Back to Basics

The core mission of New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has always been to support small galleries and emerging artists with a platform to hold their own alongside blue-chip heavyweights. The nonprofit launched its first fair, a year after it was founded in 2002, as a satellite to Art Basel Miami, and it took a parallel approach in coinciding with Frieze New York for the first NYC edition in 2012. More than a decade later, it’s still in touch with its roots.

‍

NADA New York remains strategic when it comes to luring Frieze’s crowds. It’s now situated across an expansive floor of the gargantuan Starrett-Lehigh building on the West Side, just a few blocks south of Frieze’s the Shed. The grittier aesthetic of the industrial space offered a neutral backdrop that also tapped into NADA’s indie origins, channeling a word-of-mouth warehouse after-party. And it’s a crowded one, as this year’s edition housed a vast 111 exhibitors hailing from 50 global cities. The emphasis was on paintings, drawings, and a smattering of more sculptural wall-works—while pieces incorporating video or any other electronic multimedia were virtually absent from the mix. Below is a selection of some stand-out moments.

‍

Haleigh Nickerson at Superposition

‍

Gold-painted and bejeweled boomboxes sat in splendor at Superposition’s solo presentation of Haleigh Nickerson’s work, titled “Ladylike.” The Los Angeles-based artist, originally from the Bay Area, took up portable audio systems—specifically, models from the 1980s and ’90s—as totems to explore girlhood, style, hip-hop culture, and Black female identity at large. Beyond their glittering, metallic coating, Nickerson’s assemblages incorporate items like bamboo earrings, hair clips, curlers, and various bits of other jewelry. At the roving gallery’s booth, some were even refashioned as dazzling purses that hung from chains on the wall. Key to the artist’s inspiration was a quote from Hilton Als from a 1997 Missy Elliot New Yorker profile describing what the critic termed “New Negroes” as “a woman who considers her marginal status a form of freedom, and a challenge: She takes the little she has been given and transforms it into something complex, outrageous and ultimately fashionable.”

Dennis Osadebe at Ceysson & Bénétière

‍

Rendered in flat, monochrome color planes, as if made out of construction paper, the paintings of Nigerian-born, Lagos-based Dennis Osadebe conveyed a more hopeful outlook on technological change. His figures, who sport Nigerian masks in place of faces, are all occupied with some combination of electronic screens and traditional Nigerian objects, including fans and hand-carved figurines, often attached to wiring. “His work is based on this idea that tradition and technology exists not in opposition to one another but actually as a part of a larger spectrum and cycle,” says gallerist Francesca Pessarelli. Objects of both culture and technology are testaments to human creation, after all, serving as a physical index to our history.

Maya Perry at RAINRAIN

‍

Maya Perry’s massive ink and pastel drawings of fire doubled as backdrops for a suite of small oil paintings showing mundane, intimate vignettes of day-to-day life: hair in a hairbrush, a lampshade, a sink of dirty dishes. Sometimes these took on a surreal bent, as with a cat-sized cockroach on a couch in My feelings for you without form are free, 2025. The cockroach joined other paintings focusing on dogs and insects, indicating the artist’s inspiration in Franz Kafka. Beyond meditating on the insanity of reality, Perry’s impetus, as gallery founder Rain Lu explains, is also to prompt reflection on the human condition at what feels like the perilous edge of a precipice.

Eva Papamargariti and Saša Tkačenko at Eugster

‍

At the Belgrade, Serbia gallery Eugster’s two-person booth, metallic sculptures by Eva Papamargariti blended with enigmatic text works from Saša Tkačenko to manifest a cinematically dystopian aesthetic. The London- and Athens-based Papamargariti fashions bizarre, tendril-sprouting forms out of clay that sport an iridescent sheen thanks to her use of automotive pigments. The effect is like if starfish were exposed to a lot of radiation; the instances on view were placed along the floor and wall as though a galaxy of them were crawling across the surfaces. Meanwhile, Tkačenko’s pieces combine digital-print posters and aluminum sheets engraved with a single word. (Here one reads, “Void,” a second reads, “Fall.”) “The posters are meant to evoke the feeling of seeing these repetitive things plastered on the wall,” says gallerist Vanja Zuni, while the aluminum elements push the idea of what she calls the “cold part of the world.”

Namwon Choi at Pentimenti

‍

Aglow in neon-hued acrylic, irregular geometric patterns are juxtaposed with photorealistic depictions of highways in Namwon Choi’s paintings, which were on view at Philadelphia-based Pentimenti’s booth. The artist collected reference images over the course of real-life road trips across the United States and South of France, with the concept also evoking sojourns to see loved ones. In rendering these pictures, Choi’s foundational training as a landscape painter in her native South Korea translates to exquisite details across clouds, trees, signage, and even the texture of the asphalt. The bright, 2-D graphics combined with this hyper-realism—at once vivid and phantasmal—conjures the dreamily unspecific and yet somehow crystal-clear memories of time spent on the road.

Thekla at Orange Crush

‍

Thekla only moonlights as an artist. For her main gig, the native of Vienna is actually a decorated female professional wrestler who has made it big in Japanese joshi—the word for women’s wrestling. Trained in ballet and martial arts, she became known in that scene for her subversion of cute, childlike archetypes with her in-the-ring persona, typically playing the villain to more conventional female characters. Reminiscent of action-movie storyboard panels in their sketchy, expressive line-work, her paintings capture climactic moments of impact in the sport—though there’s also one contemplative image in Self Portrait (Tankobu), 2024, in which she calmly gazes out at the viewer. Her booth at Orange Crush—the travelling project space that also doubles as the name of New York-based gallerist Adam Abdalla’s art-wresting magazine—marked her solo debut in the United States.

Carolyn Case and Trish Tillman at Asya Geisberg Gallery

‍

Asya Geisberg Gallery’s two-person presentation juxtaposed the sculptural practices of Trish Tillman and Carolyn Case. Baltimore-based Case molds intricate frames out of ceramics to accompany abstract chalk-pastel drawings. Case’s emphasis on the framing ultimately results in ample naturalistic sculptural detail that builds out the given theme. Take Comfort Zone, 2025, wherein the central, 2-D pastel composition is flanked by a ceramic border featuring a slice of buttered bread, a pencil, a strawberry, and flowers. Meanwhile, New York-based Tillman crafts puffy, wall-works out of dyed and UV-printed leather, folded over foam. Her forms, some more abstract than others, evoke a kitschy 1980s beauty salon, or perhaps a strip club, with a touch of Liberace-esque flair. In Tillman’s Giving Space, a manicured hand with iridescent nail polish makes a “come hither” gesture, and a candy wrapper is partly covered in black lace. In Stinger, 2025, a pink tongue with a hint of snakeskin print is adjoined to a single, metal-studded, black-leather butterfly wing. At the New York-based-based gallery’s booth, the presentation of the works side by side offered a textured experience, where every moment spent looking revealed something new.