At art fairs, gallerists sometimes heed the not-so-invisible hand of the attention economy, mounting big, gauche presentations that seem designed to be photographed first and appreciated second. But spare, unflashy art can thrive at a fair, too, and the newly opened edition of Independent New York offers solid proof of that.
This year’s Independent, which opened its preview at Spring Studios in Tribeca on Thursday, is alive with energy in more than a few of its booths, but the jolts that the fair offers are largely gentle. That’s a good thing.
There are no artistic stunts and no mega-galleries at this fair, whose 77 exhibitors are predominantly mid-size operations. As has been the case in the past at Independent, which this year turns 15, the emphasis is on glossy, sleek art with an international flavor.
The fair is guilty of aesthetic conservatism—the vast majority of the work on view is painting, and much of it is fairly apolitical this time around. Then again, that’s the case for every art fair. This one, at least, has its pleasures. There’s a plethora of pieces by under-recognized and dead artists, and generally, there are few stars or market phenomena among the living, which means that there is new talent waiting to be noticed.
Below are eight of the best artists on view at Independent, which runs through Sunday.
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Tomasz Machciński at Ricco/Maresca and Christian Berst Art Brut
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews The big discovery of this Independent is Tomasz Machciński, a Polish photographer who died in 2022, leaving behind thousands of photographs of himself. Machciński’s biography is so rich that it threatens to trump his art. He was born in 1942 and became an orphan early in his life, overcoming bone tuberculosis all the while. During the postwar years, when Americans abroad tried to raise awareness for orphans in Europe, the actress Joan Tompkins got in contact with him, and he began to feel a deep tie to her. He didn’t realize she wasn’t his mother until he was an adult, and then used his art to contend with this troubling revelation.
The photographs Machciński produced suggest that he accepted his identity as being mutable. Personae abound in these pictures: one depicts a balding Machciński in a tie-dye tube top, a cigarette tucked behind an ear; another is a lipstick-wearing glam shot in which Machciński wears a military officer’s hat; yet another features the bare-chested artist as a gladiator, sword in one hand and shield in the other. It is never possible to tell which of these characters are authentically Machciński and which are fabricated for the camera. If these can really be called self-portraits, they are ones in which Machciński has fractured into thousands of different selves. This was an artist who contained multitudes.
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Anna Tsouhlarakis at Tilton Gallery
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews The list of materials used by Anna Tsouhlarakis to make her sculptures are often just as intriguing as the objects themselves. SHE’S SO NATIVE SHE’LL CUT YOU WITH HER CHEEKBONE (2024), a plaster arm bound to a branch and antler, apparently has in it metal cones, scissors, screws, rabbit fur, and an object mysteriously described as an “IKEA remnant.” Whether you spot that last one is beside the point. Tsouhlarakis, a Navajo, Creek, and Greek artist, has created sculptures that are deliberately dense and indecipherable—they contain elements that escape the gaze of leery eyes. In related paintings, Tsouhlarakis seems to reflect this tendency onto her identity as a Native woman. One painting is lined with barely visible memes parodying the supposed difficulties of dating Indigenous women. On top, Tsouhlarakis has printed a threatening message to its viewers: “HER EYES CUT QUICKER THAN A SWITCHBLADE.”
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Joan Snyder at Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Parrasch Heijnen
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Joan Snyder’s glorious abstract paintings are finally receiving greater attention, and it’s about damn time. But the best work by her at this booth is neither abstract nor a painting: Peace Poster (1971), a drawing that mostly consists of text expressing furor over the 1968 My Lai massacre, during which the US army murdered scores of South Vietnamese citizens.
Surrounding what looks like a form of musical notation, with squiggles of yellow and orange standing in for rests and sounds, Snyder has scrawled words explaining the impossibility of creating an image that might adequately contest the atrocity. “I knew from the extreme anger inside of me that I could never make a peace poster,” she writes, ultimately ending with: “I knew I was a survivor of mass murder.”
Snyder, a Jewish American, was born in this country in 1940, one year before the Holocaust began. This last line seems like a reference to the fact that she and her family survived that genocide, whose violence, like that of the My Lai massacre, resists representation.
