The Independent is a sophisticated affair. Carefully curated and relatively small, these pieces are always expected to look good, but this year the style has gone into overdrive. Sometimes it pinches for content, simple glamor with nothing behind it. Sometimes like this: Ruby Neri'The bravura ceramic sculptures in “15×15: Independent 2010-2024,” a special exhibition commemorating the fair’s 15th anniversary at Spring Studios in TriBeCa, have reached a kind of critical mass of visual delight where they become entities in themselves.
But for the most part, these 172 artists exhibiting alongside 89 exhibitors are so wildly veering in so many directions – rigorous abstraction, obsessive figuration, and decadent sneakers – that it's nearly impossible to put together a standout list. The next eight booths are like personal playlists roaming the floor. (There is no booth number.)
But don’t forget to explore every nook and cranny you can find. Margo Sammel Showing a trompe l'oeil painting Olivia Zia; Houston-based publisher and gallery F sale F. Richard Caldwell's dystopian art-world novel “The Lies of Paris on the Wall”; and “Moby detective” with a picture of Alex Katz from Karma Bookstore.
These three large square oil paintings by Kate Spencer Stewart could almost pass for a dark brown monochrome. Take a closer look. In reality, it is a rich, bloody red-brown, speckled with flashing primary red and long stripes of bright, poisonous green. With their silent composure and whispering depth, these works provide a thought-provoking contrast to Michael Ho's original landscape paintings next door at the Shanghai gallery. There is a vacant room.
niru ratnam
Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman's “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies/Journey to the Moon” is a single-channel video in which an audio commentary narrates sequences of mostly black-and-white photographs. It tells the hopeful yet cynical story in a magical realist manner of the collective imagination of a small town in Turkey in the 1950s, sparked by a politician's speech about sending a minaret into space by balloon. The implicit question is, “Are any of us really capable of democracy?” Sutapa Biswas's 12 acrylic and graphite bird paintings and her video “Magnesium Bird” make a wonderful counterweight.
6th floor
Rico/Maresca Gallery and Christian Berst Art Brut
For me, the most memorable event at the fair will be the American debut of Polish photographer Tomasz Machcinski (1942-2022). He began dressing up in character and taking thrilling, dangerous and vibrant self-portraits in the early 1960s. His incredibly moving and mercurial face, which everyone from Gandhi to Hitler and countless other men and women have drawn from their own imaginations, has to be seen to believe. Machcinski's self-portraits are presented alongside Tom Wilkins' (1951-2007) Polaroid photographs of strange and fascinating women on television, also enjoying their American premiere. Jointly presented by Ricco/Maresca from New York and Christian Berst Art Brut from Paris.
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Five elegant canvases by painter Ryan Mrozowski appear for the first time at this trendy independent gallery from Reykjavik, Iceland. To two of his signature paintings, which are dense but delicate meditations on what it means to commodify sensual pleasures, Mrozowski adds several orange semicircles floating freely above green leaves. The effect is like a magician giving a very dry wink after a well-executed trick. In the triptych, which the artist calls a “split painting,” more leaves are alternately grayed out, evoking a fog of understated questions about perception, binocular vision, and the bicameral mind.
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Jessie Henson uses an industrial sewing machine to weave threads tightly into paper, then decorates them with metal leaves. Through this process, the paper is bent and fixed so that all its sculptural, sensuous and sometimes painful bends become an integral part of each piece. Overall, the work offers a powerful combination of texture, eccentricity, and thoughtful subversion of art historical categories. Even the most art-weary intellectual will find comfort in the pretty colors, she said. Most of her colors appear to have been borrowed by Henson from her personal vintage rugs.
Approach and Chris Sharp
The hundreds of small rectangular dots that cover Glenn Goldberg's paintings are reminiscent of textiles, Australian Aboriginal art, and stick-and-fork tattoos, among other things. But mainly what they do, in a joint presentation by Angeleno gallerist Chris Sharp and London gallery Approach, is to impede our ability to read the work metaphorically, abstractly, or even simply as a whole composition. Instead, each canvas is a complex ledger. Distinct decisions about color and pattern. Despite the sparrow-like silhouettes of all six works in this exhibition, it makes sense for the Bronx-born artist to say, as quoted in the gallery's promotional material, “There are no birds in my work.”
7th floor
March
Susan Te Kahurangi King is best known for her crisp, twisty pencil drawings of cartoon characters. Often they seem impossibly perfect, like projections of expertly animated dream images. This is true even when half a blank page is filled with characters. It's very enjoyable to see the line-up of odd and less-finished examples of this New Zealand artist's work shown here to contextualize one larger body of work. Donald Duck falls into the ironic fate of a river on a piece of oil-stained paper. On the other, a graphite-gray Tweety Bird with giant eyes stares out at the viewer, frozen in space, possibly flying, possibly falling.
King's Leap
This Chinatown gallery features four powerful works by Magnus Maxine, each showcasing the dense surface of paper pulp., Colored with oil paint or layered over a page or entire page of The New York Times. The two larger pieces, featuring a dark pink cross and circular array of rays, are by far the most powerful. But all four seem to have been built not on the news of the day, but by tearing it apart to reveal a wilder, more primitive world of half-formed signs and symbols rising beneath them.
independent
May 10-12, Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, Manhattan; independenthq.com/fair, day pass $45.