Announcing the Independent Art Fair 2023 Artistic Program

Independent New York returns for its 14th edition from May 11-14 in New York City and online. The highly anticipated fair features works by more than 120 artists and 74 galleries and nonprofits from around the world. Independent sits at the intersection of an art fair and a biennial, with exhibitors vetted through a competitive nomination process. The fair enjoys an insider's renown and is a destination for meaningful discovery of contemporary art. Taking over four floors of Spring Studios in Tribeca, Independent New York features more than 50 solo and duo presentations, 10  presentations by artists who have concurrent museum exhibitions, as well as New York debuts by 22 artists.

 

Kinke Kooi, Lynne Woods Turner and Stefanie Victor | Adams and Ollman
Adams and Ollman will present a group exhibition of Kinke Kooi, Lynne Woods Turner, and Stefanie Victor. Kooi’s paintings and drawings are unabashedly feminine and feminist, filled with the recurring images of shells, pearls, flowers, fruits, breasts, orifices, folds of flesh, and hair. Her overwhelming, non-hierarchical compositions explore critical concepts of gender, equality, and the body, deploying the language of decoration on its own terms. Turner’s abstract geometries are characterized by delicate linework, subtle coloration, and a fluidity between positive and negative space. Calling to mind cellular forms or mathematical diagrams, her notations seek to give shape to the hidden rhythms of the natural world. Victor’s practice explores the capacity of objects to map a language of private experience and accrued gestures over time. Her sculptural forms suggest the commonplace details of a domestic interior—hinges, electrical cords, a soap dish—and the small daily movements the body performs in relation to them.  

Gaëlle Choisne | Air de Paris and Nicoletti
Air de Paris and Nicoletti will jointly stage a solo presentation by Gaëlle Choisne. Described by the artist as a “kaleidoscopic prism with multiple entries of meanings and signs,” her work is concerned with the vestiges of colonialism and the continuum of extractivist practices in the globalized present. Choisne’s interests in the occult and vernacular make particular reference to Creole myth and culture, linking a collective history with her own personal French-Haitian genealogy. Her experimental formal approach mirrors the complex dynamics of the subjects she investigates, moving between sculpture, installation, and a video practice that spans documentary and narrative modes.  

John Walker and Emily Nelligan | Alexandre Gallery 
Alexandre Gallery will present a selection of the late Emily Nelligan’s charcoal drawings of the coastal landscape of Maine, together with a single plein-air painting by John Walker. Nelligan traveled to Great Cranberry Island every summer for more than 60 years, producing a body of work that records her deep meditation on a remote, intimately known place. She often made her shadowy, ethereal works at sunrise and dusk, at times obscuring the landscape to the point of abstraction. The Independent presentation will place these drawings in dialogue with Walker’s large-scale view of the Maine shoreline at night, concurrent with his solo exhibition at the gallery’s Grand Street location (April 29 – June 17).

Tom Rees | Allouche Benias Gallery
Allouche Benias will dedicate a solo presentation to the painter Tom Rees. With an offhand, stream-of-consciousness style, Rees echoes automatic writing and drawing practices. His caustic visual lexicon draws on noir, art brut and muralism, often freezing his subjects in positions of compromise or defeat. Cartoonish everymen wander lost in the landscape or lie trampled in the dirt, alternately floating and drowning in swampy water. In Rees’s hands, however, the atmosphere of threat also serves to raise a laugh, harboring an implicit social satire.Andrew Chapman

Andrew Chapman | Bill Cournoyer | The Meeting
Bill Cournoyer | The Meeting will exhibit a solo presentation of paintings and sculptures by Andrew Chapman. The Los Angeles-based artist’s practice is driven by a preternatural attention to surface and materials, generating effects that teeter between familiarity and otherworldliness. Although some works evoke antecedents from the history of abstraction—the grid, the machine age—and others yield hints of figuration, such likenesses are fleeting. The ​​mesmerizing surfaces of Chapman’s panels eschew discernible forms of painterly mark-making, obscuring his meticulous process even as they invite and reward close scrutiny. His art objects ask viewers to participate in the act of narrative construction, immersing themselves in an archive shrouded in enigma.

