Andy Freeberg has an amazing knack for capturing people involved with the art world. His current show offers a selection of images shot between 2009 and 2011 at art fairs in Basel, Switzerland; Miami and New York. The dozen pictures on view resemble life-size dioramas, in which dealers and their assistants interact with the art and their electronic devices, rather than with clients or the general public.
In one amusing juxtaposition, a woman in a booth for the downtown gallery Two Palms talks on her cell phone, while standing next to a Mel Bochner print that reads blah, blah, blah. A strawberry-blond assistant for the Andrea Rosen Gallery wears a yellow top that blends perfectly with the abstract photo behind her by Wolfgang Tillmans. Two men in matching dark suits stand in front of a trio of Ad Reinhardt’s all-black paintings like characters from a Samuel Beckett play. And dealer Sean Kelly, sitting beneath a massive Kehinde Wiley painting of a young black man in a classic death pose, covers his face with his hands as if he were in mourning. As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” and in Freeberg’s work, every booth becomes one.—Paul Laster