Atlanta Art Fair 2025

Opening Evening
Thursday, September 25: 6–9pm

All Public Days
Friday, September 26: 11am—7pm
Saturday, September 27: 11am—7pm
Sunday, September 28: 11am—6pm

Pullman Yards, Porter Hall
225 Rogers St NE
Atlanta, GA 30317

 

Beyond Boundaries: Materiality, Memory, and Modernity

At the 2025 Atlanta Art Fair, Sponder Gallery presents Beyond Boundaries: Materiality, Memory, and Modernity — a curated selection of works that reflect the gallery’s longstanding commitment to blue-chip contemporary art while also engaging with the complex textures of our present moment. The booth highlights a rigorous dialogue between historical modernism and contemporary innovation, offering a dynamic intersection of media, process, and conceptual framing.

At the heart of the presentation is a selection of screenprints by Josef Albers from the seminal Formulation: Articulation portfolio (1972). These works:  G Clef, Homage to the Square, and Variant, stand as timeless studies in color interaction and perceptual logic. Albers’ pedagogical lineage from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College continues to influence generations of artists. His systematic, controlled formulations are not merely aesthetic exercises but philosophical meditations on perception, laying a conceptual groundwork for the rest of the booth.

Photographic works by Harry Benson capture seminal cultural moments with visceral intimacy. Ali Hits George, taken at Miami’s 5th Street Gym in 1964, freezes the mythic energy of two titans of the ring in an iconic instant of tension. In James Brown Does the Split, Benson’s lens captures not only a physical movement but a historical pulse, the embodied dynamism of Black excellence in Augusta, Georgia. These images serve as artifacts of memory, resistance, and performance within the American psyche.

The painterly and sculptural works of Donald Martiny and JM Rizzi expand the language of gestural abstraction. Martiny’s Milyan blurs the line between painting and sculpture with thick polymer brushstrokes that float off the aluminum surface like frozen movements in time. Rizzi’s Summer Blues pulses with inked spontaneity, anchoring Abstract Expressionism within a contemporary urban idiom. These works are not composed as much as they are enacted,  gestural traces that externalize emotion, rhythm, and space.

Photographic and lens-based practices by Max-Steven Grossman, Tom Leighton, Kim Keever, and Isabelle van Zeijl interrogate the nature of constructed imagery. Grossman’s Rock SQ WF acts as both archival structure and visual playlist, a library of sound visualized through stacked music book covers. Leighton’s Venice 1 digitally collages architecture into a surreal symphony of symmetry and density, while Keever’s underwater photographic abstraction (Abstract 47648) distills color and form into a dreamlike, painterly ether. Meanwhile, van Zeijl’s A New Dawn resurrects the opulence of Dutch Golden Age portraiture through a contemporary feminist lens, both haunting and luminous in its recontextualization of beauty.

Sculptural materiality is foregrounded in the work of Patrick Tagoe-Turkson, Boaz Vaadia, and Kx2. Turkson’s 515 Maakomamu reclaims flip-flops from the shores of Ghana and transforms them into richly patterned wall works that speak to migration, sustainability, and African visual traditions. Vaadia’s stacked bronze and bluestone figure, Hanokh, channels the weight and permanence of ancient megalithic traditions into intimate human form. Kx2’s Caspersen Beach, intricate modular wall-mounted discs,  render light, space, and color through powder-coated aluminum and acrylic reliefs. 

Sponder Gallery continues to explore how contemporary artists engage with notions of luxury, desire, and the academic. Metis Atash’s Soul Sync, encrusted with over 28,000 Swarovski crystals, reinvents the aesthetics of the Buddha figure through the lens of contemporary pop and material glamor. Simultaneously, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan’s Mirror Vmeditates on visibility, identity, and illusion, a palimpsest of feminine form partially obscured by painterly handprints, challenging the viewer’s gaze.

This curated booth at the Atlanta Art Fair reaffirms Sponder Gallery curating with a lens that is scholarly, globally attuned, and aesthetically rigorous. Each work on view is not merely an object of visual pleasure but a node in a broader conversation about form, memory, identity, and material culture. Collectively, the booth forms a prismatic lens through which to consider the state of contemporary art at the crossroads of history, innovation, and market relevance.

-Gabriel Delgado