APAA’s Top Picks From Frieze & TEFAF New York
New York's eagerly anticipated spring art season flourishes as the city's prestigious art fairs open their doors—Frieze New York debuts with a VIP Preview on Wednesday, May 7th, with doors open to the public through Sunday, May 11th, while TEFAF New York debuts with their VIP Preview on Friday, May 9th, running through Tuesday, May 13th.
Our APAA advisors have carefully selected exceptional works representing the highlights from both prestigious fairs. We extend our thanks to our advisors for sharing their top picks.
Top Picks from Frieze New York
Joey Terrill, Still-Life with Viagra, Triumeq, Dr. Pepper and Mole Verde, 2025.
“Following in the art historical footsteps of Tom Wesselmann’s Pop still lifes from the 1960s, Joey Terrill reimagines the genre through compositions infused with his own lived experience. The series began in the 1990s, when Terrill started managing his HIV diagnosis with antiretroviral medication. As these pills became part of his daily routine, he found humor in how his breakfast table began to resemble a Pop still life—HIV meds placed alongside a box of Cheerios. Rich with layered symbolism, the paintings ultimately function as a form of self-portraiture. American consumer products like Jell-O mix, Dr. Pepper, and Rinso soap sit beside references to the artist’s Chicano heritage—mole verde, Tecate beer, a serape blanket—and nods to his queer identity, such as Triumeq and Viagra pills. Deeply personal and inherently political, the works reflect Terrill’s identity and daily life while transforming the still life tradition and advancing queer-Chicano representation.”
Mixed media on canvas
36 1/2" x 48"
Presented by Ortuzar
Courtesy the artist and Public Gallery London. Photo credit: Kai Werner Schmidt
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, 2020-2023 (installation view).
“In recent months, one of the most vulnerable communities among us has suffered blow after blow. Trans people—our fellow human beings—are being treated unjustly, and yet we do nothing. That’s why I’m so glad that Public Gallery, a small space with limited funds, chose to exhibit at Frieze New York the work of the maverick Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, a Berlin-based artist whose practice spans animation, sound, performance, and objects. WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT is an interactive archive currently playable on the artist’s website, and it will be installed on LED panels at the fair to offer a unique experience to visitors. Even in a landscape saturated with identity politics in art, the best of it still shines through.”
Veritable dimensions.
Presented by Public Gallery London
Sherrie Levine, After Picabia.
“A standout at this year’s edition of Frieze New York is the solo booth of Sherrie Levine’s work at David Zwirner. The suite of After Francis Picabia paintings is a particular highlight. A member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who emerged in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Levine is known for appropriating mass media and recontextualizing widely circulated images to explore the notion of artistic originality.
These After Francis Picabia works are part of Levine’s ongoing project of revisiting iconic early twentieth-century masterpieces. Here, she engages with the referential abstraction of Francis Picabia’s “dot paintings” from the 1940s and early 1950s. The quartet of oil paintings builds on a group of watercolors Levine produced in 1983, in which she recreated a selection of Picabia’s dot paintings from a catalogue of his late work. Decades later, she returned to those watercolors, using them as the basis for this new body of work, making these new works not only appropriations of Picabia, but appropriations of her own appropriations. This recursive approach exemplifies Levine’s enduring inquiry into the concept of authenticity.
The series is especially timely, as Frieze New York coincides with an exhibition of Francis Picabia’s late abstract paintings at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea entitled Eternal Beginning. This show features paintings created in the 40s and 50s when Picabia lived in Paris in the last years of his life. The works in Eternal Beginning highlight Picabia’s singular approach to abstraction and his nonconformist tendency to repaint his earlier works, further enmeshing ideas of re-creation and re-representation within Levine’s After Francis Picabia pieces.”
Image credits from left to right:
Sherrie Levine, After Francis Picabia: 2, 2024. Oil on mahogany panel. 20 x 16 inches.
Sherrie Levine, After Francis Picabia Inverted: 2, 2024. Oil on mahogany panel. 20 x 16 inches.
Sherrie Levine, After Francis Picabia: 4, 2024. Oil on mahogany panel. 20 x 16 inches.
Sherrie Levine, After Francis Picabia Inverted: 4, 2024. Oil on mahogany panel. 20 x 16 inches.
Presented by David Zwirner
Sherrie Levine, After Piet Mondrian: AP3, 1983.
“My choice for Frieze NY is this C-print by American artist Sherrie Levine, a great example of her work in appropriation of images and part of a series she began in 1981 with Untitled, After Walk Evans. Levine often appropriates famous artworks, flattening genres and eras by removing the work from its original context through multiple steps of transformation, subverting the original references of authorship.
Here she has photographed the work of Piet Mondrian published in an illustrated book, shifting the colours as she pleases. She more recently produced a series of paintings based on these earlier photographs, further removing Mondrian by appropriating her own earlier work. David Zwirner will be presenting a solo booth of both with both of these artworks at Frieze New York.”
20 x 16 inches
Chromogenic print
Presented by David Zwirner
Top Picks TEFAF New York
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1959.
“In the male-dominated art world of the 1950s, Lee Bontecou emerged as a radical and powerful voice. Defying gendered expectations, her work boldly pushed the boundaries of what women could achieve in the Post-War art world. At TEFAF, Ortuzar dedicated its booth to a selection of Bontecou’s seminal pieces, and I’m eager to experience them in person. This particular wall relief, created during the first year she created these pieces in 1959, radiates a visceral, almost cosmic intensity. It’s an emotionally charged work, simultaneously aggressive and vulnerable; its rawness and central vortex compelling the viewer into its forceful material presence.”
Measurements 44 x 37 x 10 inches
Welded steel, canvas, wire and velvet
Presented by Ortuzar
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.461, Hanging Single Lobed, Five Layers of Spheres), 1954.
“David Zwirner is always known for having one of the strongest booths at any fair. The gallery's well timed @tefaf solo presentation of sculptures and works on paper by Ruth Asawa aligns with Asawa's first posthumous retrospective now on display San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveling to The Museum of Modern Art in October 2025. This is a great opportunity for collectors to experience and acquire museum quality work by an incredibly important artist. ”
Hanging sculpture--iron wire
15 x 21 x 21 inches
Presented by David Zwirner
