Art lovers and collectors often look forward to Independent New York’s annual fair because of its curated selection of invitation-only works from artists working across the world and represented by international galleries.
This year’s 15th anniversary edition at Spring Studios in Manhattan’sTribeca neighborhood won’t disappoint with 37 galleries, of a total of 88, coming to the fair for the first time. Many will bring artists who are having their New York debut.
Some of these artists are represented by emerging dealers, such as Ginny on Frederick gallery in London, founded by Frederick Powell, “who has his finger on the pulse of rising artists coming out of Europe,” says Elizabeth Dee, founder of Independent.
The gallery will show a nine-hour film created in 2022 by the London artist Debra Joyce Holman, born in 1991, titled Moment 2. The film, which will be specially edited to run from the beginning to the end of the fair each day, references an historic film, Portrait of Jason—a 1967 documentary by Shirley Clarke where Jason Holliday, a gay Black performer and sex worker, was interviewed as he sat on a couch and spoke.
The artist and performer Rebecca Bellantoni will deliver excerpts of Holliday’s monologue while sitting on a couch, but providing a more contemporary context. The film is “continuing the critique of over-representational Black trauma in media,” Dee says.
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Holman, who also paints, is likely to have “a significant institutional presence” in the future, Dee says. A film showcase taking place during the fair in partnership with the Film-Makers’ Cooperative will include other works by the artist.
Los Angeles’ Charlie James Gallery, which supports several Southern California artists, will feature the work of Danie Cansino, born in 1986. Although this is Cansino’s New York debut, the artist has had a major presence in the Rubell Museum in Miami, Dee says.
“She’s working with this kind of Baroque realism, Chicanex aesthetics,” Dee says. “She’s from Los Angeles [and] inserts her own friends, family, and the streets of L.A. into her work.” Cansino’s chiaroscuro paintings and ballpoint drawings have this “otherworldly quality that she’s really trying to imbue into it, even if some of the scenes are very pedestrian—typical East L.A. vistas from the sidewalk,” Dee says.
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Clima Milan in Italy is showing the paintings of the Italian artist Valerio Nicolai, born in 1988,, who brings magical realism to his images of mysterious interiors and transformed realities. “There is this element of surprise in this work, or irony,” Dee says. “It falls within a tradition of narrative painting that’s somewhat non-narrative. But compositionally, the work is incredibly strong and very, very intelligent.”
Two galleries from Shanghai will also be new to the fair. Gallery Vacancy is a young gallery, founded in 2017, that is exhibiting the work of second-generation Chinese artist Michael Ho.
Ho, who was born in the Netherlands in 1991 and lives in London, is interested in ideas of “cultural mismatch,” Dee says.
“He’s been thinking a lot about what does it mean to culturally rediscover certain elements through a painting practice,” she says. Ho’s specific technique involves painting from the back of the painting to the surface, including diluted images of Eastern traditions and working with Western aesthetics.
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“He’s working with this idea of political images, erotic images, domestic images, but he’s also thinking about Orientalism and its kind of tropes and how do you kind of keep these two things held tightly within the same painting, which is complicated,” Dee says. “There are forces that are in alignment and misalignment in the paintings that’s intentional. And he’s thinking about mysteries and how you can collide pictorial frames and objects and still deconstruct this and keep the mythology there and the sense of reality there at the same time,” she says. “It’s quite an ambitious agenda. But I think it’s working. And I don’t think it looks like anything else I’ve seen.”
Linseed, another Shanghai gallery, is bringing the gestural paintings of the Japanese artist Asami Shoji, born in 1988, which capture moments in the artist’s daily life. The work reflects what it means to build “your impressions or your journal diaries into an artistic practice,” Dee says. “Asami’s trying to kind of work with this idea of a nonlinear narrative experience, or a different story within each painting.”
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Hostler Burrows in New York is featuring ceramic works by two Nordic artists with very different practices, although both based in clay. The Finnish artist Jasmin Anoschkin, born in 1980, creates animated sculptures of made-up creatures that reflect contemporary folk art and pop culture. The glazed stoneware pieces are “playful and very childlife and just full of life,” Dee says.
The earthenware by Martin Bidilsen Kaldahl, born in 1954 in Denmark, is based more in architecture and design, appearing as “spatial drawings.”
“The gallery, which is an expert in this area, is really showing the range of intergenerational conversations in the Nordic countries around this medium and what is possible—from the very high tenacity focus on process to what I would call the more gestural or expressive potentials of the medium,” Dee says.
The fair, which is also bringing works from long-time exhibitors showing artists with politically and socially engaged practices, such as Eritrean artist Ficre Ghebreysesus’s works at Galerie Lelong & Co. (from New York and Paris) anticipating the upcoming U.S. election and his “tense yet hopeful vision of democracy,” and the German artist Kota Ezawa’s light boxes on view at the New York gallery Ryan Lee. Ezawa’s Grand Princess shows the March 2020 arrival of a cruise ship in San Francisco bringing some of the first known cases of Covid-19.
The fair begins with a VIP showing the evening of Thursday, May 9 and is open to the public from May 10-12 at Spring Studios in Tribeca.
