The 12th edition of NADA New York is now open through May 17 at the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea, transforming the former industrial landmark into a maze of emerging voices and international crosscurrents. Organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance, the fair brings together 120 galleries and nonprofit spaces from across the globe, with presentations that range from materially obsessive craft experiments to emotionally-charged figurative painting.
This year’s edition feels especially attuned to intimacy and scale: monumental ideas compressed into shirt cuffs, dollhouse-sized emotional universes, domestic animals rendered uncanny, and bodies turned into vessels for identity, conflict, and desire. Elsewhere, galleries foreground collaborations rooted in regional craft traditions, psychedelic excess, and tactile experimentation that pushes beyond conventional booth design. Alongside a robust schedule of talks and programming, CULTURED offers our guide to the seven presentations worth seeking out this weekend at NADA.
Saenger Galería & COHJU
Artists: Scott Reeder, Shengzhe, and more
Show: “East Meets West in Fur and Paws”
A transatlantic dialogue staged through the domestic uncanny can be found at Saenger Galería’s presentation in collaboration with COHJU. Dogs and cats are rendered as familiar yet slightly off-kilter protagonists. Across figurative works by Scott Reeder, Shengzhe, and others, the booth (divided into two sections between Shengzhe and Iván Trueta, and Scott Reeder, Kosai Shiraishi, and Shinya Azum) turns affection into something unstable: soft edges with a latent charge, where cuteness and discomfort quietly overlap.
P.A.D
Artist: Chang Sujung
Show: “Nature Sport”
Chang compresses a vast landscape into labor-intensive miniatures, all stitched onto hand-sewn shirt cuffs in pale hues. Using Central Park as a background character, the iconic plane becomes something portable, intimate, and obsessively observed. This is an act of scale reversal where the monumental is made wearable, and becomes a closer opportunity for intimate study under the artistic microscope.
Capsule
Artist: Douglas Rieger
Show: “Male Fantasies”
Capsule presents a full solo booth for Douglas Rieger, asserting a strong, spatially driven argument for spiky sculpture at scale. The installation underscores both material ambition (from aluminum to bead chain and beyond) and the increasingly international language of the fair—Capsule arrives from Shanghai—with work that insists on presence through volume and uncompromising visual force.
smoke the moon
Artists: Corey Feder & Diego Medina
Show: “Iridescent World”
Feder and Medina meet in a materially-rich conversation between novel materials such as colcha embroidery and classical technique including oil painting, grounding their exchange in New Mexico’s craft lineages. The result reads like a slow atmospheric drift—handmade techniques folded into the contemporary rhythm of an art capital’s demands, where texture carried thousands of miles holds as much weight as the images displayed for passing attendees.
Third Born
Artist: Loucia Carlier
Show: Solo Presentation
Carlier’s miniature works operate like compressed emotional systems, not unlike a dollhouse for that most adult of emotions and quandries—small in size, but dense with intention. At Third Born, Carlier molds restraint into its own register of intensity with her creations, offering a space where close looking reveals the quiet volatility embedded in the smallest gestures.
95 Gallon
Artists: Chris Beeston & Wyatt Bertz
Show: “A Holy Place”
The gallery’s fair debut is defined by excess and precision, heights and valleys, as depicted by towers of light, crystal sculpture, and a captured snide grin. Beeston and Bertz’s collaborative sculptures unfold as glittering, psychedelic geometries that defy conventional structure. Across whimsically named works (Frosted Flake and Mr Sock among them) and use of buzzing, neon color, the language of 95 gallon comes alive from this mobile curatorial project.
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