As newer art fairs crowd the spring calendar, the Art Show wears its age proudly and well. Now in its 24th year, this annual showcase of the Art Dealers Association of America combines polish and relevance. It offers current hits from the museums and galleries as well as historical goodies in one tasteful and increasingly manageable package.
This year the fair has a record 35 solo and two-person exhibits, up from 29 last year. And the remaining exhibitors have organized thematic shows, several of which are excellent. (Though some of the rubrics, like “20th-Century Abstraction” or “Figure and Landscape,” are impossibly broad.)
In general the shows of just one or two artists work so beautifully that the association ought to consider enforcing this standard across the board, along the lines of what is done at newer fairs like Volta or certain sections of Art Basel Miami Beach.
Timeliness helps. Three of the artists with full booths here also have solos at New York museums right now: Cindy Sherman (at MoMA), Sarah Sze (Asia Society) and Henry Taylor (MoMA PS1). And then there’s Francesca Woodman; a touring survey of her brief but influential career opens at the Guggenheim Museum next week.
But only at the fair can you see mini-shows of all of these artists in close proximity to one another: Ms. Sherman’s vampy “Murder Mystery” photo collages (at the Metro Pictures booth) across the aisle from Ms. Woodman’s hiding-in-plain-sight self-portraits (at Marian Goodman), for example.
The most serious of the two-person shows, in mood as well as substance, is at P.P.O.W., where recent works by the artist and AIDS activist Hunter Reynolds accompany a nearly complete set of David Wojnarowicz’s “Rimbaud in New York” photographs. Wojnarowicz’s work offers an enchanted look at city life just before the epidemic; Mr. Reynolds assembles chilling news coverage from the height of the crisis.
The shift to one- and two-artist shows, though, is definitely a good move for this fair and possibly a sign that collectors are expecting more from fairs in general.