For The North American Pavilion at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, Marta is pleased to present a series of works by four US–based artists.

Virva Hinnemo, Minjae Kim, Dino Matt, and artist duo Kristen Wentrcek & Andrew Zebulon hail from around the globe (Finland, South Korea, and the US, respectively) and currently center their practices on either the East or West coasts of the United States. The four-entity presentation puts in conversation diverse outputs produced in quintessentially American settings ranging from the bucolic (Hinnemo lives year-round in Springs, East Hampton) to the metropolitan (Wentrcek & Zebulon work out of a compact studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown). Seeking out formal correlations across disparate mediums and bodies of work, as well as a programmatic bridge between the wall-works common to traditional art fairs and the functional works that have peppered the gallery’s offerings in the past, the joint showcase of works by Hinnemo, Kim, Matt, and Wentrcek & Zebulon share unexpected and elucidating relationships in pigment, line, form, topography.

In Virva Hinnemo’s (b. 1976, Helsinki, Finland) landscape-adjacent paintings—each rendered from memory but based on a real-world vantage-point—abstracted representations of the natural environment are speckled with vestiges of human intervention and suggestions of the objects or detritus associated variously with camping, picnicking, touring. Generous-with-paint compositions of unpeopled diversion become still, gestural citations of (or pastoral eulogies for) scenes and scenarios in which the overlap of nature and unnature are quietly apparent.

An unmatching pair of Minjae Kim’s (b. 1989, Seoul, South Korea) sculptural seating works continues the New York-based artist’s fascination with the chair-as-figure, skillfully humanizing known quantities—legs, seat, back—into compositions that flirt with anthropomorphism. Kim’s chairs increasingly embrace and cradle a would-be sitter; a body upon a body. The artist’s signature dark lacquer grounds these works to any exhibiting surface, and nurtures contrast-y, gestalt-y reads of Kim’s expressively-carved wood forms against all but the darkest of backdrops.

In Dino Matt’s (b. 1987, Lake Havasu City, Arizona) glazed stoneware vessels, the pastoral and sculptural combine in a frenzy of ceramic daubs; a swirl of disparate three-dimensional clay strokes that layer into semi-solid forms. The urn-like works—created by piecing together fragments of material, laying bare their process in the final result—are lively, surreal, and wonderfully unlikely in the new canon of West Coast ceramic outputs.

In Kristen Wentrcek (b. 1984, El Paso, Texas) & Andrew Zebulon’s (b. 1984, San Diego, California) functional sculptures, a material trompe-l'œil suggests the rigidity of solid wood or cast concrete. Realized in carved foam and pigment, the duo’s growingly-iconic Soft Foam Works are rendered as candidly as the series is entitled, with exposed areas of material extraction offering up contours for seating: Sofa I becomes a sculpture or stage for a two-party conversation. Their coating pigments named by the artists (‘Rust’, ‘Hamburger’), the pieces engage in a push-and-pull of formal attraction and revulsion typical of the duo’s output.

—

The North American Pavilion is an exhibition of works from eight young galleries hailing from the United States, México, and Canada, hosted by Frieze at their No. 9 Cork Street, located in the heart of London’s Mayfair gallery district.

With: Bruises Gallery (Montréal, CA), Emma Scully Gallery (New York, US), Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery (New York, US), Marta (Los Angeles, US), NOON Projects (Los Angeles, US), Of the Cloth (Atlanta, US), Studio IMA (México City, MX), and TIWA Select (New York, US).

Download the TNAP Press Release.