In an art world dominated by the fair duopoly, galleries are carving out new ways of networking their businesses. At the forefront of one of the latest initiatives, you'll find Chris Sharp.
Post-Fair—the new Los Angeles art fair conceived by gallerist Chris Sharp—is set to open its pilot edition this week, shadowing the timing of Frieze L.A. After two decades spent continent-hopping as a curator, writer, and editor—including the launch of his acclaimed project space, Lulu, with artist Martín Soto Climent in Mexico City—Sharp eventually returned to his native U.S. in 2021 to open his eponymous L.A. gallery. As preparations intensify for his new fair, Sharp talks to Michael Polsinelli about the drivers, challenges, and concepts that have led him to his latest initiatives.
MP
The California wildfires have been devastating. How are you?
CS
We've been very lucky. No one in my team and none of my artists has been directly impacted. However, for some, it's unthinkable. About 150 of us from the L.A. art community—gallerists, curators, museum directors, artists—got together in a digital town hall to discuss whether to proceed with the fairs following the devastation. The artist Kelly Akashi, who lost everything in the fires, including the work she was about to include in her solo show at Lisson Gallery, said something really powerful (I paraphrase): 'I don't want anyone to lose opportunities because some of us lost everything. It's important that artists continue being able to do what they do and this is an important time for them to get attention.' I've always liked Kelly, but I now have a new level of respect for her. So, the art community came together and made the decision to proceed.
MP
We're speaking as the preparations for your pilot edition of Post-Fair are fully in motion. I'm curious: What questions were you asking yourself when you decided to start the fair?
CS
What I'm doing has something of a precursor in Place des Vosges, which was a micro-boutique fair project I organised last year in Paris. I found this really beautiful big apartment and invited seven other galleries to do it with me, including the likes of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Kerlin Gallery, and Kate MacGarry. We each paid 5,000 USD, which reduced the sales pressures, although we all made sales. There was a collegial feeling to the whole project; we gave tours to each other's collectors for example. That's rare for art fairs, which are typically very tribal and competitive.
This year, my gallery was accepted into a major L.A. fair but, frankly, the booth fee was too much of a risk for my business, and I can see how it's too much of a risk for a lot of galleries right now. So, I decided to look around and maybe replicate the Paris project on a larger scale. I found this space about a ten-minute drive from Frieze L.A., the old post office in Santa Monica, where the art dealer Vito Schnabel did some shows in 2021. I looked into the rent, and it was about twice what I would've paid for a small booth at Frieze. Divide that among 25 galleries, along with some admin/building costs, and it began to make sense. Although you also quickly learn that building walls and installing lighting are the most expensive parts of creating fairs!
I told myself that, if I could get ten galleries on board, I'd go ahead with it. I reached out to a bunch of people, including Wendy Olsoff at P·P·O·W, who is a close collaborator because we share some artists, and she encouraged me to do it, claiming it was the right time for this kind of project. Now, I don't have enough room for everyone who would like to participate.
MP
I can remember speaking to gallerists at art fairs who were on the verge of nervous breakdowns, telling me that, if they didn't sell a certain work by tomorrow, they were going under.
CS
Art fairs shouldn't be like that. I mean, doing an art fair shouldn't be a threat to the ongoing existence of your gallery. At the moment, everyone is adjusting because of the market, but I feel like the fairs aren't really adjusting, or not enough. It feels cyclical though: a lot of art fairs were started by gallerists—Art Basel and The Armory Show, for example—who were responding to moments when they felt they had to take matters into their own hands. Then the fairs evolve, they get selection committees, there's a whole infrastructure to maintain, and they grow into semi or totally corporate entities. Gallerists eventually become removed from the production, and ultimately alienated from the process in such a way that it needs to be reconsidered or renewed. Hence, Post-Fair. But I am far from the first person to do this: think of what Robbie Fitzpatrick did with Basel Social Club, for example.
MP
I know you have an existing profile and a great network, but still, for a fledgling fair, you have participants who aren't strangers to the big art circuit. That shows an impressive level of trust.
CS
Yes, we have been fortunate for a number of reasons. Michael Benevento is close with Sprüth Magers as they're both involved with the Kaari Upson Estate, and there's a project of hers they wanted to show. Michael, who also did Place des Vosges with me, has been really supportive in conversations about the fair. I've known Paolo Zani at Zero in Milan for ages. Paolo has no interest in conforming to conventional gallery protocols: I have so much respect for him. And I was really happy when so many others decided to join, including Lisa Overduin and Gordon Robichaux in New York.
