UNTITLED, ART Online: The First Art Fair in Virtual Reality

UNTITLED opened its VIP previews online featuring the first-ever virtual reality art fair experience realized in partnership with Artland, on view until August 2nd.

Today UNTITLED offered an answer to some of the issues encountered in the last major fairs that migrated online, reducing the gap between remote digital experiences, and IRL contacts, and chat by teaming up with the online platform Artland to create the first true virtual reality art fair. Mattis Curth, co-founder and CEO of Artland said to Artnet: “The platform really looks like a video game, a mix of architectural modeling, gaming innovations, and e-commerce.”

Despite the fact that walking through a fair using keyboard arrows and a mouse pad will never be the same as wandering in person through crowds and booths (and you how won’t be able to chill and enjoy a drink in front of the sea as usually happens in Miami),  the experience they were able to create was much more intuitive and enjoyable. 

Moreover, the new functions allow the visitor to get in touch directly with the gallerists through a chat, where you can choose to leave your name, phone number, or email if you’d like to take the conversation further. This will never substitute the pleasure of fortuitous conversations engaged spontaneously while walking and stopping in front of an artwork, but still, this will allow for a better way to capture the moment of attraction and interest from a collector, reducing time and possible distractions which could emerge when scrolling down to other thousands of works. 

The partnership with Stripe and a bank transfer option with Escrow.com is then intended to smooth the buying experience and the payments.

Here are our top favourite women artists we saw and loved through this virtual walk during the VIP preview.

Tsedaye Makonnen, Senait & Nahom. The Peacemaker & The Comforter (2019) at Addis Fine Art (London)

Ethiopian black woman, Tsedaye Makonnen explores identity, womanhood and the complexity of migration and state-sanctioned violence through sculpture and performance. Highlighting the connectivity of our geographic and ancestral borders. These well-manufactured precious adorned towers are composed of individual mirrored cubes, each of which bears the name of one of 50 Black women whose lives have been cut short by systemic and institutionalized racism, patriarchy and through forced migration. Accompanying the tower, a written booklet memorialize the lives of these woman. So poetic work dense in meaning and messages.

Sara VanDerBeek, Roman Woman XXXIX (2020) at Altman Siegel

Sarah VanDeBeek conducts a deep analysis of visual culture, addressing to the speed and ease with which images and ideas spread in the digital age as something inherent in the reproducibility of photography. However reproducibility has always been something part of artistic practices: in this series Roman statues of the sort are depicted in VanDerBeek’s images, which were themselves reproductions produced in mass of Greek statues made 500 years earlier. In pointing to this process, VanDerBeek’s work collapses the distinction between sculpture and photography, understanding each as potentially reproducible political and diffuse.

Nohemi Perez, Expulsados del paraíso (2019) at Instituto De Vision

Instituto de Vision is a terrific women-led gallery based in Bogotà. For UNTITLED they are bringing a solo show of delicate and intimate gouaches by Columbian artist Nohemí Pérez. These apparently simple and calm ordinary of people scenes actually address to deeper wounds in Colombian history: the subject is in fact the Catatumbo territory, a geographical region with a very particular natural and sociocultural ecosystem which from the conquest until today, haas been stage of multiple conflicts that have been transformed to compose a complex plot of anachronistic situations characteristic of Latin American contemporaneity as illegal armed groups of right, left, native tribes, evangelical missionaries and large multinationals of mining and drug trafficking coexist in this jungle region.

Ebony G. Patterson, Untitled (Lily, carnation, and rose budz) (2015) at Artspace Phaidon

If you’re looking for something nice but with a tiny budget, Ebony G. Patterson editions presented by Artspace Phaidon are made for you. The works of this young Jamaican artist investigate forms of embellishment as they relate to youth culture, to young rebellion to degeneration within disenfranchised communities, and in particular within the post-colonial context of her native Jamaica and within black youth culture globally.

Carla Jay Harris, Sphinx (2018) at Luis De Jesus (Los Angeles)

An elegant pattern, takes this work by Carla Jay Harris to some spiritual and celestial dimension.  With references to Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Lorna Simpson, Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt, each work is made by the artist posing and photographing her models in her studio according to a narrative, and then she she builds the image in layers through photoshop, in effect creating a digital collage.

Corita Kent, with love to the everyday miracle (1967) at Andrew Kreps Gallery

Very particular story for this former nun artist, whose messages resonate up to our days. Corita Kent (b. 1918 – d. 1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice, who joined the order of the immaculate Heart of Mary, producing the first prints on the 50s. These vibrant words are calls to action, to social solidarity mutual respect and dignity for all people with no distinction of gender or color. 

As tensions arose she eventually left the order while she continued to pursue her work. With a very unique and conceptually dense pop style, her word compositions were not limited to the staple imagery and language of consumer and mass culture but also often integrated philosophy, literature, street signage, scripture, and song lyrics in bold text and abstract forms.