Nine Fine Booths at SCOPE

SCOPE, year after year, presents a fun and eclectic art fair that always manages to feel celebratory. It’s a place where artists congregate and share ideas, and attendees are more than welcome to wander into the blissful abyss, meeting the artists, exchanging Instagram handles, and sharing it all on Snapchat. This year in New York, the show sees 60 international galleries with works from creators that steal our attention in every direction.

1. As soon as you enter, you’re greeted by Zahorian & Van Espen (Prague) on your right with a piece by Štefan Papčo of a figure face-down on the ground and penetrated by numerous arrows. The figure lays restless in front of a piece by Juraj Kollár that looks like thick glass blocks, but with delicate swirls of paint to reel you in.

2. It won’t take you long to find Galerie Mark Hachem (Paris). The first piece that may strike you is an ostrich with its head submerged in a Rubik’s cube. Scattered throughout the booth are other animals in odd positions by Bombardieri, like an elephant squeezed into a contraption with a young girl using a pulley to hoist it high in the air. There’s a piece by Wolfgang Stiller of three matchsticks, with the heads of the matches replaced by human heads in a crisp black with a faded orange-yellow at its neck. We then met Colombia-based artist Daniel Samper in front of his work, comprised of iron and magnets on wood. Moments before both were sold, Samper showed us how his art pieces easily come apart and attract themselves back together.

3. Bursting with energy and eye-catching accessories was MORDEKAI—a label by Los Angeles-based artist Ken Borochov. Familiar at first glance, the accessories have been seen gracing some of today’s hottest spotlights, like on Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Lana del Rey for album covers and tours, and on Emma Watson. Covered in gold, pearls, and sweet colored gems, we watched men and women alike take their time trying on their favorite pieces, ranging from large flower headdresses, custom pearl sunglasses, delicate crowns, bee earrings and rings, and an array of eye-catching pieces fit for the fashion leader in us all.

4. New Gallery of Modern Art (North Carolina) brought a beautiful work by Erik Jones, featuring a double nude image—pencil, wax pastel, acrylic, and oil stick on Rives BFK paper—in bursts of color entitled Portrait of Caroline. We also enjoyed a variety of mixed media works by Stephen Wilson.

5. Artist King Saladeen had a solo presentation of attention-demanding graffiti works at Gallery 38 (Los Angeles) made up of acrylic, crayon, pen, pencil, magazine, newspaper, wheat paste, and spray paint.

6. Arte Berri (Santo Domino) presented a handful of flat steel sculptures by Daniel Sanseviero that seemed to throw off our depth perception, as their shadowing and placement worked well with the walls and pedestals within the booth.

7. Looping around, we caught Markowicz Fine Art (Miami)’s booth full of art by Kaï, whose work pokes fun at the fashion industry, with designer bags marked with a “No values” tag across its front. The artist also made a jab at the cigarette smoking culture, showing a pack of cigarettes with “Morons” as a label instead of the recognizable brand.

8. Cantor Fine Art (Venice Beach) showed a series of nine stellar pieces entitled Topographical Facial Landscape Series by Andrew Myers, who used a tiny paintbrush to carefully and individually paint the heads of steel-head screws, and arranged them side-by-side in a square to create the image of a face. Up close, we got a view of just how precise the markings were, and the detail was exquisite. Along the booth’s back wall, we also saw immense detail in artist Marcus Levine’s work Petra of a nude woman on her back with her hands behind her head, made entirely out of stippled nails.

9. Just before jetting out, we stopped and appreciated the insane detail in pieces by Daniel Jacob at Axiom Gallery (Santa Monica). Sneakerheads everywhere can now rejoice, as their favorite Nike, the Air Jordan, is larger-than-life, and more glamorous than ever. Using round-top Swarovski crystals, over the course of hundreds of hours, 23-year-old Jacob creates masterpieces to replicate the most famous shoes of our time. Apart of his “The Twenty First Century Ice Age” series, the artist shows that he has attained the American Dream by hard work by hand, and by foot.