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Adebunmi Gbadebo at Nicola Vassell Gallery
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews The vessels set at the center of this booth are made not from clay, as they may first appear, but from soil that Adebunmi Gbadebo has collected from True Blue, the site of a former plantation in South Carolina where her ancestors were once enslaved. Fired using techniques more commonly associated with Nigerian pottery, the vessels have also been affixed with hair sourced from barbershops in Philadelphia, one of the cities where Gbadebo is based. These vessels, with their partially sunken mouths, appear soft and partially deflated, but their hardened soil renders them firm and durable, ensuring that her family’s fragile and often invisible history lingers on. Beneath one vessel, Gbadebo has placed the bones of an unidentifiable being, a gesture that underlines how these vessels are essentially exhumations of the past.
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Danie Cansino at Charlie James Gallery
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Run-of-the-mill figurative painting continues to reign supreme in New York, a trend that is in full evidence at this fair. Danie Cansino’s newest canvases, however, rise above the rest. All of them are focused on Chicanx people, and though Cansino here has made valiant efforts to write these sitters into the fabric of art history, swapping out white models in famed images by Goya and the like for tattooed Chicanas, her finest works are the ones focused on the here and now of her community. Chismosas (2024), one of two paintings here done on a serape instead of canvas, features the hands of two women chatting over cups of Cafe Bustelo instant coffee. The title suggests they’re gossiping, but one need only look at the open palm of one sitter, lit cigarette in hand, to get a sense of the juicy hearsay being traded.
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Olivia Jia at Margot Samel
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Many of Olivia Jia’s tiny pictures depict ready-made images that she has observed with close attention to detail, working with such realism that her works seem less like paintings and more like photographs. One painting features a photograph of the sculpted head of a boy, as seen on a creased sheet of paper. Jia’s title for this work suggests that this fragment came from a tomb, and that is virtually the only context for what is depicted. More hints arrive via a short text supplied by the gallery, which notes that many of Jia’s subjects—pictures of kingfisher birds, porcelain vases, and the like—are related to her identity as the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. But if you bypassed all that information, you’d mostly be befuddled by these downcast works, and that seems to be Jia’s point. Just as she accesses people, places, and things related to her heritage via secondary sources, viewers are meant to feel distanced by these works. Despite their cold surfaces, these paintings are engaging.
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Oscar Santillán at Copperfield
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews This is a fair largely devoid of big conceptual swings, and that makes Oscar Santillán’s work stand out. For one sculptural piece called 1’111,111 (2023), Santillán is showing a row of sneakers, each more rundown than the last. In fact, all this wear and tear is totally artificial—Santillán worked with a startup to “age” these shoes using chemical mixtures. Beyond simply functioning well as a technical curio, this work suggests that the future has already arrived, and it is accessible via a well-funded lab. Santillán’s nearby paintings also manage to summon the years to come in the present. These works, with their colorful arrays of jellyfish, crustacean arms, and human forms, are the result of a process that involves neural networks and 3D modeling programs, yet the paint has been applied totally by Santillán’s hand. They fuse digital and analog techniques, and delightfully confuse the eye.
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Simona Runcan at Ivan Gallery
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews Simona Runcan’s paintings, all done in muted blue and brown tones, are so spare and so dour that I initially did not give them much thought. I was glad that I returned for a second look, as their hypnotic power only becomes apparent after prolonged viewing. The works on view here, dating from the 1990s and 2000s, all come from this late Romanian artist’s “Interior, Icons, Inclinations” series, featuring views of unidentifiable domestic spaces. Runcan sucks the air out of these rooms, painting them as though they were windowless and claustrophobic. Viewing them generates a creeping anxiety, as though one were fumbling their way through an apartment during the moments when day fades to night.
Many of Runcan’s paintings thrum with a special weirdness. Why, for example, did Runcan feel compel to paint a swatch of carpeting, along with an icon showing a faceless figure holding a staff? Who’s to say? My advice is to give these enigmatic paintings time. Let your eyes adjust to their darkness, and watch as they expand in the mind’s eye.
