FIAC Breaks Ground While Branching Out

Lelong & Co.

If this gallery is good enough for Yoko Ono, then it may even be good enough for Etel Adnan. Ms. Adnan, a 92-year-old Lebanese poet and essayist (she writes in Arabic, French and English), is also a visual artist extraordinaire. Roberta Smith, the New York Times art critic, has described her paintings as “stubbornly radiant abstractions.” Ms. Adnan herself likes to refer to her passion for “the immediate beauty of color.” The very recent works being shown at FIAC seem to imbue ordinary shapes with a remarkable energy. Lelong is also showing work by more than a dozen other artists, including David Hockney and Jean Dubuffet.

Instituto de Visión

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O.K., its name may sound like an eye care clinic, but this three-year-old Colombian gallery, inside a modest pistachio green building in San Felipe — a formerly industrial Bogotá neighborhood now packed with chic galleries — is abuzz with ambition and experimentation. Take Felipe Arturo, a native Colombian whose work will be at the fair. Sometimes he works in concrete, sometimes with glass jars. For his installation “La Disolución de la Geometría” (2014), he made do with ground coffee, raw sugar and powdered milk.

House of Gaga

A Frenchman and two Americans are representing this gallery, which has locations in Mexico City and Los Angeles (a second-floor space on the edge of MacArthur Park). The hanging painted wool poncho is by Marc Camille Caimowicz, a Parisian known for performance and installation work.

“America 2017,” an acrylic that appears to depict a scalping, is from the North Dakota-born Antek Walczak, who made his name as a video artist. “Comrades, Not Colleagues” (colored pencil on paper, 2016) by Sam Pulitzer, a New York artist from New Hampshire, may remind some collectors of scary office politics.

Sorry We’re Closed

Another thing the 2017 fair can brag about is the number of highly respected galleries with highly unusual names — like Truth and Consequences (Geneva) and Scai the Bathhouse (Tokyo). And there’s the Brussels gallery Sorry We’re Closed, which is presenting three artists: Eric Croes, a native Belgian, makes small ceramic, bronze and wood sculptures that can be simultaneously frightening, adorable and primitive. (Ever seen totem poles with Cyclops and snowman heads?) Yann Gerstberger, a Frenchman now living in Mexico City, creates intense tapestry-collages using lots of cotton and linoleum. Josh Sperling, a third-generation American artist, does both sculptures and sculptural paintings; with their squiggles and candy colors, they could be mistaken for oversize desserts.

Sammy Baloji

Technically, Mr. Baloji, a 38-year-old Congolese photographer, never experienced European colonialism firsthand, but he saw its indelible traces and heard its powerful echoes while he was growing up. To comment on the phenomenon (from the perspective of the colonized), he sometimes combines archival photos with his own new shots for a powerful then-and-now perspective. So some prefer to call him a photographic artist. This solo presentation of his work is from Galerie Imane Farès, on the Left Bank in Paris. (Mr. Baloji’s home country was once the Belgian Congo. He now lives part time in Brussels.)

mor charpentier

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Óscar Muñoz, the innovative, unconventional Colombian artist represented by this Paris gallery, never met a transient medium (water, dust, fire, even human breath) he didn’t like — or, apparently, want to make part of his work. Each is a way of looking at life’s transitory nature, memory and existence itself, but Mr. Muñoz didn’t need any of those for one of his works at this booth. “Domestico” (2013) is a marble shelf topped with an elegant arrangement of white marble picture frames. Every one of them is empty. The gallery is also presenting Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Alexander Apóstol and Voluspa Jarpa.

Kohn Gallery

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If you didn’t happen to get to Oregon or South Carolina to see the total solar eclipse in August, looking directly (without special glasses) at Lita Albuquerque’s “Eclipse” series may be the next best thing. Ms. Albuquerque, a native Southern Californian who also lived in Tunisia and France as a child, has a thing for the cosmos. Maybe it started with her “Stellar Axis” project in Antarctica. Her work, however, is highly accessible to the Earthbound; you don’t even have to know what the Fibonacci Sequence is to appreciate her “Fibonacci Lunar Activation” (2017). Kohn, her Los Angeles gallery, is also showing artists including Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner and Ed Ruscha at FIAC.

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