Join us in New York for the gallery’s second annual participation in NADA, the New Art Dealers' Alliance.

NADA New York 2025
Project Booth C105

The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY — 10001

Hours
Wed. May 07, 4 – 7PM
Thurs. May 08, 11AM – 7PM
Fri. May 09, 11AM – 7PM
Sat. May 10, 11AM – 7PM
Sun. May 11, 11AM – 5PM

For NADA New York 2025, Marta presents new and recent works from A History of Frogs, the joint studio practice of Los Angeles-based artists Antonia Pinter & Chase Biado. The gallery—itself operated by partners [in life and work] Benjamin Critton & Heidi Korsavong—has an ongoing and vested interest in artist pairs, as evidenced in the gallery’s representation of, and recent exhibitions with, tandem studios Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon, and Lindsey Muscato & Joshua Friedman, among others. What is it that draws certain artists to collude and collaborate? Is it the proverbial Chicken (the Work) that begets the Egg (the Partnership), or vice versa? What technical, practical, and emotional skill-sets dovetail to form bodies of work that would not or could not exist in the hands of a solo practitioner?

The sculptures of Antonia Pinter & Chase Biado, realized predominantly in an array of cast and manipulated metals and alloys, engage with worldly (object-ive) narratives of otherworldly (imaginary) places and entities. For this new presentation, A History of Frogs draws on previous investigations into the self-designated Goblin Baroque and Marsupial Gothic. For Pinter & Biado, this exercise in non-human thinking allows for the creation and production of works that trade traditional industry (and industrial) signifiers in favor of archaeological ones. These items, objects, and sculptures—collectibles, even—are variously cast and molded with the embrace of imperfection, so that the artists’ hands are eternally present in the plastic decisions of creature-logic. Each work inhabits space with the poise and impishness of a fairytale being: curious, potentially beloved, yet always somewhat elusive. The works reflect Frogs’ treatment of objects as evolving and fluid; hologram and hybrid. Fantasy, play-logic, and retrospect render an anthology of artwork-heirlooms that are arguably functional, unabashedly decorative, and—in true morphological fashion—several things in-between.

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Hosted across plinth and wall, the gallery’s Project Booth (C105) exhibits a series of lighted sculptures, vessels, and wall-hanging works, all rendered in aluminum, that articulate new geometries within the duo’s universe of fictional pasts and fabricated relics, continuing their interrogation of our relationship to the concept of antiquity and the potentialities of culture.

There is a mystery to the nature of early art objects. We may—by form, material, or context—deduce their meaning contemporaneous with the time of making, but there is a foundational essence of unknowing—a categorical lack of definitive conclusion that broadens their scope to the beauty and pleasure of the infinite. Within the work of A History of Frogs’ Pinter & Biado, this suggestion is ever-present. Fluid lines—first borne in wax, then cast in sand, and finally welded into union—metamorphose into abstracted wall works that, when observed, seamlessly loop into the realm of the figurative. They transform between winged insects and kaleidoscopic patternings, reflecting, as with a Rorschach test, the viewer’s own psychology as much as the hand of the sculptor. This duality is embedded in Pinter’s heritage in particular—her father was an electrical engineer and zoologist who specialized in insect vision and formulated an equation that explained how light is received through arthropodic eyes.

From here, we understand that there is not only an artistry to Pinter & Biado’s practice, there is also a biology—a sense that the work extends, perhaps quite literally, from a lineage of living creatures who, be they of a distant past or a near future, exercise(d) thought and existence with a similar emotional impulse to us. Within each vessel (a new form for the artists) a central container is suspended between glyphic appendages—a fly in a primordial web that hints at a civilization with its own distinct mythology and attendant structures of ritual, the inhabitants of which may have utilized these objects as reliquaries in their houses of power. Whether activated by flora or remaining eternal in that possibility, each work possesses a distinct symmetry that, instead of seeking uniformity, finds resolution in its own internal logic. This is a principle that holds true across the taxonomy of A History of Frogs’ work. Be they light- or water-bearing, adorning vertical or horizontal planes, every free and solid connection reveals a new set of undiscovered references that hint at an imaginary world untouched by our own.

A History of Frogs is the joint studio practice of Antonia Pinter & Chase Biado. Through the former’s training as a metalsmith and art book publisher, and the latter’s painting and drawing background, the artist duo’s Los Angeles-based morphology explores material and thematic transformation made visible through world-building and object-creation. In their own words —

“A History of Frogs is an experiment in form, destabilized through play-logic to find new relationships between peoples and objects, [with] the object conceptualized as evolving and fluid, hologram and hybrid. A History of Frogs is an investigation into the re-historical object: the goblin baroque, the marsupial gothic. A History of Frogs believes in the evolution of the self through the dissolution of the fixed narrative of selfhood.”

Recent individual and tandem works have been exhibited at Marta Los Angeles, Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, Noon Projects, The Pit, Frieze Los Angeles, NADA New York, Dimin, Other Places Art Fair, the Neutra VDL House, The Valley, and BozoMag.