NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- All art fairs aren’t the same, but they can have a comparable blanketing effect: after hours of walking around a sales floor, the works start to blend together. Was this the clever neon text sculpture you liked, or was it that one?

This week, two fairs gamble on unpredictability to help break up the monotony. The more ambitious, Spring/Break Art Show, offers shake-it-all-up collaborations between artists and curators, while Volta is a mixed bag, but with a strong streak of playful abstraction. Although very different from each other, both lack the blue-chip sheen of bigger outlets like the Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. They can’t give you a flawless experience but that’s OK. They make you put in a little extra legwork to find something you love. Consider the possibilities.

SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW
Spring/Break was founded in 2012 by the husband-and-wife team of Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly. Its original location was a disused schoolhouse in SoHo, where a slate of wonderfully weird installations filled the rooms. The fair has moved several times since then. Now some 100 exhibitors have taken over two floors at 625 Madison Avenue, the former offices of Ralph Lauren.

What sets Spring/Break apart is its model. Every booth is curated, whether by a commercial art dealer, a nonprofit worker, an independent curator, or an artist. For each edition, the organizers issue a theme and then sort through proposals to pick the best ones. Participants are not charged a fee, which makes the show radically more open than just about any other fair. In fact, most of the time Spring/Break doesn’t feel like a fair so much as a crowded, exhilarating, madcap art extravaganza.

Fittingly, the 2020 theme is “In Excess.” The fair is known for immersive installations, such as a new work by longtime Spring/Break contributor Azikiwe Mohammed, who reimagines the Subway Lounge, a basement club in Jackson, Mississippi’s Summers Hotel. Filled with wood board figures sitting around a table and holding neon card sculptures, the meticulously designed room pays homage to the refuges that black people have created for themselves. It resonates with Ali Shrago-Spechler’s more muted “Eine Friedliche Industrie,” a cardboard, papier-mâché, and concrete reconstruction of a secular Jewish home in 1938 Germany that also meditates on the sanctity of private space.

If you’re looking for interaction, artist Z Behl is spending the fair enlisting visitors and collaborators to reshoot her short film “Geppetto,” a riff on the story of Pinocchio done in the style of a spaghetti western. If you prefer to watch, go find LJ Roberts, who’s on site finishing a massive textile piece seven years in the making; it’s an ode to the ways queer and transgender communities have used conversion vans.

Some of Spring/Break’s most over-the-top booths star painting, especially the figurative kind that’s currently in fashion. Kate Klingbeil’s solo presentation is a wonderland of layered landscapes whose miniature, molding-paste flora and fauna the artist pipes with pastry bags and sticks onto the surface. David B. Frye’s scenes of people worshipping a golden bull — a play on the golden calf — are set within shaped sculptural frames against a backdrop of imitation red paneling, evoking a rustic barn for mysterious rituals.

The body seems to be at the forefront of many minds. Claudia Bitran finds videos of drunk teenagers on the internet and renders them first as small, ghostly paintings, then as animations. Similarly, Faith Holland has taken notorious photographs of male genitalia and turned them into oddly soothing videos. KC Crow Maddux combines photographs of his own trans body with surreal, biomorphic shapes in painted wood to create hybrid objects. Shihui Zhou sews together articles of clothing in droopy, evocative ways that make the absence of a wearer seem almost grotesque.

All that is only a fraction of what’s on view. You could spend hours here and still not see everything.

VOLTA
Volta had a dramatic 2019: It was canceled after its location was deemed structurally unsound and then sold, dissolving its official ties to the Armory Show. Now the fair is back, with a new director and location, and change in format — whereas before it was strictly solo booths, now anything goes. The 53 exhibitors are an undeniably international group, but what they’ve brought to New York City is decidedly mixed. There is, honestly, plenty of mediocre work to skip, but also enough good stuff to reward a visit.

The strongest current at the fair is abstraction, which takes a variety of forms. Mark Hachem Gallery’s booth provides a historical anchor with a selection of op and kinetic art, including several small, two-plane constructions by Jesús Rafael Soto that seem to shift and vibrate. A striking piece nearby by his fellow Venezuelan artist Daniel Perez-Flores should literally move — the label lists a motor — but it was either dead or hadn’t been turned on when I saw it.

At Galerie Richard, Young-Hun Kim pays tribute to aging technology with a series titled “Electronic Nostalgia”; he uses a traditional Korean technique to create paintings that look glitchy. At Crossing Art, Qing Fen also blends old and modern by making spare, dynamic black marks that draw on both Chinese ink painting and abstract expressionism.

The mysterious forms in Rachel Ostrow’s works, shown by Planthouse, seem to be floating too — in her case, they look like prismatic particles drifting in outer space. The thick strokes and pointed shapes in Ephraim Urevbu’s canvases, with Art Village Gallery, refer to throngs of protesters.

Shaped paintings make up a mini trend, appearing in three different booths. Katy Ann Gilmore’s acrylic-on-dibond works at Galerie Wenger suggest warped elements from video games. Jaena Kwon’s creations at Space 776 are bright and beguiling; they could be oversized, flattened paper fortunetellers, but they’re actually made of hand-carved fiberboard. And in the booth of NL=US, Jan Maarten Voskuil’s modular, curving canvases appear as if they’ve been cut up and pieced together.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention one figurative painter here: Ashley Norwood Cooper, with Zinc gallery. In high-key color, Cooper renders intimate scenes of women who seem immersed in their interior lives and creativity (always with cats at hand). Tender and funny, the works stopped me in my tracks.

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