My first stop at the independent art fair was the bar on the roof: I wanted to catch my breath, enjoy the view, listen a little. I was immediately rewarded (although not with a drink – if the public opening is like the private view, the line is simply not worth it). Two boring stylish early 20-year-olds sat on the terrace discussed the view: “Oh, it gives,” one of them waved with their hand vaguely at the storm clouds shot on the horizon, “It gives New York.”
That may be the feeling to distinguish this week between the many art fairs in New York – Frieze, Nada, Esther II, Future, Ad Infinitum. They all have well -lit white cabins covered with art, chaired by besieged gallerists who sip on cocktails, just try to get through the day. The Independent, who opens to the public today, 9 May, and is running this Sunday 11 May, celebrates his Sweet 16. What started as a more boutique experience is split into more traditional rate (no punishment meant). With 85 galleries – the most in the history of the stock market – the cabins together with less breathing space in and in, although it still does not entirely have the purgatorial feeling of some others, with lines of cabins that extend beyond the limit of your sight. The Artspeak on the website of the stock exchange Little does to determine his difference: “Meaning and context are everything,” explains it, a statement with no meaning nor context.
Nevertheless, the Independent has some distinctive characteristics. Almost half of the 85 galleries on this year’s edition – 39, to be precise – debut and 26 new artists are shown. It is planning to be ‘non-hierarchical’, as founding curatorial adviser Matthew Higgs it has made me and largely succeeds: there are no ‘focus’ or ‘discovery sections’ that are with a younger artists and spaces of the platform, as in Frieze or Art Basel. For decades old galleries such as Jane Lombard, Yancey Richardson, Mitchell-Innnes & Nash, and, of course, white columns, where Higgs is director, share the elbow space with spaces that have opened in recent years, such as honest warning, management and Margot Samel. In terms of the crowd I would say it is about 15 years younger than Frieze, and about so white. (If you are here for the designer-looking-Dog watching, let’s say that this might be the promised land.)
Take this market statement from this assessment editor-inhart with a grain of salt: I think it has the highest standard of the work that I have attended.
The independent is only invitations and co-founders Higgs and Elizabeth Dee clearly had a guideline in mind. Many stalwarts in the city center are shown, including March, off -paradise and Magenta plains, as well as galleries that have just moved to Tribeca, such as Yveyang, Swivel and the hollows. It is in line with a larger shift in the art world to Tribeca-Jane Lombard moved there in 2020 from Chelsea and Mitchell-Inity simply closed their Chelsea room to move a “project-based advice” model. Well-known galleries from other cities-Daniel Faria from Toronto, Corbett vs. Dempsey and Monique Meloche from Chicago and Voloshyn from Kiev as a small monster also present.
Shrine – also new for Tribeca – has previously shown in Nada. With a budget from a grant per year, they chose the independent. Stenciled in the top of his stand was the name “Laura Footes”; Below, however, was the work of six autodidactic artists, including Bill Traylor. The work of Footes was entangled in customs because of the recent rates of the Trump administration and was stuck at JFK Airport until just earlier that day. “Something we had expected would take a week, it took two and a half weeks,” Galerist Tess Reichlen told me and said that the customs process had influenced another gallery on the stock exchange.
On that subject I heard the rumor that artworks were worn by a suitcase, which took place in Esther II, but that it could not fully confirm here. “By the way, I was a joke about the suitcases,” an unnamed source told me, “and I am not going to mention which gallery I work in.”
Yet the artwork that has found its way here is strong. Artworld favorites such as Pope.L, Wolfgang Tillmans and Tseng Kwong Chi stand. In terms of semi-realist painting I was partly for the intimate vignettes of Claudia in March Gallery, the spooky figures of Satoru Kurata in Tomio Koyama and the silent still life of Zoë Carlon near South Parade. I discovered new-to-me names that I will keep an eye on, such as in Shanna Waddell’s figurative ceramics, Achraf Touloubs’s Strated Crowd Scenes in Parliament and Ada Friedman’s mixed media Semi-abstractions and Constanza kramer Garfias’s Garfias. I also loved Huidi Xiang’s matt-black pierced tomato sculptures, which are both playful and bittersweet (a visitor stepped on one, trusted the artist, but it is good as new).
At the end of the day it’s all about art, and The Independent is a good time, even for newcomers in the art world: “I love how approachable it feels,” the first “big-fair” participant Joe Tessler told me. “Every stand has a representative who is willing to talk to you. It has an intimate feeling.”
