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The Satellite fair comes of age, The Art Newspaper, December 1, 2005

The Satellite fair comes of age
By Louisa Buck



NADA-the New Art Dealers Alliance fair which opened last night-is three years old and is rapidly becoming ABMB’s leading satellite event. Despite the best attempts of the organizers, collectors were sneaking in not just a few hours but an entire day before yesterday’s evening preview. “If they come any earlier they’ll only have the building to buy,” sighed one exasperated dealer. A case in point was the film producer and indefatigable collector Dean Valentine who was very much in evidence as early as Tuesday reserving works right, left and centre. Other early birds included the Japanese artists Takahashi Murakami, who paid the fair’s co-founder Zach Feuer of LFL Gallery in the region of $40,000 for Aaron Spangler’s carved wooden sculpture of a dystopic landscape The Economy Car, and the Los Angeles collector Stanley Hollander, who was trawling the aisles of NADA while the main ABMB preview was in full swing across town.

This year, not only is NADA bigger-with 83 galleries as opposed to last year’s 61-but also more international, with participating galleries hailing from Puerto Rico, Japan, Israel, and Poland. New Zealand’s Hamish McKay Gallery is also making is NADA debut. Works on its stand range from $30,000 for the aptly entitled 1969 text painting For Sale by veteran New Zealander Billy Apple, a contemporary of Hockney and Kitaj at London’s Royal College of Art in the 60’s, to more recent work by Australian artist Mikala Dwyer which includes tropical plants being given away for free, “if you bring your own bucket.”

“NADA has grown up, and it shows,” says Christian Viveros-Faune of New York’s Roebling Hall. Zach Feuer agrees. In collaboration with the Sonnabend Gallery, he has brought a new Haim Steinbech sculpture to the fair with an asking price of $35,000. “People are bringing more important works this year-it’s an inevitable consequence of increasing interest.”

Despite NADA’s high-rolling tendencies, there is also a reassuringly large amount of reasonably priced work to be found. New York’s White Columns Gallery-one of several not-for-profit spaces taking part in the fair-is showing the work of Mexican-Philippino Aurie Ramirez. This severely autistic artist’s day-glo watercolors of androgynous, dandified figures, sell for between $1000 and $2500 and have already attracted a wide collector base, including artists Chris Ofili and Cecily Brown as well as Don and Mera Rubell. Another powerful new artist premiering at NADA is Felix Schramm, a Dusseldorf sculptor whose violent yet rigorously controlled sculptural cuttings, tearings and slicings into architectural planes and cubes start at $3000 and go up to a room-sized $25,000.