Saturday, November 23, 11am-6pm: Chelsea Art Fair

Platform, a click-and-buy offshoot of David Zwirner, and the historic Chelsea Hotel invite art lovers to a one-day, free art fair this weekend. Founded during the Pandemic shutdowns, Platform started out by offering around 100 one-of-a-kind works per month presented by about 12 independent international galleries with prices currently under $2,500.

In an interview with the New York Times, Zwirner said, “We learned there is a real place in the art world for e-commerce,” Zwirner said in a recent telephone interview. “There is an audience out there we did not know existed. They don’t go to galleries necessarily and they don’t really go to art fairs. They look at things online.” He noted that the audience was “almost all millennials,” who discover art through Instagram and word of mouth. “The art world has never catered to them,” Zwirner added. “They can graduate into a much broader participant.”

Today, Platform  still offers a curated monthly selection of artworks from partner galleries, encouraging fresh discoveries, but over time, the company recognized the importance of educating its primary audience—mainly young, first-time collectors—who wanted to engage with Platform not only online but also via offline programs and events. Now Platform is offering a one-day art fair featuring just five galleries presented inside the hotel’s main event space, The Bard Room. With neither exhibition nor entry fees, the fair provides a new platform focused on making art more accessible.

The Chelsea Art Fair is free to attend, but advance registration is recommended. Sign up here for details and admittance.

The Hotel Chelsea, 204 vWest 23^rd Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, November 21, 6-8 pm: Azadeh Nia | A Silent Volcano at Fridman

The works in A Silent Volcano presents a microcosm of the universe where the past and future, nature and ruins, coexist on the same plane. Azadeh Nia’s intimate works invite slow, meditative viewing, offering a contemplative space where isolation and hope are intertwined. 

Through metaphors and symbols, Nia presents a timeless dreamscape where the distant past and the dystopian future, unadulterated nature and archeological ruins, coexist on one plane. Separation, stillness, solitude, and despair (symbolized by single trees and pillars, the lone moon, abodes devoid of people) foreshadow spaces for hope and growth (the open sky, flowing water, blooming flowers, infinite pathways).Open bar by Edmond's Honor

Fridman Gallery, 169 Bowery, New York, NY Info

Thursday, November 21, 6-8 pm: Keith Haring | Black, White, and Read All Over at Pace Prings

Gathering works from 1985 to 1989, the exhibition's title makes reference to Haring’s unflinching artistic engagement with the pressing socio-political concerns of the time, and imagery in dialogue with the artist’s activism appears throughout the exhibition - addressing themes central to his work during this period.

Known for his affinity towards reproducible mediums, Haring’s work is represented in a breadth of printmaking techniques, including lithography, aquatint, woodcut, and silkscreen. Rare large-scale prints like Retrospect (1989) and Untitled (1986) harness Haring’s narrative power in engrossing black and white compositions, imbuing the many fantastical figures with an approachable comic book sensibility that is undercut by their radically subversive subject matter. 

Also at Pace Prints, in keeping with the spirit of the artist’s iconic retail space, The Pop Shop, which opened in 1986 and sought to keep Haring’s artwork accessible to all, specially designed merchandise and apparel will be available for purchase at the gallery throughout the course of the exhibition.

Pace Prints, 536 West 22^nd Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, November 21, 6-8 pm: Pat De Groot | Sea Smoke at NYSS

The paintings of Pat de Groot (1930-2018) emerge from her deep connection to the distinctive geographic and atmospheric conditions of Provincetown, MA, where she settled in 1963 with her husband Nanno de Groot, a Dutch-born Abstract Expressionist painter. Rarely exceeding 12 x 11 inches in size, her intimate oil-on-board paintings of the Provincetown Harbor outside of her studio window transcend the genre of “seascapes.” They are not merely paintings of the sea, sky, and sand, but rather evocative meditations on perception, meteorological conditions, and the natural world. 

Ken Johnson, in the New York Times, describes the conceptual underpinnings of de Groot’s paintings as “part Zen, part American Transcendentalist, part Modernist formalist. Contradicting the horizontal expanse of conventional seascape painting, Ms. De Groot’s works have a blocky presence that calls to mind Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin.”

New York Studio School, 8 West 8^th Street, New York, NY Info