The 11th edition of the New Art Dealers Alliance (Nada) New York fair has taken over the third floor of the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea (until 11 May). Boasting 120 galleries, art spaces and non-profits representing 19 countries, this year’s edition offers notably cryptic forms of figuration, unspoken secrets and clandestine commentary, enticing viewers with the conspiratorial promise of disclosure.
On Anca Poterașu Gallery’s stand, the Romanian artist Aurora Király enriches the slick sophistication of a gelatin silver print with a collagist’s flair for multimedia, obscuring a shadowed self-portrait with a shaggily geometric cardboard and charcoal border in Viewfinder (1999), priced at $10,000. “This work is all about photography and memory,” Poterașu tells The Art Newspaper. “Király is one of the most respected artists of her generation in Romania.”
More mysteries await on the stand of the Ghent-based gallery Tatjana Pieters, which has been invaded by taxidermy hermit crabs hiding in a variety of borrowed shells, like coiled snakes and dead frogs. “It’s about the relationship between nature and constructed reality,” says the artist Charles Degeyter, who started his career as a poster illustrator for bands like Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age. Collectors looking to pinch one of his crab sculptures will have to shell out $1,700 to $3,000.
On the Seoul-based gallery Dohing Art’s stand, the Spanish painter Bárbara Alegre renders the body abstract through intimate, cropped compositions, forcing the viewer to wonder whose fingers are slithering through an otherwise quiet plane of wallpaper, as seen in Nothing Happens but the Wallpaper (2025), priced at $3,000.
The Japanese gallery Cohju’s stand features a pair of delicate wooden braids by the Kyoto-based sculptor Anna Yamanishi that hang on nails, inviting onlookers into the sneaky synaesthesia of their creation. The sculpture, breeze (2025), was priced at $6,000 and has sold. Another Delphic sculpture sits on New York gallery Superhouse’s stand. Colin Knight, who reinterprets wartime motifs by way of midcentury design, is showing, Wedge Chair (Amidst a Blackout) (2021), a wooden chair occupied by a leather wedge cushion, a nod to both Joseph Beuys and the blackouts in London during the Second World War.
The Shanghai-based gallery Cubism Artspace is showing a dark, arresting painting by Yan Bingqing that plumbs the tension between the gazer and the gazed-upon with an image of a four-eyed woman obscuring her face with her fingers. Titled No Peeking (2024), it is priced at $10,000. At Megan Mulrooney Gallery’s stand, obfuscation titillates the viewer with a group of sexy pears by the painter Piper Bangs in the still life Dressing (2025), which has sold. The succulent fruits don harnesses and flirt with the viewer from behind ever-slipping leaves. Bangs, who is based in Los Angeles, explores the humanoid aspects of flesh and sexuality in her practice. Also on view, at the stand of the Los Angeles-based La Beast Gallery, are the unraveling abstract paintings of Amy MacKay. Her sensitive stains of light and dark recall the body without explicitly cohering into a human form, as seen in Bog Morning (2025), priced at $4,000.
“I’m liking Nada this year,” says La Beast’s director Zach Christensen. “People feel real.”
