NEW YORK, NY.- VOLTA NY debuts at PIER 90 in Hell's Kitchen, New York City, in the solo-project fair's eighth stateside edition on March 5 – 8, 2015. 93 galleries across six continents converge on the new venue, situated adjacent to sister fair The Armory Show, delivering a dynamic survey of emerging and innovative contemporary talent by artists from 34 nations.
This year, over 80 percent of galleries have shown in prior VOLTA editions, both in New York and in Basel, exemplifying the fair's distinctive identity as a boutique platform for new and salient contemporary art positions within a curated (and, in the case of New York, solo-project) format — the foundation of VOLTA's mission since its 2005 Basel inception and arrival stateside in 2008.
Returning exhibitors showcase a full spectrum of artistic discovery. UNION Gallery (London) taps seminal British artist Rose Wylie, winner of the 2014 John Moores Painting Prize, contrasting her energetic current series Nicole Kidman and the Black Strap with a selection of key archival works; while BravinLee programs (NYC) presents a three-decade survey of Thomas Nozkowski's iconic 16 x 20 inch abstract paintings, accented by related brand-new works; and Popopstudios (Nassau) spotlights Kendal Hanna, the celebrated octogenarian Bahamian Abstract Expressionist and subject of last year's internationally produced documentary Brigidy Bram.
Other highlights from returning exhibitors at VOLTA NY include: Lisa Sigal (Samsøñ, Boston), whose site-specific painting constructions manifested with theatre in Prospect.3 New Orleans' Home Court Crawl/Blights Out, Sigal's site-specific intervention through four neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Katrina; constructed photography phenom Christiane Feser (Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt am Main), active in multiple German museum group exhibitions this year; a threedimensional, color-saturated treatise on art institutions by Santo Domingo-based Cuban artist Quisqueya Henríquez (LYNCH THAM, New York), creator of Davidoff Art Initiative's debut Limited Art Edition, which premiered at Art Basel in Hong Kong 2014; and meticulous cut-roadmap figures by young Bostonian Nikki Rosato (Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans), a 2014 Blanche E. Colman Foundation Award winner and participant in Mark of the Feminine at Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, last autumn. Bowery hotspot.
The Hole (New York) reveals a suite of Midwesterner Gabriel Pionkowski's laborious unraveled, hand-painted, and rewoven paintings; while Galerie Jan Dhaese (Ghent) strikes a particularly adept downtown Big Apple chord, presenting sublime works on paper from Sonic Youth co-founder and creative interdisciplinarian Lee Ranaldo. Plus, Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles) swings for the fences in a cultural purveyor double-header: Michelle Grabner, co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial in addition to a very active artistic career including her forthcoming solo at Indianapolis Museum of Art, plus sculptural paintings by Pioneer Works (Red Hook) founder and director Dustin Yellin, 2015 commissioned artist for the New York City Ballet.
17 new galleries to the VOLTA family keep a pulse on current cultural trends and concerns. Haines Gallery (San Francisco) spotlights Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, whose resplendent engineering of geometric abstraction with traditional Persian mosaic techniques spans a formidable career — from her solid-gold showing at the 1958 Venice Biennale to her four-decade solo survey Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings at the Guggenheim Museum (New York), opening March 13; ARNDT Contemporary Art (Berlin/Singapore) introduces young Manila-based wunderkind Jigger Cruz, whose proficient blend of Classical figuration and chaotic abstraction veers between reverence and defacement; Catinca Tabacaru Gallery (New York) presents new video and photography by Belgium-based Israeli artist Rachel Monosov, whose recent activities include sitespecific installations for the Beethoven Festival (Chicago) during her 2013 residency there, as well as participation in The Last Brucennial (New York, 2014); Christinger De Mayo (Zurich) conceives an enveloping gesamtkunstwerk for Yves Netzhammer, whose distinctive and evolving visual vocabulary has animated both the Venice Biennale's Swiss Pavilion (2007) and Kunstmuseum Bern (2010); Galeri Zilberman (Istanbul) stages a 'constructed museum' for skilled ceramicist and cultural reassembler Burçak Bingöl, who was featured in Sculpture Road to Miro at Baksi Museum (Bayburt, Turkey) and entered the museum's permanent collection last year; and YOD Gallery (Osaka) highlights signature ikimono ('from life') assemblages from Kyoto-based, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna-educated Hiroshi Shinno, subject of solo exhibition Mikrokosmos/Makrokosmos at Karuizawa New Art Museum (Nagano Prefecture, Japan) this past summer.
Exhibited artists do not waver from potent and pertinent sociopolitical statements in their respective solo presentations. Peterson Kamwathi (ARTLabAfrica, Nairobi) reveals his latest series Positions, large-scale works on paper in reaction to global religious conflict and exacerbated by the 2013 Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi; current international artist-in-residence at The NARS Foundation of Art (NYC) Ida Kvetny (Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen) critiques globalization and deforestation within intensely psychedelic painted worlds; Travis Somerville (beta pictoris gallery, Birmingham, AL), subject of 2013 solo exhibition Rebirth of a Nation at Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), mounts a bracing mixed-media installation challenging post-racial American society by blending his activist upbringing with semiotics of historical racism in the United States repositioned as current national myopia; while Maïmouna Guerresi (MARIANE IBRAHIM, Seattle), participant in multiple DAK'ART and Venice Biennales, explores motherhood, multiethnic spirituality, and the marginalization of women in Islamic Africa through large-scale photography, sculpture, and video installation; and Rudy Shepherd (Mixed Greens, New York), whose current activities include traveling museum group exhibition When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, channels criminals and victims as filtered through mass media in a provocative suite 'straight from the headlines' and rendered in watercolor, balanced by ceramic Healing Devices.
