Abdias do Nascimento, Oricha’s Mother (Mother Nature), 1971, acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 48 inch, Buffalo, New York, USA, Courtesy Galeria MaPa, São Paulo.
Independent 20th Century returns for its third edition in New York City from September 5–8, 2024, accompanied by the fair’s online platform that will launch as a preview on August 29. The invitation-only fair premiered in 2022 to champion artists and international avant-garde movements between 1900 and 2000. It is located at Cipriani South Street in the historical Battery Maritime Building in downtown Manhattan, which was built in 1908.
Independent 20th Century brings together internationally recognized and lesser-known artists and narratives to redefine the canon of 20th-century art. Under Founder Elizabeth Dee’s leadership, the fair’s newly expanded curatorial team has nominated 32 exhibitors for the 2024 edition, of which 15 are making their Independent debut, including Alison Jacques, London; Gomide&Co, São Paulo; and Fair Warning, New York, a curated auction platform founded by Loïc Gouzer.
Independent 20th Century will feature a diverse range of approximately 65 artists, encompassing solo presentations surveying the development of an artist’s practice, women artists throughout the 20th century, Black and Indigenous artists from the Americas and beyond, and work from the 1990s. Several galleries will also honor artists whose work is being reappraised curatorially through significant institutional exhibitions, including the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Independent’s Founder Elizabeth Dee states, “Independent 20th Century is broadening our understanding of the canon, by showcasing key artists and movements currently undergoing reassessment in our cultural landscape. We present a platform for well informed collectors and museums who are actively engaging with opportunities to thoughtfully explore new art historical conversations. Our mission as a fair is to link the past to the present moment in contemporary art.”
Solo Surveys
Nahmad Contemporary will celebrate the profound yet underrecognized legacy of Raoul Dufy, who emerged in early 20th-century Paris with works embodying the experimental painting techniques of the Impressionists and the bold colors of the Fauves. Featuring paintings and works on paper made between 1920 and 1948, the presentation captures the artist at the height of his career. John Szoke Gallery will exhibit a constellation of works on paper by Pablo Picasso from among the nearly 2,500 print editions made by the artist over his prolific 70-year career. Almine Rech will focus on the artistic development of Karel Appel in the 1950s and 60s, when he engaged in a long and fruitful collaboration with the New York dealer Martha Jackson. The Dutch-born artist was a founding member of the short-lived but highly influential European avant-garde group CoBrA, active from 1948 to 1951. Alison Jacques will spotlight Lenore Tawney, a vanguard figure in fiber art during the second half of the 20th century. Tawney’s groundbreaking woven forms, which achieved strong sculptural presence, are her most recognizable series. However, over the course of five decades, she developed a multifaceted practice encompassing large-scale sculptural installations, box-like assemblages, intricate collages, and graphic drawings. James Barron Art will show a selection of Sol LeWitt’s vibrant gouaches exploring variations in color and form alongside exceptional pieces from the R Series that employ folding, ripping, and cutting as methods of drawing. Diane Rosenstein Gallery will exhibit significant works from 1959 to 1998 by Sarah Schumann, a German figurative painter and collagist who drew on her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. She was a pioneer in the feminist scene of 1970s Berlin, joining the activist collective Brot und Rosen and co-curating the landmark feminist survey exhibition Women Artists International 1877-1977.
Women Artists, From Surrealism to the Contemporary
Richard Saltoun Gallery will present a group show uniting 12 pioneering female Surrealists from ten countries and across four continents, Butterfly Time, titled after a featured work by Toyen, which will also extend to the gallery’s recently opened New York location. Among the featured artists are the British painter and photographer Eileen Agar; the Czech avant-garde figure Bĕla Kolářová, who deployed objects from everyday life in experimental photographic works and assemblages; and Lebanese Surrealist Juliana Seraphim, whose dreamlike paintings engaged deeply with the liberation of female sexuality and agency, nature, and spirituality. James Barron Art will exhibit works on paper by self-taught artist Janet Sobel, who is increasingly recognized for her influential contributions to Abstract Expressionism during her brief career in 1940s New York, skillfully merging influences from folk art from her native Ukraine with Surrealism and all-over abstraction. A joint presentation by Galerie Michael Janssen and Marisa Newman Projects will feature Susana Wald, showcasing her feminist perspective on international Surrealism. Wald’s 1980s series Mujeres de (The Wives of) mixes humor with bodily transformation, depicting women in the guise of furniture inspired by the professions of their male partners. Presented by Van Doren Waxter, American artists Rosemarie Beck, Zoe Longfield, and Vivian Springford embody a spirit of looking at people and landscape before any stylistic categorization applied to them as abstract or expressionist painters. They each experimented with a wide range of media, creating unique bodies of work with a heightened sense of materiality. Luxembourg + Co. will present works by Simon Hantaï with a response by contemporary artist Rebecca Ward, whose practice draws on Hantaï’s pioneering method of “pliage,” folding the canvas before adding paint. Ward sets out to deconstruct the linen surfaces of her paintings by fraying them into individual threads, revealing the support structures beneath. Dutton makes its Independent debut with a dual exhibition featuring Rose deSmith Greenman, who began creating art in her 70s and produced a staggering number of drawings over a seven-year period while struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. With intricate detail, she interpreted her home, garden, and family in Boston as well as making transformative works from her imagination.
