SPLIT LEVEL 

NEW YORK

It’s a tough time to run an art gallery. While heading a space has always been challenging, increasingly dire economic conditions have put strains on gallerists like never before, and even among well-established dealers there’s a sense that the system as it’s currently structured isn’t working. This year has seen a rash of closures of highly esteemed venues, including Clearing, Venus Over Manhattan, L.A. Louver, Blum, Rhona Hoffman, and Tilton Gallery. Nevertheless, there are plenty of young gallerists who insist on persisting—whether out of masochism or idealism—and they are finding new and unconventional ways to adapt to the difficult landscape.

The most recent example of this can be found at a high-end furniture store in NoMad. I was skeptical when I first heard about Split Level, a micro fair at Rimadesio of 16 galleries that, in the words of its press release, “takes a playful approach to installation within this design-centered space.” There was more than a whiff of artwashing afoot: Expensive brands like to associate themselves with up-and-coming artists to make their clients feel like they’re cool for buying a $5,000 coffee table (an outlay that’s reasonable only when you’re pulling in the kind of money that typically comes from a decidedly uncool job). I prepared myself for an uninspiring visit where the art was mere window dressing to sell window dressings. Joyously, I was wrong.

The creation of Jaqueline Cedar, founder of Good Naked Gallery, Split Level takes inspiration from other unconventional fairs like Felix (staged in a Los Angeles hotel), Esther (in which works are displayed around New York’s Beaux-Arts Estonian House) and Villa Tigertail (a pop-up with art placed throughout a luxurious home just around the corner from the Getty). Its participation fee is orders of magnitude less than other fairs, making it a particularly attractive proposition for participants: small galleries showing emerging artists. And unlike more conventional fairs, with sterile environments and white booth after white booth, the venue worked particularly well. Too often the sales side of the art world seems to forget that people live with the works they buy. Few of us have homes that look like a pristine gallery space, so seeing art in settings staged like living rooms, dining rooms and closets helps make the idea of coexisting with these creations especially concrete.

Three-dimensional art is the star attraction. Ali Della Bitta’s clay-and-mixed-media pieces, shown by Artist Estate Studio, are dazzling assemblages that tread the line between delicacy and solidity, playfulness and solemnity. Inspired by nature, her abstract forms look like extraterrestrial corals, otherworldly weeds and rare gemstones from far off planets. Their fragility nods to ecological crisis and the many threats to the environment, but despite their heavy message, their exuberant colors and shapes—they seem to sway and ruffle before our eyes—mean the works are never gloomy.

Shelter’s presentation of outsider artist Charles Simmons’s carved-stone sculptures was revelatory. The black Simmons, who died in his early 80s in 2020, sadly never received the attention in life that his friend, neighbor and fellow artist Raymond Coins did despite working in similar styles and materials. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. His creations are vibrantly modern, with each figure pared to its most basic elements. A bird looks like an abstract whorl until you catch it at a particular angle; a man barely emerges from his stone, the cross on his neck just visible. Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi and Medardo Rosso all come to mind, but with these humble subjects—frogs, chickens and everymen—Simmons’s work is entirely his own.

Speaking of humble, Chris Beeston’s works, shown by Alex Stoller, elevate everyday objects into whimsical, often utilitarian artworks. Plastic food containers and trays are stacked and wired with lights, feeling at once like retro-futuristic inventions and something cobbled together after the apocalypse. A portable TV is programmed to play only episodes of “The Simpsons” and offers a clever critique of the streaming era’s tyranny of choice.

At Ro Art Services, the artist-duo ESSAY (Jeffrey Prokash and David Sprecher) also leans into the functional with their linguistic-focused works. Cast-plaster lamps inspired by a poem by Franny Choi, in which the text’s phonemes were each translated into a physical object, are humorous attempts to make language three-dimensional: Atop a giant bone, or a dead rat, a single bulb burns brightly, a hopeful yet ironic symbol that illuminates the futility of the project. Cast vessels, in which different parts of a mold corresponding to different sounds are combined in seeming random groupings, are intriguingly impractical, with one element often clashing with the next due to the spontaneous way they are assembled. They too speak to the difficulty of rendering language in solid form, and we see flaws in each piece where the molds have degraded after repeated use.

Ms. Cedar’s presentation embraced the sculptural theme with the utmost cheeriness. Trevor King’s pair of “Brothers” was a spellbinding Yves Klein blue, and Langdon Graves brought levity to the space with her bright-red birdhouse perched on a pole high above a single worm, blissfully unaware of the danger roosting above it. With all the difficulties that accompany being a gallerist these days, Ms. Cedar proves that it’s most rewarding to be a happy warrior.

SPLIT LEVEL

Rimadesio, 102 Madison Ave., through Oct. 4

— Mr. Kelly is the Journal’s associate Arts in Review editor. Follow him on X @bpkelly89 and write to him at brian.kelly@wsj.com.