Process Is the Point at IFPDA Print Fair
“Print is a more democratic medium,” said Temma Nanas of Leslie Sacks Gallery, one of around 80 global galleries returning to the Park Avenue Armory for the annual fair.
There’s something special about visiting an art fair when New York is on the cusp of spring.
On Thursday night, April 9, well-dressed patrons marched into the Park Avenue Armory for the newly renamed International Fine Prints and Drawings Association’s (IFPDA) annual Print Fair that kicked off the city’s spring fair season.
The fair, which started in 1991 and returns to the Upper East Side fortress, has become a favorite among the city’s wealthy collectors and everyday print enthusiasts alike. IFPDA’s atmosphere is far more intimate than its counterparts at the autumn art fairs, but another main draw is the comparatively lower pricing.
“I think there’s a comfort level with collectors. There's a place to find a price point that fits,” Temma Nanas, partner at Santa Monica-based Leslie Sacks Gallery, told Hyperallergic. “Print is a more democratic medium.”
With more than 80 galleries, print studios, and publishers from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the fair is brimming with intriguing offerings from leading contemporary artists, including Julie Mehretu, David Hockney, and Yayoi Kusama.
Visitors could pretend to be a member of NASA’s Artemis II crew by beholding Kiki Smith’s hand-painted watercolor, “Wooden Moon” (2022), at Boston-based Krakow Witkin Gallery’s booth. The 12-foot-long (~3.7-meter-long) work is her largest to date, according to IFPDA staff. Viewers could also dive into Japan’s ukiyo-e tradition from the 19th-century Edo period with masterworks by Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige at the booth of New York’s Scholten Japanese Art.
Around the corner, David Zwirner offered artist Louis Fratino’s eye-catching portrait of a man in a colorful garden with a sleeping dog. Elleree Erdos, the gallery’s director of prints and editions, said Fratino studied several Picasso etchings and applied them to his process. She appreciated that the fair allowed people to see both artists’ work at Zwirner and nearby John Szoke Gallery and compare their techniques.
“People often ask, ‘How was this made?’” Erdos said. “That’s unique to the print fair. It is always the first greeting you get.”
At the back of the armory, IFPDA President and Old Masters gallerist David Tunick’s inviting booth featuring Amedeo Modigliani’s “Cariatide Rouge sur Fond Noir” (c. 1914) and several delicate Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec works drew crowds. Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Clownesse Assise” (1896) and the “Divan Japonais” (c. 1892) advertisement for a Parisian musical establishment, two of his most recognizable lithographs, transported onlookers to a romantic Montmartre cabaret.
Paula Rego’s series of abortion etchings at Cristea Roberts Gallery stood out as another fair highlight. The late Portuguese artist, whose series was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, demonstrated the psychological toll that underground, often dangerous terminations had on women and helped bring about abortion’s legalization in the country in 2007.
Fans of William Kentridge had plenty to see, too. Hauser & Wirth’s booth included his poignant etching, “Refugees (You will find no other seas)” (2018), which was inspired by a shipwreck of refugees off an Italian island in 2013, continuing his exploration of oppression and injustice. He also had an etching available at Krakow Witkin and two $4,500 lithographs, whose captions indicated that they were created to benefit the Print Center New York and the arts in South Africa.
Several guests appreciated reconnecting with the fair’s longtime vendors. Judith Solodkin, a printmaker and founder of SOLO Impression print publisher, greeted several women at her booth after returning for the first time since 2023. “Don’t you know she’s famous?” one of her friends boasted.
Solodkin exhibited several fabric works, including a lovely Judy Chicago piece, “What if Women Ruled the World?” (2023), and a digital embroidery collaboration with artist Ceceilia Vicuña, “Tara: the eye of compassion,” that included an image of the earth in the pupil of an eye.
For a certain New Yorker, nothing is as alluring as the city itself. Some of the largest crowds congregated at a booth for The Old Print Shop, which featured antique maps, historic prints of street scenes, and drawings of the city’s skyline that spanned the colonial era to the 21st century.
Harry Newman, whose family has run the Manhattan print shop for three generations, said interest in early maps and the Revolutionary War period was high as the nation prepared to celebrate its 250th birthday. But he also loved a rare Emily Trueblood print of a black-and-white, close-up view of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge’s stanchions.
“We did several editions, and we’re just about out of them,” he said. “That might be one of the last ones.”