Black and Indigenous Artists from the Americas and Beyond
RYAN LEE presents an intergenerational show of two artists who shared a desire to celebrate the humanity, power, and beauty of the Black body. Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé created refined and romantic representations of Black figures referencing classical sculpture. His rare early casts, including African Boy Dancing (1937), will be juxtaposed with newly released works by Emma Amos from the 1980s, a period when she was inspired by media images of Black athletes as well as dancers like Josephine Baker and Bill T. Jones. Galatea and Simões de Assis will jointly exhibit the work of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Heitor dos Prazeres. Personal memories, scenes of everyday life among the Afro-Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro, and carnival festivities were the primary themes of his paintings. He also played a pioneering role in the history of samba as a musician, singer, composer, and founder of two of Rio’s first samba schools. Galeria MaPa will exhibit paintings by the Afro-Brazilian artist, scholar, and statesman Abdias do Nascimento alongside a collection of sacred iron tools associated with Candomblé religious ceremonies. Nascimento was a dedicated Pan-African activist and a leader in Brazil’s Black movement. He began to paint in the late 1960s, while living in self-imposed exile in the United States during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Gomide&Co will present a two-person exhibition of Julia Isídrez and Maria Lira Marques. Following a centuries-old Indigenous tradition in Paraguay, Isídrez draws on the techniques of her Guarani ancestors to create her sculpted vessels, which are noted for their expressive vocabulary of whimsical animal figures rooted in the Paraguayan Chaco. Based in Jequitinhonha Valley in southeastern Brazil, Marques has focused her practice since the 1980s on the Meus Bichos do Sertão series: mineral pigment paintings of imaginary animals that inhabit the artist's inventive mind. OSMOS is presenting historic and recent works by Australian Aboriginal artist Richard Bell, who uses his art as a political vehicle to challenge Western and white power structures in provocative ways. Bell’s work operates both as an indictment against legacies of Western colonization — specifically, the expropriation of land from Aboriginal communities by the British — and as a statement of solidarity with global struggles for social justice, in particular with the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter movements.
Revisiting the Nineties
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with MACK FOUNDATION will explore the innovative ceramics practice of Heinz Mack. One of the founders of the German postwar group ZERO, Mack developed his own language of light and color and is regarded as a leading representative of kinetic art. Less well known is his intensive creative engagement with ceramics, which began almost by chance in the 1990s. Presenting early work by Brad Kahlhamer, Venus Over Manhattan will reveal the foundations of his exploration into cultural hybridity and identity, influenced by his study of Native American ledger drawings and his immersion in the gritty New York art scene of the 1980s. Salon 94 will showcase life-cast sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s by John Ahearn, a New York-based artist who has worked within the South Bronx community for nearly four decades. Ahearn’s cerebral busts and dynamic relief murals express the modest nobility and emotional fervor of his subjects’ lives and interior selves in painted plaster, bronze, and fiberglass. Showing with Jane Lombard Gallery, Squeak Carnwath has been active in the Bay Area since the 1970s. Her signature painting style incorporates text, repeated symbolic iconography, and abstract patterns in work that is at once intimate and open to everyone, forming a catalog of her thoughts and daily life. Cristin Tierney Gallery and Abattoir Gallery will co-present works from the 1990s onward by Lithuanian-born US artist Audra Skuodas, who produced thousands of paintings, drawings, and artist’s books over five decades based in Oberlin, Ohio. Skuodas was concerned with the role of humanity in the universe and with the Japanese Zen Buddhist idea of satori: the special moment of awareness in which the infinite and the finite become one.
