The opening night of Frieze New York 2025 felt like a kaleidoscopic plunge into contemporary art’s current obsessions: spectacle, tactility, and the porous boundary between craft and concept. Gagosian’s booth, anchored by a monumental Jeff Koons installation, stole the early crowds. Koons, never one for understatement, presented a suite of inflatable Hulk sculptures augmented with brass instruments—tubas and saxophones sprouting from green latex torsos like baroque appendages. The installation is absurd and triumphant, a gleeful collision of childhood kitsch and symphonic excess. Koons remains committed to his signature blend of consumerist allure and pop irony, but here the scale tips toward joy, as if the sculptures are inviting us to dance rather than critique.
Fiber, in fact, made a quietly powerful showing across the fair. Tina Kim Gallery’s presentation of contemporary Korean fiber artists extended the material conversation, emphasizing process, gesture, and the malleability of tradition. Elsewhere, works in textile, tapestry, and hybrid forms pushed beyond mere medium: they embodied acts of care, subversion, and storytelling. This year’s Frieze felt like a call to touch, to thread connections across fractured histories, to see material as a carrier of both past and future. And on opening night, the art delivered—a fair as tactile as it was conceptual, weaving its own vibrant, unruly fabric.
