The Best Booths at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair

The London-based gallery Blond Contemporary is showing phantasmagorical paintings by the South African artist Sulette van der Merwe, who conjures the legacy of Surrealism in works that play with “the notion of consciousness and how consciousness is formed,” according to gallery director Philip Blond. There’s also a playful element of trompe-l’oeil trickery, as what appear to be collaged elements are all painted on surfaces that otherwise seem to be stuck together.

In the booth for 193 Gallery, which maintains spaces in Paris, Venice, and Saint-Tropez, there are paintings by Modou Dieng Yacine that are inspired by Senegalese wrestlers. They exude a sense of power while remaining intriguingly elusive. The artist—born in Senegal and currently based in Chicago—reimagined figures based on photographs as “unstable, shifting bodies where Black identity dissolves into silhouette, transparency, and absence,” according to gallery materials. The colors are inviting, but they also manage to somehow recede, pulling the viewer in close.

Presented as a “Special Project” by 1-54, Black Forest Library is an extension of an initiative started at MIT through which the artist Ekene Ijeoma organizes community events and plants trees. Some 400 milk crates in the colors of the Pan-African flag display a heady collection of books—on subjects ranging from racial justice and conservationism to the history of dub reggae—as well as plants and other curios. Ijeoma has planted hundreds of trees all over—including 200 in the South Bronx.

Rommulo Vieira Conceição, born in Salvador and based in Porto Alegre, plies materials such as anodized aluminum into works that tap into traditions and histories while paying attention to reality that “globalization is collapsing,” the artist said. In a work presented by the São Paolo–based gallery Aura, colorful tiles arranged in geometric patterns conjure the past of Brazilian modernism while dramatic blue waves wait to wash them away.

The first curated section of its kind at 1-54, “Brazil Beyond Brazil” features 10 artists selected by Igor Simões, whose curatorial statement reads in part: “Brazilian art is Black Brazilian art and goes far beyond the white-Brazilian art that, for decades, occupied the center of debates about the country and its artists.” A big painting by Jaime Lauriano extrapolates on an earlier rendering of the arrival of the Portuguese to Brazil in the 1500s, with ominous elements haunting boats that burn. Nearby, a chess set by No Martins consolidates the most powerful pieces (all of them white) in the middle of a board populated otherwise by black pawns.