The opening night of Frieze New York 2025 felt like a kaleidoscopic plunge into contemporary art’s current obsessions: spectacle, tactility, and the porous boundary between craft and concept. Gagosian’s booth, anchored by a monumental Jeff Koons installation, stole the early crowds. Koons, never one for understatement, presented a suite of inflatable Hulk sculptures augmented with brass instruments—tubas and saxophones sprouting from green latex torsos like baroque appendages. The installation is absurd and triumphant, a gleeful collision of childhood kitsch and symphonic excess. Koons remains committed to his signature blend of consumerist allure and pop irony, but here the scale tips toward joy, as if the sculptures are inviting us to dance rather than critique.
A quieter but equally compelling counterpoint unfolded at Casey Kaplan’s booth, where Hannah Levy’s surreal sculptures stretched the body into unexpected forms. Her biomorphic metal chairs, sinewy and precarious, suggest a choreography between function and dysfunction, evoking both the insectile and the orthopedic. Levy’s use of industrial materials—steel, silicone, rubber—feels elegant yet unsettling, as if the objects might crawl away when unobserved. The booth thrums with a subtle eroticism, a meditation on vulnerability embedded in polished surfaces and fragile balances.
At Booth C4, Proyectos Ultravioleta assembled a beautifully curated presentation of fiber and textile works that felt both rooted and radical. Featuring artists like Edgar Calel, Rosa Elena Curruchich, Paula Nicho, Hellen Ascoli, Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, and Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, the space felt like an intimate conversation across geographies and lineages. Calel’s earthy installations and Curruchich’s vivid weavings reclaimed indigenous techniques with quiet urgency, while Unzueta’s abstracted textile forms evoked architectural blueprints rendered in thread. There was a refreshing refusal of spectacle here—a confidence in the slow, deliberate labor of weaving as both act and artifact. Across the booth, one felt the pulse of community, memory, and resistance stitched into every fiber.
Fiber, in fact, made a quietly powerful showing across the fair. Tina Kim Gallery’s presentation of contemporary Korean fiber artists extended the material conversation, emphasizing process, gesture, and the malleability of tradition. Elsewhere, works in textile, tapestry, and hybrid forms pushed beyond mere medium: they embodied acts of care, subversion, and storytelling. This year’s Frieze felt like a call to touch, to thread connections across fractured histories, to see material as a carrier of both past and future. And on opening night, the art delivered—a fair as tactile as it was conceptual, weaving its own vibrant, unruly fabric.