I wanted good galleries and I wanted different galleries, because this isn't about taste. I love what House of Seiko is doing with their storefront in San Francisco. I also like the idea of the fair acknowledging its region. For example, Cruise Control is based in a small, beautiful, and very pro-Trump Californian beachside town called Cambria. Charlie Smith, who runs the gallery, is fantastic, and I think he's doing something very unique there.
MP
You've always been someone who relocates with ease—nomadic as a byproduct of your research and passions. Now, you have a gallery and an art fair in L.A. They're serious brick-and-mortar roots.
CS
Yeah. As corny as it might sound, I love that often-quoted line by the poet Frank O'Hara, which is also his epitaph: 'Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.' In some ways, I have been led more by literature, specific writers—like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roberto Bolaño—and a love of languages than anything else. Maybe I have commitment issues, too! I lived abroad for about 20 years: ten years in Europe; eight years in Mexico City. Europe was mostly Paris and Milan, with long sojourns in Portugal and Sweden. Now, I feel less compelled to move and more settled down—as opposed to flying by the seat of my pants, like I did with Martín Soto Climent, when we ran our project space, Lulu, in Mexico City on a shoestring budget for years. Then you open a gallery, and the decisions are all but made for you commitment-wise—here's a 10,000 USD shipping bill for a show; here's a 15,000 USD art fair booth invoice—and you think: 'OK, I guess this is what I do now.' Evolution seems characterised by these progressive expenditures. But it's all for the love of and belief in art.
MP
By all accounts, Lulu was a modest space—Martín's living room—but you were consistently pulling the attention of international media, like The New York Times, Artforum, Vogue, and The Telegraph.
CS
It was the right time and place. Everybody loves Mexico City: they always have. When we were doing Lulu, there were a handful of incredible galleries and some really good museums in Mexico City, but there are many more now.
The model for Lulu was perhaps refreshing, too, and I guess this relates to a through-line for me: economy of scale, economy of means, economy of production. That element of reverse hyperbole played maybe the most important role. We did this fake biennial, Lulennial—perhaps the world's smallest biennial—and, despite its scale, we had artists like Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco in it, which seems crazy now.
We show a lot of painting precisely because it's the one thing I never get tired of. It's inexhaustible but it's pretty trite at the same time, 'Oh, another painting ...' How do you enact this 'wacky mode' in painting? How do you surprise or break somebody's heart with what is potentially a total cliche? It's funny, when you and I were both working on magazines together 15 years ago in Europe, painting was all but inadmissible. Curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist would brag about their ignorance of painting, as if the seriousness of a curator were contingent upon and proportionate to their ignorance of this vast swathe of art history.
Two painters I work with and have recently shown, Angeline Rivas and Anna Glantz, have very different but equally challenging practices. Angeline pulls from very specific frames of reference, which can include everything from western Americana to the occult and cults, but when you're in front of the work, it's a struggle to articulate it. On the other hand, I see Anna's work as coexisting in a universe with artists like Trisha Donnelly and Vincent Fecteau, both of whom operate right on the threshold of the inscrutable and, for me, that is as good as it gets.
MP
I also want to ask you about another of your artists, Ishi Glinsky, because his work went from being largely unknown to being acquired by the Hammer Museum within a couple of months. It's a great example of the role galleries can play in strengthening culture.
CS
Ishi's a very special case. L.A. convention dictates that you matriculate into the art world via select schools, like UCLA or CALArts. Ishi was living in L.A. but didn't have access to the art world because he's from Tucson and primarily self-taught, yet he was finding his own way to survive as an artist.
From the Tohono O'odham Nation tribe of Southern Arizona, Ishi is very committed politically to the issues around that, and particularly to examining the ways in which Indigenous iconography has been appropriated by animation companies such as Disney and Warner Brothers. Ishi adopts incredible indigenous artisanal practices—such as inlay techniques with semi-precious stones and mother of pearl—re-creating and translating them at large scale using resins and pigments with uncanny realism. Whether it's in painting or sculpture, Ishi is a one-in-a-million artist who is genuinely doing radical things in both mediums. With every body of work, he demonstrates a resourcefulness and invention, a commitment to material and craft, that produces stunning results. This, as we've been discussing, feels like something of a through-line for my entire programme.