In the Zone: Hunting for Art
I’ll let you in on a little secret.
I’ve found an endless source of passion and energy as a professional art hunter.
Last week in New York, amidst chaos and pretension, as the art world converged into its most concentrated form, I synced into a feeling I call being in the zone.
Jake Troyli (b. 1990) is a rising star who merges classical Renaissance techniques with pop art and comic-inspired motifs to explore themes of racial identity, commodification of the Black body, and performative labor. Chicago’s Monique Meloche recently showed new work of his at Independent Art Fair in Tribeca.
An expression used in sports, gaming, even gambling — often describing a detached and compulsive focus — for me, being in the zone as an art advisor is a hyper-tuned sense of clarity, allowing me to float in awe among meaningful objects of beauty, oozing fascination and meaning.
In the zone my mind races, not with distraction, but with connection, drawing lines between across mediums and centuries. I’m not just looking — I’m linking. Intuition and knowledge coalesce, weaving threads between facts and allegories and artists separated by centuries or continents.
It’s just one of the superpowers of the Charting Transcendence brand these days that made New York Art Week 2025 spectacular.
Telos Tales (2025) by Alicja Kwade (b, 1979) on at Pace compellingly depicts the paradox of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the more accurately one tries to measure an object's time or position, the more likely it is to alter measurable time.
Big Game, Big Names: Superstars of Frieze Week
Untitled (NY NY Night) (2021) by Joel Mesler (b. 1974), a crowd-pleasing contemporary pop artist whose work now appears regularly at auction, most recently at Sotheby’s and Phillips.
New York Art Week, held annually in early May, is one of the most consequential events on the global art calendar, surpassed in gravity in the US only by Miami Art Week (a.k.a. Art Basel.)
Frieze New York and The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) anchor the week, drawing crowds to view works by market-leading artists represented by blue-chip galleries and traded at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.
For collectors and professionals, this is a choice opportunity to survey artists shaping today’s art-historical narrative — household names whose careers are bolstered by institutional acclaim and commercial demand.
Love him or hate him, Jeff Koons (b. 1955) is probably America’s foremost living contemporary art world superstar. Hulk (Organ) (2004-2014) was one of several fully functional musical instrument sculptures of his shown by Gagosian at Frieze New York.
Reminiscent of the mobiles of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), but with a twist: Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976) makes his out of bomb metal and artillery shells, drawing spectators to James Cohan Gallery’s booth at Frieze.
This large photograph of a scotch-taped vintage Marlboro advertisement magazine spread by by Richard Prince (b. 1949) speaks deeply to the American mythos. It sold at Christie’s this week for $1.5M, well over its estimate of $700k-$1M.
Phillips New York offered a hot-pink feathered polar bear by Italian Paola Pivi (b. 1971). a Miami favorite (not surprisingly) since her 2018 show at the Bass Museum of Art.
$5M is the price of this epic 100” x 100” painting by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Myths (Multiple) (1981), offered at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) by Robilant Voena.
Demonstration (2025), by Thomas Demand (b. 1964), who builds elaborate paper and cardboard models, which he photographs before destroying them, at Matthew Marks.
Karma Gallery showed this deeply moving 16” x 12” painting, Stage (2018) by the late Matthew Wong (1984-2019), a true 21st-century master of the brush who blended Eastern and Western styles of painting, at TEFAF.
Pace Gallery is currently showing a museum-quality show of text and image works by Robert Indiana (1928-2018), a preeminent 20th century pop artist.
Diamonds in the Rough and Lesser-Known Gems
Lesser known (and often less expensive) art is also totally worth checking out in NYC in May, including at satellite fairs such as the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair, Future Fair, and Spring Break Art Show.
There are also those unexpected discoveries that hit just right.
From an advisor’s perspective, engagement on this (and every) level of the art world offers early insights into trends into humanity’s evolution through artistic expression.
Transcendence, after all, is not confined to marquee names; it often emerges where curiosity meets the unexpected.
Mike Kelley (1954-2012) was a seminal Los Angeles-based artist best known for a body of work from the 1990s that turned discarded stuffed animals into sculptural installations. Christie’s displayed this rarely seen piece, Arena #7 (1990), during its spring sale preview.
Women artists who work in fiber, including Japan’s Mitsuko Asakura (b. 1950), who shows with the Upper East Side’s Salon 94, continue to captivate attention as they did at TEFAF.
Abel Macias (b. 1979), an artist whose work is rooted in Mexican folk art, showed several lovely paintings at the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair with a Chelsea gallery, Situations.
Kenichiro Fukumoto (b. 1986) sold out a booth of large lyrically-abstract oil paintings — including one to a client of Charting Transcendence — at NADA brought from Japan by Tokyo’s Akiinoue Gallery.
Since making a splash at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Lee ShinJa (b. 1930) has gotten more exposure in the United States for her hand-woven abstract landscape tapestries dating from the 1980s, seemingly decades ahead of their time. She and other superb contemporary Korean artists are represented by Tina Kim Gallery.
Underscoring continued interest in geometric abstraction, Ricco/Maresca Gallery quickly sold over a dozen vintage American Game Boards, designed by unknown artists and dating from 1890-1925, at Independent Art Fair.
Also at Independent, London’s The Sunday Painter showed this ceramic wall sculpture, Let Down, Your Hair (2025) by British artist Emma Hart (b. 1974).
As one of the top art fairs in the world, TEFAF curates art across centuries and boundaries. Charles Ede Gallery offered this ancient Greek Geometric Period bronze horse (ca. 8th century BCE), just five inches high, yet very contemporary in form. Asking price: $800k (i.e. less than Basquiat!)
