Dealer Ellie Rines, who operates the New York gallery 56 Henry, hadn’t even changed out of her Citi Bike shoes into her gold go-go boots before collector Beth Rudin DeWoody entered the Chelsea Art Fair, at New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel, for the event’s VIP preview this past Saturday. DeWoody was the first to enter, a few minutes before the doors even opened, at noon. The tiny fair, taking place in a small, ground-floor parlor fitted out with petite booths, would open for its one-day run on Sunday, and some 3,000 people registered to attend the sophomore edition.There were just five exhibitors, four from New York—56 Henry, Lomex, Magenta Plains, and Ramiken—alongside Castle, from Los Angeles. There’s also a special presentation by New York’s Off Paradise. (The exhibitors are mostly the same as last year; Matthew Brown dropped out and was replaced by Magenta Plains.)Other VIPs in attendance by early Saturday afternoon included DJ and record producer Mark Ronson, collector Jamie Cohen Hort, writer Lola Kramer, adviser Tanya Traykovski, and Whitney Museum curator Dan Nadel. The scene was buzzy; Rines had to switch out one of the works on the wall about 30 minutes into the preview after it sold.The 56 Henry booth had on view paintings by Pierre Bellot and a funny piece by Kevin Reinhardt, in which a dead crow carved from wood sits on the floor in front of a painting of a window with some broken blinds, where it has evidently just crashed. Next to it, to my surprise, was what appeared to be a small painting of flowers that was actually a trompe-l’oeil ceramic sculpture of a painting. Rines took it off the wall and knocked on it with her fingernail to prove it. Why bother coming three miles north to show at this fair, I asked Rines, who already has two gallery locations downtown? “We don’t get this many people in a day!” she said. “Five hundred registered for the VIP preview!”Ellie Rines at the Chelsea Art Fair with works by Kevin Reinhardt.Photo Brian Boucher/ARTnewsThe Chelsea Art Fair is backed by Platform, the online art presenter that mega dealer David Zwirner launched in 2020 to give New York galleries struggling through the pandemic a place to sell their art while their galleries were dark. Times change; Zwirner laid off around 10 engineers and web developers last year, and in September sold Platform to Basic Space, an online marketplace for design, art and fashion. In 2023, Basic Space had added furniture fair Design Miami to its portfolio in an all-stock deal.In a chat at the back of the sales floor, by a bar where baseball hats emblazoned with the fair’s logo were on offer, Basic Space founder and CEO Jesse Lee fielded some questions. The company hopes to reach new, younger buyers who are interested in buying art online, but, he said, even an online company still has to have a physical experience about which people can spread the word via their usual channels— Instagram, mostly—to lead people back to the online platform, in an IRL to URL itinerary. The sweet spot for dealers at the Chelsea Art Fair was anywhere between $4,000 and $30,000. The fair hoped to draw millennials and older Gen Z, who may have never experienced an art fair but who, judging by their investments in fashion and design, have some money to spend. Dealers were showing top material, including artists who are currently on their gallery walls, or who they’re bringing to fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach next month. The fair may be looking to new buyers, but judging by the prominent collectors in attendance on Saturday, any newcomers face tough competition.Paintings by Grigoris Semitecolo on view at Ramiken’s booth at the Chelsea Art Fair.Courtesy Chelsea Art FairRamiken offered small paintings by Grigoris Semitecolo that all feature New York-like skylines, with white light coming from one side. At their small size, they’re like cityscapes–meet–still lifes, with shades of Giorgio Morandi. The gallery’s founder, artist Mike Egan, told me that Semitecolo’s paintings capture an Athens-like sunset smiling on a Gotham-like city. “These paintings are from 2007, before we had all these pencil skyscrapers here,” he said, pointing out the needle-like high-rises in the canvases by the artist, who died in 2014 at 79 years old. “There’s a lot of energy per square foot here,” said Egan of the fair, which is, he pointed out, the only one he’s participating in this year. Magenta Plains was showing paintings by Janis Provisor and Bill Saylor. “It’s super easy to participate and it’s fun to be a part of,” said co-owner Olivia Smith about the fair. The gallery is currently showing works by Provisor at its downtown showroom, priced at $28,000. “It’s a very generous model.”That generosity consists in the fair organizers not charging a booth fee, as is standard at art fairs. Instead, they take a cut of the galleries’ sales, which is around 20 percent, according to one dealer.Joseph Geagan, Queue, 2025.Courtesy of the artist and Lomex.At Lomex, five gallery artists were on view, two of them, Nate Boyce and Joseph Geagan, with current shows at the gallery. Last year, Lomex had success with works by Geagan, placing a large work by the artist with the Rubells; gallery owner Alexander Shulan said that work will feature in a show at the Rubell Museum in Miami next month. At this year’s fair, Lomex has on view a small painting of a number of figures standing in line by Geagan, 2025’s Queue, including the artist, wearing giant feathery ears, and his partner, looking more conventionally stylish. The rogues’ gallery of queue standers in the painting could easily evoke the bohemian history of the Chelsea Hotel, said gallery director Leah Newman. Built in 1884 as a cooperative living space, the hotel has hosted famed counterculture figures like Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen, who famously devoted a song to the place, relating a sexual encounter with Janis Joplin.Peter Nadin, Diver (1993) at the Chelsea Art Fair.Courtesy the artist and Off ParadiseOff Paradise presented a large painting by Peter Nadin, Diver (1993), tagged at $175,000. In it, a woman on a flaming diving board prepares to plunge into the waters far below; behind her, a large white house stands on a grassy lawn at the top of a high rocky outcropping. Nadin was involved in the downtown art scene in the 1970s and ’80s, including starting an artists’ collective that counted among its members Jenny Holzer and Richard Prince and that, per the gallery’s description, “offered up their talents as critical thinkers to solve real-world problems for clients.” Diver comes from a series of six paintings; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Yale Center for British Art each own one of them. (The YCBA mounted a retrospective of Nadin’s work in 1992.) The gallery has organized two shows of his in 2022 and brought his work to the Independent 20th Century fair the following year. The gallery also had on hand smaller pieces in the $15,000 to $30,000 range.At LA’s Castle, dealer Harley Wertheimer was showing a few works by Austrian outsider artist Leopold Strobl, whom the dealer first saw at the Outsider Art Fair, courtesy of the stalwart outsider art dealership Ricco/Maresca Gallery. A resident at the Open Studio program at the Gugging House of Artists in Vienna for more than a decade, Strobl draws in colored pencil every day on small pieces of newspaper, which he turns into bewitching, mysterious scenes. “They’re very spiritual, to me,” said Wertheimer. Michael Bala, Sconce (Vertical stripe), 2025.Courtesy of the artist and Castle.But the main display was given to small sculptures by LA-based artist Michael Angelo Bala. All are inspired by an imagined home, à la the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. He salvages various materials and makes them into sculptures that resemble architectural and design elements like sconces.“This fair is very special,” Wertheimer told ARTnews. “It’s an opportunity to show artists I really genuinely love in a place they don’t usually get to show.”And how were sales? “We’re selling some work,” he said. “We’re feeling good.”