Media coverage at Esther New York

The New York Times / The Wall Street Journal / Financial Times / artnet / Artsy
May 2, 2024

﹒The New York Times

THE ART WORLD is not traditionally friendly to newcomers. That's why, for its inaugural edition, the art fair Esther put out a welcome mat. Literally. Esther is part of a growing contingent of alternative art fairs, including Basel Social Club in Switzerland and Supper Club in Hong Kong, born out of a desire among dealers to collaborate rather than compete.

While galleries participating in corporate events like Frieze or Art Basel shell out tens of thousands of dollars to rent a space the size of a small New York bedroom, 26 exhibitors at Esther have installed art ever corner of the space...Upstairs, a video of young people spitting paint and rolling in dirt by the Brooklyn-based artist Oliver Herring screens on a monitor above a piano.

 

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﹒The Wall Street Journal

The Blue Room, with its vibrant walls, features a soulful portrait from Bony Ramirez—less in-your-face than some of his other works that deal with colonization and his Dominican upbringing, but still moving—and a captivating video by Oliver Herring of performers rolling over gravel, splashing themselves with glitter and paint, and slowly grappling. (Both artists are shown by BANK Gallery.) While not without faults, Esther refreshes the art-fair model.
 

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﹒Financial Times

Also timed to coincide with Frieze New York is a new art fair, Esther, which runs in the Estonian House in Murray Hill, May 1-4. Its founders are gallerists Margot Samel, who runs an eponymous space in New York, and Olga Temnikova, co-founder of Temnikova & Kasela in Estonia's capital, Tallinn. A further 20 galleries have already committed to participate, nine with spaces in New York, and others from around the world such as Gathering from London and Shanghai's Bank.

 

🔗Original report

 

﹒artnet

What is Esther?

That question kept popping up as collectors and advisors arrived on Tuesday at the Estonian House, a slender French Beaux-Arts building on East 34th Street in Manhattan, for the city’s newest art fair.

The brainchild of two Estonian art dealers, Margot Samel (who is based in New York) and Olga Temnikova (the capital of Tallinn), Esther brings together 26 galleries, including some from countries that are rarely represented at trade shows in New York. Several hail from the former Soviet bloc, including Latvia, Georgia, Romania, and of course, Estonia. They are joined by New York-based colleagues like Andrew Kreps and Simone Subal, as well as dealers from Norway, Italy, Germany, and Shanghai.

“These are our friends, people we’ve long admired and collaborated with,” Samel said. “For us, it is an experiment in terms of what an art fair can do.”

The building’s communal history offers a perfect framework for an art fair focused on collaboration. Presented by Shanghai's BANK gallery, Oliver Herring’s video of Chinese youth spraying paint and glitter was displayed on a grand piano.

 

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﹒Artsy

Upstairs, Shanghai gallery BANK brought a video work from Oliver Herring’s “Areas for Action” series, which documents experimental, collaborative actions by volunteer performers, such as splashing one another with paint and glitter. The screen is situated atop a grand piano, whose renective surface amplifies thesensory impact of the moving image.
 

🔗Original report