Art Stage has been open for a couple of days, but don’t fret if you haven’t had the chance to head on over yet – you’ve still got the weekend. While the fair’s sheer size (all 17,190 square metres of it) may make you want to hurry down the maze of booths just to make sure you catch everything before time’s up, quite a lot of the works there made us do a double take and take a second, closer look. What we discovered made us smile, gawk, and gave us the heebee-jeebees. Here are five of the quirkiest pieces that we came across.
‘Apocalypse – New York’ by Enzo Fiore. Contini Art UK.
What it looks like: A rather bleak cityscape of New York City.
What it really is: A canvas filled with dead bugs, dead plant matter, and gravel. And we thought it couldn’t get any creepier.
‘Untitled (Kneeling Woman)’ by Sam Jinks. Sullivan+Strumpf.
What it looks like: A really small woman who’s gotten so tired of walking around the huge art fair that she’s fallen asleep on top of a plinth.
What it really is: A hyper-realistic sculpture of a woman, created with silicone, fiberglass, resin, real human hair and coloured with pigments.
‘Bust of Agrippa’ by Li Hongbo. Eternal Art Space.
What it looks like: A sculpture of a man’s head made of plaster.
What it really is: A massive stack of paper that’s sculpted in such a way that it mimics the texture of plaster. Make sure you ask the gallery assistant to demonstrate by lifting a part of the head up to reveal the intricate pattern of the paper.
‘Cloud 05 (jellyfish)’, ‘Cloud 02 (dog head)’, ‘Cloud 01 (crab)’ by Leandro Erlich. Art Front Gallery.
What they look like: Clouds magically entrapped in glass cases.
What they really are: The Argentinia artist has cleverly come up with a way to spray ceramic ink onto ultra-clear glass, which are then stacked to give the illusion of a floating cloud. And as the titles suggest, you’re invited to try and look for animals in the abstract forms.
‘Spiel’ by Antonio Santin. Marc Straus.
What it looks like: A photo of something trying to burst through a gorgeous carpet.
What it really is: A textural oil painting with bright, thin lines of paint piped onto the canvas to resemble fabric. And the thing underneath it? It’s really the body of a person who appears to quite literally have been swept under the rug.