The Best Booths at NADA New York, From Whimsical Sculptures to Tar Paintings
By Harrison Jacobs
May 8, 2025
The New Art Dealers Alliance opened its 11th edition of NADA New York on Wednesday, a very busy day that also saw the start of Frieze. Those are but two of the many fairs packed into a single week, meaning that collectors, arts professionals, and even humble journalists have to hustle to see everything.
Still, the energy was high at NADA New York, with the fair moving to Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh, a massive near-century old Art Deco building on West 26th Street and 11th Avenue that has been extensively renovated in the last decade. Located on the building’s third floor, the fair leveraged the space well with fairly spacious booths for even NADA Projects presentations and a huge bank of wraparound windows bathing one end of the fair in natural light.
By the late afternoon Wednesday, the aisles were thrumming with collectors, with dealers hopeful the busyness would translate to business.
“The energy is really good,” Natalie Kates, cofounder of Lower East Side’s Kates-Ferri Projects, told ARTnews, noting that the gallery had already made a few sales. “People are not as quick on the draw, but the sense of discovery is there.”
And there’s a lot to discover. This year’s edition of the fair, which runs through May 11, is large—by recent NADA standards, anyway—at 111 exhibitors, with 54 of them showing in New York for the first time (2024 and 2023 editions of the fair capped at 92 and 88 exhibitors, respectively). There’s considerable geographic diversity too, with galleries hailing from Mexico, Nigeria, China, Korea, Japan, Poland, Germany, Argentina, and further afield.
While there was the usual glut of painting, there seemed to be a renewed emphasis at the fair on both sculpture and wall-hung works that involve the use of fiber and other materials.
Below, see the standouts at the 2025 edition of NADA New York.
Taj Poscé, Brennen Steines, Ye Zhu, and Michelle Im at Dimin
The four artists presented by Tribeca’s Dimin act as a “cross-section of the gallery,” founder Robert Dimin explained to ARTnews. “But I try my damnedest to have it make sense, even if its just to me,” he said, adding that he wanted to create a “textural conversation.”
There’s Ye Zhu, whose blends acrylic painting with found materials like tree roots, mass-produced plastics, and semi-precious stones to create intricate works referencing classical Chinese paintings and Buddhist reliefs. On an adjacent wall are works by Taj Poscé, who mixes industrial and building materials like tar, plastic, and roof coating to create spiritual compositions that sit unstably between representation and abstraction. (Many of Poscé’s family members, according to Dimin, were builders and construction workers.)
Brennen Steines, meanwhile, uses what Dimin called a kind of “alchemical process” to create a textured limestone or calcium base onto which he then paints. Rounding out the group is Michelle Im, who has on view a ceramic sculpture of a Korean flight attendant. She has recently created sculptures of Asian domestic and service workers to reflect on labor, performance, and individuality.
