Far from the hubbub of Frieze’s monster midtown affair sits Independent, newly relocated to Pier 36, a 70,000-square-foot venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It remains the most refined offering in New York Art Week’s buffet of fairs, though the term “boutique” may soon feel strained: the new location is more than double the size of the fair’s former home at Spring Studios, accommodating an expanded roster of exhibitors and ambitions. (The venue’s architect, SO–IL, also designed Brooklyn’s Amant Foundation, and that same sleek sensibility translates well here.)
Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder, told ARTnews that its eyes are on greater attendance and institutional influence; last year’s edition reported a 25 percent uptick in foot traffic. Seventy-six exhibitors are participating this year; notably, 26 of them mark an artist’s New York debut. The opportunity has not been wasted: several of the strongest booths spotlight rising talents, the majority of whom seem inclined, at least glancingly, to register the histories unfolding far beyond the art-fair circuit.
In that vein, don’t miss Sprüth Magers’ timely re-staging of TV Text & Image (PEOPLE WITH AIDS), a self-described “electronic theater” by the late artist Gretchen Bender. Conceived in the 1980s, this contemporary iteration interrupts the fair’s usual programming with a dispatch from a more familiar, dystopic register.
Below, more memorable presentations at this year’s Independent Art Fair, running through Sunday.
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SECCI
Image Credit: ARTnews/Tessa Solomon. Omar Mismar makes his New York debut with “Root and Branch,” a show of abstract paintings on salvaged PVC felt banners once used for advertising and now bleached and cracked, appearing at first glance like ancient maps or barren terrain. A closer look reveals them as palimpsests concealing the personal and political: faintly visible are graffiti slogans linked to the 2019 wave of anti-government protests across Lebanon. Mismar pairs these works with mosaics; they recall those on view in National Museum of Beirut while spinning a more personal mythology. Faceless fragments of male bodies encountered on dating apps are elevated here into artworks.
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David Peter Francis
Image Credit: Courtesy of David Peter Francis and Independent. A section of one of Carrie Schneider’s gargantuan photographs, a hit at this year’s Venice Biennale, commands a corner of David Peter Francis’s booth. Produced using a monumental camera, the sequence unfurls an eight-second excerpt from Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi featurette La Jetée, a trippy meditation on nuclear annihilation in which its time-traveling protagonist discovers there’s no outrunning human nature. Here, Schneider repurposes the booth into a cinema, albeit slowing the story to a pace through which we may imagine a new ending.
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YveYANG
Image Credit: Courtesy YveYANG and Independent. The paintings at Independent reflect the fair’s signature position as the cool option of Art Week, where much of the hyper-fresh figuration trends toward the languid and meme-aware. That’s what makes the work of Kim Stolz and Raphael Egil at YveYANG so head-turning. These are works of efficient near-abstraction—like Egil’s green horse and its rider, their charge smearing into comet-like trails of motion. The horse’s body seems held together only by fraught, searching strokes. Stolz’s small, geometric paintings, meanwhile, function as compact portals: removed from place, but not space.
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Kiang Malingue
Image Credit: Courtesy of Kiang Malingue and Independent. Tseng Chien-Ying, another artist making his New York debut, is presenting new works, created in Taiwan and at the artist residency 99 Canal, at Kiang Malingue. Tseng’s ongoing practice charts epic themes of mythology, power, and violence, distilled here into their most intimate expression: hands, ears, and genitals straining against the picture frame. They may be removed from our spiritual plane, but the psychological world on view looks much like our own—crowded with culture and mostly alone.
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Silke Lindner
Image Credit: Courtesy of Silke Lindner and Independent. Amid this year’s notably tactile spread, the Miami-born, Queens-based sculptor Nina Hartmann shines. Hartmann is showing a new body of resin lightboxes, more of which are on view at Silke Linder’s Tribeca gallery under the name Actualization Machine. Here, irregularly shaped sculptures illuminate sordid U.S. government intelligence projects, the sort typically buried in the dredges of the digital realm—exactly where Hartmann went fishing for the photographs framed throughout. A viewer can easily enjoy the hyper-saturated panels that riff on reverence and cosmology, but a deeper reading requires homework.
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Uffner & Liu
Image Credit: Courtesy Uffner & Liu. Uffner & Liu brings together the work of Venezuelan artist Bernadette Despujols and Brazilian artist Sacha Ingber in a duo presentation that threads questions of motherhood, migration, and the wandering self across textured painting and near-functional design. Ingber’s backgammon table can certainly sustain a game, though water may not hold in her perforated vessel—two empty bodies shaped like homes, tenuously bridged. Meanwhile, in Despujols’s textured paintings, the lights are on and everyone is home: family members crowd the frame and seem to merge with vegetation in an ecofeminist vision of generational continuity. But this is life, not fiction. In one work, a quiet figure crouches beside a snarling dog, a flicker of domestic tension cutting through the chatter.
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SGR Galería
Image Credit: Courtesy SECCI. In Colombia, despair might taste like red brick dust. As attendants at SGR’s booth explained, inexpensive construction bricks—ubiquitous and often left exposed in buildings—are commonly scraped by people struggling with cocaine addiction, who use the residue to extend their supply. This, of course, simplifies complex social conditions that reduce individuals to their worst days. Johan Samboni returns to them a degree of selfhood by reclaiming red brick as the medium of one of the fair’s most impactful booths. He has carved a legion of figurines in the pre-Columbian Indigenous tradition, arranged in unblinking rows along the booth walls and bearing imperatives as titles—“Resist,” “Collapse,” “Embrace.” It was no easy feat hauling this metaphorical mountain of brick to New York, but the result feels all the more necessary for it.
