Sunday Fair Brings Galleries from Luxembourg, Arkansas, and Elsewhere to London

The VIP previews of Frieze London and Frieze Masters of yesterday gave way to the public days today, and the masses flooded the fairs, so many people opted to spend their Thursday afternoon at Sunday, a fair showcasing younger galleries that is held a short walk away from Regent’s Park.

Sunday is, compared to the madness happening under the Frieze tents, quite a relaxing time, despite being held in a concrete hangar that you arrive at after walking down a sketchy-looking truck ramp. You’re greeted by the SoCal vibes of some Jake Longstreth paintings at LTD Los Angeles—green West Coast landscapes—and it goes from there.

Around the corner, at the booth of New York gallery Yours Mine & Ours, artist Jeremy Couillard has installed Uncle Sad Bedroom (2017), a video game that you can play right there at the fair, projected on a large screen and on sale for $8,000, as an edition of 10. As a game, it appeared to be passing the hardest test: One Sunday visitor left his kid there and he was hooked playing it for what seemed like half an hour, jamming at the controller as the game’s hero explored a subway stop in Queens. Some stuff might have gone over the kid’s head, though. At one point when I played, I clicked a button that said “I’m a Marxist” and found myself on a magic carpet throwing psilocybin-laced tubes of toothpaste at flying robotic drones.

Besides those two booths, there are a few other envoys from New York’s Lower East Side—Johannes Vogt, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery—and Los Angeles—Shulamit Nazarian—but the other American gallery here is Good Weather, and they’re from Little Rock, Arkansas.

“North Little Rock,” said its associate director, Erin Riley, who works alongside her brother, Haynes Riley, who founded the gallery in 2011 in a one-car garage. They joined NADA in 2016, and this is their first fair in Europe. Their London debut is a fine one. They were showing work by Stephen Kent alongside William Marcellus Armstrong, and gave a wall up to the Los Angeles project space Vernon Gardens, run by artist Ben Wolf Noam and curator Zully Adler—a booth within a booth. The work was priced between $900 and $7,500, and when I was walking out, one canvas was being wrapped up. A sale had been made.

Plus: they had Good Weather koozies! A true highlight of the Sunday fair.

Stems, which has outposts in Brussels and Luxembourg, opted to bring the work of Paul Yore, last seen in the booth of Melbourne gallery Neon Parc at NADA Miami Beach last year. Suffice it to say that it’s not for everyone. While the Miami display featured work heavy on the Donald Trump imagery, with the president often defecating or being penetrated, these embroidered blankets were slightly more innocent, and leaned heavily on teen idols such as Harry Styles, Justin Bieber and, um, Slavoj Žižek—but, again, there is still a lot of scatological and sexual imagery.

One of the gallery representatives said, of the work, “It speaks to everyone, as people from every country can understand it.” Fair enough. They were priced at up to €16,000, which is about $18,700 right now.

Galerie Pact, from Paris, had on display work by Sarah Meyohas, photos of flowers in the infinity of dueling mirror reflections that were priced at €7,000, about $8,200. (New Yorkers: she’s opening a show at Red Bull Arts in Chelsea next week.) And on the floor was a contraption by Dorian Gaudin that was first shown at the Palais de Tokyo: three chairs tethered to a processor that, at random times, makes the chairs pop up from the ground. It’s just an inch or so, but it’s enough to make you jump the first few times.

Pact co-founder Arnaud Doucède explained that, about once an hour, all three chairs jump at exactly the same time. That sounds like a really special moment, but during Frieze Week, you don’t have time to wait around.