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Art & Design|An Embarrassment of Style at the Independent
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/arts/design/independent-art-fair-review.html
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Art Fair Review
This year’s fair is in overdrive, with exhibitors taking big swings in dozens of directions. Use our critic’s personal playlist to find your way around the floor.
May 9, 2024, 1:14 p.m. ET
The Independent is a stylish affair. Carefully curated and relatively small, it can always be counted on to look good, but this year its style is in overdrive. Occasionally it’s pinch-hitting for substance, mere showiness with nothing behind it. Sometimes, as in Ruby Neri’s bravura ceramic sculptures in the fair’s special 15th-anniversary ““15x15: Independent 2010-2024” exhibition, at Spring Studios in TriBeCa, visual pizazz hits a kind of critical mass, becoming substance in itself. Most often, though, these 172 artists showing with 89 exhibitors are taking big swings in lots of directions — severe abstraction, obsessive figuration, decaying sneakers — so that making a list of standouts was nearly impossible. The following eight booths are more like a personal playlist to get you moving around the floor. (Note that there are no booth numbers.) But don’t forget to explore the corners, too, where you’ll find Margot Samel showing trompe l’oeil paintings by Olivia Jia; the Houston-based publisher and gallery F selling F. Richard Coldwell’s dystopian art-world novel “Lies From the Flies on the Wall”; and “Moby Dick” with drawings by Alex Katz at the Karma Bookstore. )
FIFTH FLOOR
Bureau
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Three large square canvases covered in crushed crystal and ground mineral pigment by Kate Spencer Stewart could almost pass for dark brown monochromes. Step closer: They’re actually a rich, bloody maroon, speckled with flickers of cardinal red and long streaks of bright, toxic green. With silent composure and whispering depths, they’re a thought-provoking contrast to the inventive landscapes of Michael Ho next door at the Shanghai gallery Vacancy.
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The Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman’s “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies/Journey to the Moon” is a single-channel video in which a voice-over describes a sequence of mostly black-and-white photographs. It tells the story, at once hopeful and cynical in a magical realist sort of way, of a small town in 1950s Turkey, its collective imagination sparked by a politician’s speech, trying to send a minaret to 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,” make for a piquant counterweight.
SIXTH FLOOR
Ricco/Maresca Gallery and Christian Berst Art Brut
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