently wacky nature SPRING/BREAK demands of its curators. Curated by the team of Jacob Rhodes, Rachel Frank, and Kristen Racaniello, Kate’s booth #1065, BURROWED, presents a massive cross-section of the earth. Half a dozen icing-thick canvases of humans in nature seamlessly bleed into a wall painting, which is dotted by hundreds of hand piped paint elements. Marching ladybugs, squirrels sleeping in their underground homes, and onions with human faces give depth to what feels like a larger than life middle school science diagram. Super Future Kid’s booth #1003 constructs a literal candy land complete with powdered floors and a pink river running through the middle. You enter the space through a gingerbread house made of actual, intensely aromatic, gingerbread. Paintings of cats with bowties and long-tongued cartoon girls licking glowing rainbow lollipops populate the space. You’re allowed to take a seat on bean bags made to look like big red mushrooms, but the candy-frosted intensity of it all is almost unnerving in its joyousness. It’s title, TWO FOR ME NONE FOR YOU: A NARRATIVE ON EXCESS AND WISHFUL THINKING, suggests this is on purpose. One might say it’s all a bit excessive.
Overall, this year’s SPRING/BREAK Art show succeeds in swinging wildly and unabashedly at its themes of excess and opulence. It’s a notable contrast from shows in previous years which weighed more heavily on themes of social upheaval and contentious political divisions. There are a few booths where current events come to the forefront, most notably Valery Estabrook’s Impeachmint series of commemorative coins chronicling President Trump’s many shortcomings, and Haley Hughes’s paintings depicting police violence and contemporary protest. But for the most part the pathos and real creative energy of the work presented at SPRING/BREAK 2020 lies just underneath a sugary sour surface.