For the next three months, I implore you, reader: Pair this column with a Campari soda on ice. I have designated it as my drink of the summer, and the moment has finally come. While I spent last summer pounding the pavement in Los Angeles, I face a blank canvas this time. There’s almost too much to do. Let’s take a look at what’s on deck, shall we?
Manhattan’s Upper East Side tends to clear out by late June—all the better for ping-ponging repeatedly from the Park Avenue Armory’s exhibition of over 450 photos by Diane Arbus, to the Met’s John Singer Sargent show, which highlights the artist’s early days causing trouble in salons around Paris, to the newly opened Frick, to try everything on the menu at its new jewel-box café, Westmoreland, which opens today. It looks so chic that it may give the Neue Galerie’s Café Sabarsky a run for its money. But that’s just one neighborhood, in one city.
Last summer, off-duty gallery directors, artists, and art handlers congregated at Time Again (or at least, carrying six-packs to the sidewalk outside Time Again) on the Lower East Side. I have some educated guesses about this summer’s hotspots. In Two Bridges, Bar Oliver has become a go-to for gallery dinners that stretch late into the night. Its Basque-inspired offerings include an amazing wild mushroom and egg yolk dish for dinner, but I’d be just as happy snacking on its boquerones before Chinatown openings. Its status as an art world haunt is no accident: Two noted Schnabels, Olmo and Cy, are the restaurant’s “creative consultants,” whatever that means.
The grand tradition of the summer group show continues, promising kooky, laissez-faire curation as a low-pressure counterpoint to the serious endeavors in Art Basel (more on that later). Two themed shows have already caught my attention. “Hope is a dangerous thing,” a Lana Del Rey-channeling group show opens tonight at P·P·O·W, with new work by artists like Diane Severin Nguyen, Kayode Ojo, Marianna Simnett, and Robin F. Williams. And on June 28, Olympia Gallery on Orchard Street will host “CAKE,” a one-night-only exhibition of edible “dessert-only” artworks by over 30 artists, including Pauline Shaw, Eli Hill, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Robin F. Williams again. Why not!
In last week’s column, I mentioned a study that determined that summer rentals in the Hamptons are down 30 percent this year, with some “ultra-high-end brokers” reporting a drop-off of 75 percent. Those are intriguing statistics, and I wonder if they will continue to hold, given that the social event of the summer is occurring in Montauk at the end of August.
Wet Paint can exclusively confirm that two powerful art-dealing families are merging. The bibliophilic former playboy Lucas Zwirner is settling down with Charlotte Lindemann, the daughter of Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann. The two got engaged at the end of last year, just a few months after the wedding of Lucas’s sister, Marlene Zwirner, to dealer Matthew Brown. (This third generation of the Zwirner art clan is really something.) Book your Blade flights now. Cheers to the happy couple.
Elsewhere in the Empire State, a new biennial has cropped up. Dan Colen’s perpetually cool upstate agricultural center Sky High Farms is hosting a biennial in Germantown, just east of the Hudson River. Highlights include Anne Imhof sculptures made of industrial water containers that will be transformed into compost bioreactors, a mirrored floor installation by Rudolf Stingel, and a series of 24 billboards bearing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1992 piece Untitled (It’s Just a Matter of Time).
That’s enough to keep you engaged stateside for quite a while. But the better half of you will all be headed off to Switzerland next week, and I am quite envious of what awaits you there. I’ll keep it brief here as I await coverage from my colleagues, but I will say that I am quite jealous of anyone who steps into Jordan Wolfson’s new VR experience at the Beyeler Foundation.
I actually laughed out loud, alone at my desk, at how vague the press-release language is about the new work, which is titled Little Room: “This immersive work invites visitors to step into an experimental environment where they play a central role in the unfolding experience.”
Um… can I buy a vowel? Would you not be terrified to enter a Wolfson VR experience without any knowledge of what’s on the other end of those goggles? At the very least, this “unfolding experience” sounds like something of a stark contrast to an idyllic afternoon at the Beyeler. (My theory that the Booth Jonathan character in Girls is based on Wolfson only grows stronger.)
After Basel closes on June 16, tough decisions await. Perhaps Venice for the architecture biennale? London to preview the sales? Or the tranquil Greek island of Hydra? That is where Greek Cypriot collector Dakis Joannou will be hosting his annual event at the Slaughterhouse Project. This year he has tapped the daring sculptor Andra Ursuta.
The day before her show opens, on June 22, the action will be in Piraeus, the port city just outside Athens. Ursuta’s dealer (and ex-husband) Mike Egan is opening a new Ramiken space there with a show of moody, moonlit paintings by the Japanese artist Daichi Takagi. “We survived the Iliad,” Egan said, when I asked about the new space. ‘’Now it’s time for the Ramiken Odyssey.” The fastest ferry will get you from Piraeus to Hydra in a little over an hour.
While the Aegean Sea sounds pretty ideal for unwinding, post-Basel, I would also like to propose a trip to Rome. As some readers may know, Gladstone partner Gavin Brown started out as an artist, and he is giving himself a show of his work at La Pulce, his second space there, which he opened in 2023 in a building along the Via dei Tre Archi. “I turned 60, and, well, it seems like a terrible cliche,” he told me by phone, “but I just wanted to get going with that part of myself before it became too late.”
The exhibition is called “Proof of Life,” and the opening party will be on June 21. “I have a great admiration for artists and their willingness to be so vulnerable and I think that is, in a sense, a proof of life,” Brown said. He described showing his own work in his own space as “an embrace of comfort.” He will be presenting woodcuts that he’s been making at his Harlem home, his first one-man effort since a show at the Green Gallery in Milwaukee in 2014. He sent me a photo of one of the works, pictured above, if you’d like a sneak peek.
Last night, I witnessed what I believe to be an auspicious harbinger of the coming months: A huge crowd of sweaty Downtowners on Henry Street, pawing to get into the door of 56 Henry’s summer group show, “Small Format Paintings.” It felt good. See you out there.