DALLAS, Texas — The tiny green bugs aphids that were clinging to my clothes matched the Dallas Art Fair (DAF) logo, a clean, leafy, lime-green square. The air was thick and warm, but it was early enough in the season that the chirping birds known as grackles weren't yet loud, and the hustle and bustle around the concrete mid-century fashion industrial gallery building was a wake-up call to spring, along with colorful art. It gives off an aura of. Costumes enter and exit through swinging glass doors in the city's downtown.
The Dallas Art Fair Foundation and the Dallas Museum of Art Acquisition Fund have raised significant funds to facilitate permanent collection acquisitions from exhibitions for eight of the past 16 years. “The fair is about those moments when everyone can be in the same room,” said Kelly Cornell, director of the fair. hyperallergenic. But the fair was not without its challenges. In 2020, 30 gallerists tried to recover their booth payments after the fair was canceled due to pandemic restrictions, but were met with resistance.
It is said that Dallas collectors cannot be rushed into a sale, and Southern style is to wait until previews are complete before closing. Still, I eavesdropped on a few soft trades as I wandered the vast expanse. In fact, amidst the alarming shortage of cowboy hats, we've heard plenty of voices, from wealthy women discussing where they bought their spring pied-a-terre to jokes about solar eclipses (though , it's rude to wear a hat indoors around here).
Catering staff, thinking they were leftovers, drifted into Alexander Berggruen's booth and tried to clear out Stephanie H. See's sculpture. It was a combination of a ceramic 7-Eleven bag and a glass pouch containing Funyun chips. She stopped in her tracks and backed away while the gallery staff were distracted by the collector.
Of course, the vast majority of DAF's work is paintings, and the young gallerist says landscapes in particular are selling like hot cakes. Abstraction with detailed compositions and vibrant color palettes dominated Booth's expansive depictions of the natural world, with Western aesthetics and cowboys coming in a close second.
Without a doubt, Wolfgang Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia has brought in one of the pre-eminent painters of the entire fair just one year into the program. Aric Block's canvases are masterpieces of close-cut, airbrushed perspectives of rust-belted cowboys in skintight Wranglers and leather boots crouching in the grass or on Spanish tiles. In “This and That” (2024), One such figure is clutching a rose in memory of his mother.
Maureen O'Leary's work exhibited by Christine Tierney Gallery in New York was also outstanding. of artist's It is reminiscent of the use of color and flattened perspective to depict Roman landscapes and busy, popping tablescapes. About Wayne Thiebaud's underrated urban paintings. “Looking Glass” (2024) by Sean Cairns, on display at the Dallas and Los Angeles-based gallery 12.26’s booth, depicts a vast mountain canyon in oil and enamel, with shimmering distemper and sand affecting the rougher surfaces. is given.
Meanwhile, MacLean Gallery in Houston was unable to hang Brazilian-born, Bozeman-based painter Bruna Masadas' bright and brooding volcano paintings on its walls.
“Sunny Boi Summer” (2023) is a wall weave by Tyrrell Tapaha, a sixth-generation Diné weaver from The Valley in Taos, New Mexico, using hand-spun and vegetable-dyed Navajo Churo wool and alpaca. It combines the custom of “sheep weaving” that has been passed down from generation to generation in the Tapaha family. ,mohair. Engraved within the chevron stripes and traditional swirling logs is the phrase “All that for a boy?”
