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Independent Opens With Solo Presentations, Early Sales and (Most Importantly) Breathing Room

In its new, less central but more expansive Lower East Side home, the fair provides a welcome counterpoint to New York's sensory overload.

Independent opened yesterday (May 14) in a new location in Lower Manhattan’s Pier 36, which is much less central and less immediately connected than Tribeca, but still worth the trip for the quality of its presentations. The larger space allowed the fair’s thoughtful selections to breathe, which matters more than you might think in a week ultimately defined by information overload. The emphasis on solo presentations, which make up 70 percent of the presentations, and tightly focused booths make the experience pleasantly digestible—even for those of us trying to visit as many New York art fairs as possible.

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“The layout is generous, and I think the quality of the fair is superb, so we are very happy to be here,” gallerist Susanne Vielmetter told Observer. She’s presenting a three-part booth with works by Samuel Levi Jones, Robert Pruitt and Nate Lewis in a shared conversation around paper, materiality and the tactile force of image-making. Jones is presenting new assemblages that question authority, representation and recorded history by physically deconstructing books tied to systems of power—from legal and historical volumes to institutional texts—and reassembling them into abstract, grid-like compositions. Here, those seams of control and collapse extend into works incorporating disassembled American flags and pulped paper, recalling Rauschenberg’s charged reworkings of the national symbol while speaking to the decadence and crisis embedded in the image’s very fabric. Robert Pruitt is showing new portraits in coffee wash, conté, charcoal and pastel, fusing the mundane and surreal through figures shrouded in sumptuous textiles, spiritual iconography, science-fiction references and otherworldly adornments, expanding his mythology of a Black past, present and future. The third section is dedicated to Nate Lewis, whose hand-sculpted inkjet prints treat paper as a bodily and sculptural surface, layering drawing, embossing, frottage and carved texture into figures in motion. Drawing from music, capoeira, medical imagery and the flight patterns and wing structures of butterflies, Lewis extends the booth’s dialogue around surface, material memory and embodied meaning.

The response, according to Vielmetter, has been extremely positive from the fair’s early hours, with two works reserved for museums and several others already spoken for. “In this new reality, there is more than we 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.

Among the first booths visitors encounter is Silke Lindner, which is presenting a show of new works by Nina Hartmann—an extension of the artist’s current gallery exhibition. Hartmann’s mysterious wall-mounted diagrams and symbolic compositions emerge from her research into government programs on psychic phenomena and paranormal studies during the Cold War. Drawing from........

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