Meticulous handiwork wins the day at New York's Art on Paper fair

Celebrating its tenth year, the Art on Paper fair has brought 100 galleries to Manhattan’s Pier 36 (until 8 September), where visitors can browse drawings, prints, photographs and sculptures in a celebration of the humble medium of paper—all while sipping a new strawberry-peach flavour of LaCroix selzer and, should the mood strike, testing out the comfort of an Infiniti sports utility vehicle. The Booksmart Fair is back, a fair-within-the-fair partnership with the Center for Book Arts that brings in book dealers as well as on-site talks and book signings. Adjacent to the book fair, Shoestring Press is doing live printmaking demonstrations throughout the weekend.

“My favourite thing about the fair is the curatorial prompt of paper, which has led to the staying power of the show and also helps attendees dive in,” Kelly Freeman, director of Art on Paper, tells The Art Newspaper.

As in previous iterations of the fair, Freeman is a big fan of the stand of Philadelphia’s Commonweal, which this time brings the works of 18 artists together under the delightful theme “What I did on my summer vacation…”—complete with AstroTurf covering the floor for added effect. Freeman also highlights Toronto’s Little Egg Gallery, devoted to artists under the age of 18, and the new exhibitor River House Arts, based in Toledo, Ohio, whose stand includes Madhurima Ganguly’s mixed-media drawings of women interacting with and morphing into tigers and fish (priced at $800 each).

While works by big names like Alexander Calder, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Julian Opie, Wayne Thiebaud and Andy Warhol can be found throughout the fair—there are even two lenticular prints by Brian Eno ($8,750 for the pair)—the most rewarding gems are the meticulously drawn and constructed works by lesser-known artists.

On Hunty Projects’ stand, giant bird’s-eye-view drawings of tiny people parading the streets of New Orleans by the artist Dapper Bruce Lafitte ($9,000 each) provide fodder for what could be hours of delightful contemplation. Up close, viewers can see the instruments of individual marching-band members and shout-outs to galleries the artist has worked with and publications that have written about him. Lafitte is self-taught and based in the city’s Lower 9th Ward—infamously devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005—taking inspiration from his surroundings by remembering the exact configurations of specific parades in order to draw them from memory later.

Around the corner at the New York gallery Spanierman Modern’s stand, on the wall opposite works by Man Ray and Tom Wesselmann, hang some of the most impressive pieces: musical collages by the late Harlem artist Sam Middleton (1927-2015). A celebration of the jazz greats Middleton grew up with as neighbours during the Harlem Renaissance—Duke Ellington would later call Middleton a “painter of music”—the lively collages (priced between $12,500-$28,000 each) incorporate clippings of performing musicians, pieces of sheet music and colours and lines inspired by Abstract Expressionism.

“He was friends with Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, and a regular at Cedar Tavern,” says the gallerist Gavin Spanierman. “Kline was the one who told Middleton to move out of the US to make his career, since a lot of opportunities were closed to Black artists at the time. So he moved to the Netherlands.” It was in Europe that Middleton made the collages on view at Spanierman’s stand.

Down the aisle, past Hunty Projects (and almost to the Miraval rosé bar), among the many works featured at the stand of New York’s Fremin Gallery are the meticulous constructions of two very different artists: Melike Kılıç from Turkey and Robert Strati from New York.

Kılıç’s works are delicate paper cutouts stacked to create 3D scenes of what appear to be fairy tales (price from $1,550 to $2,150). These miniature dioramas represent the artist’s own migration history from the small Turkish village where she grew up to the metropolis of Istanbul, where she now lives and works. The shadows the various layers of paper create on each other add an almost sinister quality to the nostalgia of childhood.

On the adjacent wall, Strati’s works bring together intricate drawings with broken antique dinner plates in unique sculptural collages (priced from $12,000 to $15,000). His series, Fragmented, began when the artist accidentally broke a porcelain plate that belonged to his mother-in-law. Rather than throw away the pieces, he decided to expand the plate’s design in the form of a drawing—in a way, putting the plate back together while giving it new purpose through exploring a possible story beyond its confines and finding beauty in the chaos of its destruction.

• Art on Paper, until 8 September, Pier 36, New York