The Independent is an elegant affair. Carefully curated and relatively small, he can always be counted on to look good, but this year his style is over the top. Occasionally it’s striking for its substance, mere showmanship with nothing behind it. Sometimes, as in Ruby Neri’The bravura ceramic sculptures in the special 15th anniversary exhibition “15×15: Independent 2010-2024,” at Spring Studios in TriBeCa, the visual pizzazz hits a kind of critical mass, becoming an entity unto itself. More often than not, though, these 172 artists featured with 89 exhibitors take big swings in many directions—heavy abstraction, obsessive illustration, rotting sneakers—so that creating a standout list was nearly impossible. The following eight booths are more like a personal playlist to get you moving on the floor. (Note that there are no booth numbers.) But don’t forget to explore the corners too, where you’ll find Margot Samel featuring trompe l’oeil paintings by Olivia Jia? the Houston-based publisher and gallery eat sale F. Richard Caldwellthe world’s dystopian art novel”Lies From the Flies on the Wall“? and “Moby Pecker” with drawings by Alex Katz in the Karma Bookstore. )
fifth floor
office
Three large square canvases covered in crushed crystal and metallic pigment by Kate Spencer Stewart could almost pass for dark brown monochromes. Step closer: It’s actually a rich, blood-crimson, flecked with shimmer from the base red and long streaks of bright, toxic green. With hushed composure and whispering depths, it’s a thought-provoking contrast to Michael Ho’s inventive landscapes next door in the Shanghai gallery Vacancy.
Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman’s “Mesopotamia Dramaturgy/Journey to the Moon” is a one-channel video in which a voice describes a sequence of mostly black-and-white photographs. It tells the story, at once hopeful and cynical in a magical realist way, of a small town in 1950s Turkey, its collective imagination sparked by a speech by a politician trying to send a minaret into space with balloons. The implicit question is: “Are any of us really capable of democracy?” A dozen acrylic and graphite drawings of birds by Sutapa Biswas, accompanied by her video “Magnesium Bird,” provide a spicy counterpoint.
SIXTH FLOOR
Ricco/Maresca Gallery and Christian Berst Art Brut
For me, the most memorable event of the exhibition will be the American debut of Polish photographer Tomasz Machcinski (1942-2022), who began dressing in character and taking exciting, dangerous and vital self-portraits in the early 1960s. his moving and changing face, as everyone from Gandhi to Hitler, as well as many men and women sprung from his own imagination alone, has to be seen to be believed. Machcinski’s self-portraits are presented alongside a strangely seductive array of Polaroids of Women on TV by Tom Wilkins (1951-2007), also enjoying its first American screening. Presented jointly by Ricco/Maresca of New York and Christian Berst Art Brut of Paris.
i8 Gallery
Five cute canvases by painter Ryan Mrozowski make the first appearance at Independent of this hip gallery from Reykjavik, Iceland. In two of his signature orange-foliage paintings, dense but subtle meditations on what it means to commodify sensual pleasure, Mrozowski adds some orange semicircles that float freely above the green leaves. The effect is like the very dry wink of the magician at the end of a well-executed trick. In three diptychs the artist calls “split paintings,” more foliage alternates graying to evoke a haze of understated questions about perception, binocular vision, and the bicameral mind.
Broadway
Jessie Henson uses an industrial sewing machine to apply narrow lines of thread to paper which she then embellishes with metallic foil. The process forces the paper to bend and secures its bending in place, making each sculptural, sensuous, sometimes tortured undulation an integral part of each piece. Overall the work offers a fascinating combination of texture, eccentricity and subtle subversion of art-historical categories. Even the most jaded art world intellectual should feel comfortable enjoying the beautiful colors, most of which Henson appears to have borrowed from a private stash of vintage shag rugs.
The Approach and Chris Sharp
The hundreds of tiny elongated dots that cover Glenn Goldberg’s paintings allude to textiles, Australian Aboriginal art, and stick-and-hole tattoos, among other things. But mostly what they do, in this joint presentation by Angeleno gallery Chris Sharp and London gallery The Approach, is disrupt your ability to read the works as figurative, as abstract, or even simply as whole compositions — instead each canvas is a complex book of discrete decisions about color and design. It makes sense that despite the sparrow-like silhouettes that inhabit all six pieces in this exhibition, the Bronx-born artist, as quoted in the galleries’ promotional material, says, “There are no birds in my work.”
SEVENTH FLOOR
March
Susan Te Kahurangi King is known for her clear, concise pencil drawings of cartoon characters. They often look impossibly perfect, like projections of professional dream animation — even when the characters are crammed onto half of an otherwise blank page. It is an enlightening treat to see this series of odd and less finished examples of this New Zealand artist’s work, presented here to shape a larger body of work. Donald Duck travels to an ironic riverside fate on a grease-stained sheet of paper. in another, a graphite gray Tweety Bird with huge eyes stares at the viewer, frozen in space, maybe flying, maybe falling.
King’s Leap
This Chinatown gallery brings four intense works by Magnus Maxine, each featuring a dense surface of pulp, colored in oil paint, laid out on a page or full spread of The New York Times. The two largest pieces, featuring a heavy pink cross and a circular arrangement of spokes, are by far the strongest. But all four seem to have been made not so much by drawing on the news of the day, but by stripping it away to reveal the rougher, more primal world of half-formed signs and symbols seething beneath.
Independent
May 10-12, Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, Manhattan. dependenthq.com/fair$45 for a day pass.