Independent opened yesterday (May 14) in a new location on Pier 36 in lower Manhattan, which is much less central and less immediately connected than Tribeca, but still worth a visit for the quality of its presentations. The larger space allowed the exhibition’s thoughtful selections to breathe, which is more important than you might think in a week ultimately defined by information overload. The focus on individual displays, which make up 70 percent of the presentations, and the tightly focused booths make the experience easy to digest—even for those of us trying to visit as many New York art galleries as possible.
“The design is generous, and I think the quality of the exhibition is fantastic, so we are very happy to be here,” gallery owner Suzanne Villmeter told the Observer. She presents a three-part pavilion featuring works by Samuel Levy-Jones, Robert Pruitt, and Nate Lewis in a shared conversation about paper, the materiality, and the tangible power of image-making. Jones presents new collections that question power, representation, and recorded history by physically deconstructing books associated with systems of power—from legal and historical tomes to institutional texts—and reassembling them into abstract, grid-like compositions. Here, these layers of control and collapse extend to works including dismantled American flags and crushed paper, suggesting Rauschenberg’s fraught reworking of the national symbol while speaking to the decadence and crisis inherent in the very fabric of the image. Robert Pruitt projects new images using coffee washes, conte, charcoal, and pastels, fusing the mundane and the surreal through figures draped in sumptuous textiles, spiritual iconography, sci-fi references, and other-worldly motifs, expanding his mythology of the dark past, present, and future. The third section is dedicated to Nate Lewis, whose hand-sculpted inkjet prints treat paper as a physical and sculptural surface, layering drawing, engraving and sculpting textures into moving forms. Drawing on music, capoeira, medical imagery, flight patterns, and butterfly wing structures, Lewis expands the cabin’s dialogue on surface memory, materiality, and embodied meaning.
The response, according to Villmeter, was very positive from the first hours of the exhibition, with two works booked for museums and several others already talked about. “In this new reality, there is more than we could have hoped for, so we are off to a great start,” she said, acknowledging that the market is no longer operating at the pace of 2022.
Brazilian gallery Almeida & Dale presents at Frieze (with François Guibaly) and at Independent, where it has a shared booth with David Nolan Gallery, and stages a dialogue between Chakaia Booker’s frame sculptures and the chromatically charged photographs of Miguel Río Branco, highlighting the artists’ shared interest in latent history, material memory, and the turbulent beauty that can emerge from what society leaves behind. Booker transforms discarded rubber tires into compressed, twisted, shadowed forms that seem almost post-human—dark, totemic creatures in which urban detritus is charged with physical tension and an eerie ritualistic presence. Instead, Rio Branco’s photographs honor marginalized communities and urban environments through layered textures, subtle reflection, and saturated colors, revealing the existential density of places often dismissed as degraded or marginal.
New York dealer Charles Moffett took a strong interest in the gallery’s display of works by the late Swiss artist Sylvia Haydn, including seven furnishings dating from 1973 to 2013. Haydn, who died in 2015, drew inspiration from nature while experimentally disrupting fiber art’s dominant orientation toward the grid, expanding the medium’s potential for vibrant expression, intrinsic rhythm, visual complexity, subtle movement and infinite color. By evening, the gallery had sold two: one for $14,000 and the other for $18,000.
Nearby, Kiang Malingwei has a booth of works by Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-ying, whose paintings on Asian paper transform the body and its fragments into a microcosm of contemporary life, desire and shifting perception. Using ink, gouache, mineral pigments drawn from East Asian painting traditions, gold and silver leaf, black foil and the technique of mounting—a prominent decorative process often associated with ceramics and murals—Zeng constructs surfaces where color not only remains on the paper, but seems to breathe in it. Drawing on Taiwanese and cross-cultural pop iconography, literary classics, body politics, and fetishes, Tseng imbues the human form with emotional intensity, and imbues everyday life with an erotic charge. The gallery placed nearly half of the booth ahead of time, with works priced between $12,000 and $27,000.
The Italian gallery SECCI features a solo pavilion of works by Lebanese artist Omar Mesmar, whom many may remember from the recent Venice Biennale. The show brings together the artist’s old-fashioned mosaics of fragmented objects with his new works of “Root and Branch (Shil Mahlisi).” Created on salvaged flexible PVC banners once used for advertising and marked by years of sun, rain and exposure, the recent works resemble landscapes, scars, scrolls and shrouds. Throughout, fragments of graffiti slogans associated with Lebanon’s 2019 protest movement appear, partially hidden under layers of paint, an echo of erasure and censorship in public spaces. Business prices range from $9,500 to $26,000; The gallery reported that a small work had been sold and two large mosaics had been hung.
Towards the end of the exhibition, 12:26 Los Angeles and Dallas, displays the work of Giulia Maiori, whose paintings present dense psychological landscapes that combine multiple levels of memorial space and the sensation of cinematic images. Prices range from $6,000 to $10,000, with most selling early. Meanwhile, the MARCH Gallery features a solo booth of works by Diana Settles, whose rich story on canvas immortalizes and celebrates the vernacular, fusing multiple memories into single scenes with a meditation on motherhood, community, and collective effort. Drawing on Western traditions and the art history of her father’s native Vietnam, Settles’s lively compositions explore what it means to exist as part of a group, depicting the ways in which culture, politics, and ideology are intertwined in society—a timely reflection on a moment of division. All of the works were priced at $12,500, and the gallery had sold several of them by 4 p.m. Across the board, the merchants we spoke with were optimistic that the next few days will bring more conversation and sales as fair buyers make their way to Pier 36.
More at art fairs, biennales and biennials