Institutional Reappraisals
For its debut participation, P420 will show a selection of works by the leading Italian painter Filippo de Pisis, concurrent with his appearance in Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th Venice Biennale exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa. P420’s reinterpretation of the artist’s oeuvre will focus on his works on paper depicting the faces and bodies of young men, recorded with immediacy and loose contours, and on the expressive power of his later works. Other notable artists represented at the fair and at the 2024 Venice Biennale include Italian Surrealist Bona de Mandiargues (the niece and pupil of Filippo de Pisis) and Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins with Richard Saltoun Gallery as well as Paraguayan ceramicist Julia Isídrez with Gomide&Co. Other artists announced for Independent 20th Century have recently been the subject of noteworthy retrospective exhibitions at major international museums. These include: Raoul Dufy (Nahmad Contemporary) at Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai; Heinz Mack (Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with MACK FOUNDATION) at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; Abdias do Nascimento (Galeria MaPa) at Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Heitor dos Prazeres (Galatea and Simões de Assis) at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; and Janet Sobel (James Barron Art) at The Menil Collection, Houston. Works by Lenore Tawney (Alison Jacques) have been included in a range of museum exhibitions in 2024, such as Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican Centre, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Tawney will also feature in The Artists of Coenties Slip, a forthcoming collection display opening October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
All Exhibitions for Reference
Alexandre Gallery presenting Stuart Davis
Mitchell Algus Gallery presenting photographs and works on paper from the Estate of Charles Henri Ford, including work by George Platt Lynes, Cecil Beaton, Carl Van Vechten, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Charles Henri Ford and Indra Tamang
James Barron Art presenting Sol Lewitt and Janet Sobel
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with MACK FOUNDATION presenting Heinz Mack
Dutton presenting Selby Warren and Rose deSmith Greenman
Fair Warning (TBA)
Galatea x Simões de Assis presenting Heitor Dos Prazeres
Gomide&Co presenting Julia Isídrez and Maria Lira Marques
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center presenting works from their archive coinciding with their 50th Anniversary
Ippodo Gallery presenting Masaaki Miyasako, Kota Arinaga, Hiroshi Goseki, Tomoyuki Hoshino, Yukiya Izumita, Mitsukuni Misaki, Yoca Muta, Nobuo Nishida, Midori Tsukada, and Kodai Ujiie
Alison Jacques presenting Lenore Tawney
Galerie Michael Janssen x Marisa Newman Projects presenting Susana Wald
Jane Lombard Gallery presenting Squeak Carnwath
Luxembourg + Co. presenting Simon Hantaï and Rebecca Ward
Galeria MaPa presenting Abdias do Nascimento
Nahmad Contemporary presenting Raoul Dufy
OSMOS presenting Richard Bell
P420 presenting Filippo de Pisis
Almine Rech presenting Karel Appel
Diane Rosenstein Gallery presenting Sarah Schumann
RYAN LEE presenting Emma Amos and Richmond Barthé
Salon 94 presenting John Ahearn
Richard Saltoun Gallery presenting Marion Adnams, Eileen Agar, Myriam Bat-Yosef, Bona de Mandiargues, Valentine Hugo, Běla Kolářová, Maria Martins, Emila Medková, Méret Oppenheim, Mimi Parent, Juliana Seraphim, and Toyen
Sies + Höke presenting Gerhard Richter, Ulrich Erben, Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Gotthard Graubner, Sigmar Polke, and Neo Rauch
John Szoke Gallery presenting Pablo Picasso
Cristin Tierney Gallery x Abattoir Gallery presenting Audra Skuodas
Van Doren Waxter presenting Zoe Longfield, Vivian Springford, Rosemarie Beck, and Tom Fairs
Venus Over Manhattan presenting Brad Kahlhamer
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Images from top: Abdias do Nascimento, Oricha’s Mother (Mother Nature), 1971, acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 48 inch, Buffalo, New York, USA, Courtesy Galeria MaPa, São Paulo. Raoul Dufy, Nogent-sur-Marne, 1934, oil on canvas, 38.8 x 51.4 inches, © Estate of Raoul Dufy / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York / ADAGP, Paris. Zoe Longfield, Untitled, gouache on paper, 11 1/4 x 15 in, Courtesy of the Zoe Longfield Estate and Van Doren Waxter, NY. Heitor dos Prazeres, Carnaval no arcos, 1966, Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 28 3/4 in, Ding Musa | Courtesy Galatea & Simões de Assis. Squeak Carnwath, Dick & Jane, 1996, Oil and alkyd on canvas, 76 x 102 in, Courtesy of the Artist and Jane Lombard Gallery. Lenore Tawney, Union of Water and Fire, 1974, linen, 39 3/8 x 36 5/8 ins, photography by Michael Brzezinski © Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, courtesy The Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, New York, and Alison Jacques, London. George Platt Lynes, Portrait of Ruth Ford, 1936, Courtesy of Mitchell Algus Gallery.