Stephanie Temma Hier, Preston Pavlis and Guimi You | Bradley Ertaskiran 
Bradley Ertaskiran will present a selection of new paintings and sculptural pieces by Stephanie Temma Hier, Preston Pavlis, and Guimi You, focused on the theme of reframing the landscape. Hier is known for her uncanny juxtapositions of found images, particularly of food and other consumable items, in hybrid works combining photo-realistic paintings with sumptuously crafted ceramic frames. Pavlis’s works on canvas and fabric portray his invented protagonists—conceived by the artist as partial embodiments of himself—in the act of solitary introspection. You’s tender, pastel-hued paintings draw inspiration from the beauty of nature and of domestic life, imbuing the everyday with a sense of transcendent wonder.

Edie Fake | Broadway
Broadway will present new works by Edie Fake. His meticulously rendered gouache-on-panel paintings distill investigations into architecture, climate catastrophe, gender identity, and sexuality into exuberant abstract geometries. Fake’s acclaimed Memory Palaces series reimagined the facades of Chicago’s lost LGBTQ venues with maximalist ornamentation, constructing dazzling visual metaphors for queer community. Since moving to Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, the artist has evolved the concept through the lens of environmental fragility and change. The desert landscape—and the core elements of sand and water—are touchstones for the cryptic graphic motifs of more recent works.

Erica Baum and Julia Rommel | Bureau
Bureau will present a dual show of Erica Baum and Julia Rommel, looking at the significance of folds and texture in their respective photography and painting practices. Composing images that often function simultaneously as concrete poetry, Baum has spent the past 20 years working with printed materials and the fragments of language found therein. A recent series abstracted phrases and symbols captured from industrially produced 20th-century home sewing patterns. There is also a structural quality to Rommel’s paintings, which lay bare the traces of their making and manipulation. The surfaces are visibly layered, smoothed, folded, unfolded, and stapled, indexing the artist’s process and decision-making over time.

Marc Hundley, Xylor Jane, Elisabeth Kley, and Mary Manning | Canada
Canada will present new works by Marc Hundley, Xylor Jane, Elisabeth Kley, and Mary Manning. Often referencing song lyrics and important dates or addresses from his life, Hundley’s text works share a diaristic impulse with Manning’s photo-compositions. Their juxtapositions of 35mm analog prints, portraying friends and everyday snapshots against the backdrop of New York City, tenderly draw our attention to modest but remarkable moments. Jane’s prismatic paintings combine an autobiographical sense of time with universal mathematical systems, being rooted in numerical patterns such as prime palindromes. Patterns are also integral to Kley’s ceramics, paintings, and works on paper, which explore geometric and plant motifs influenced by a wide range of historic sources, including the Wiener Werkstätte and ancient Egyptian art. All four artists employ a high degree of craft in their work, which is more ornate than it might appear at first glance.

Srijon Chowdhury | Ciaccia Levi x Foxy Production 
Ciaccia Levi and Foxy Production will jointly present a show of new paintings by Srijon Chowdhury. The artist’s intimate portraits, vanitas still-lifes, and dreamscapes combine a heightened realism with symbolic and emotional resonances, capturing the tension between mystery and revelation. His canvases use color, light, and patterning to hypnotic effect, frequently traversing different perspectival views in the same pictorial space. Recurring floral motifs point to a rich vein of sensuality and mysticism in Chowdhury’s work. By contrast, his human subjects are often pictured lost in contemplation, manifesting a mood of disquiet verging on existential alienation.

Gina Litherland, Magalie Guérin and Roscoe Mitchell | Corbettt Vs Dempsey 
Corbett vs. Dempsey will present recent works by Magalie Guérin, Gina Litherland, and Roscoe Mitchell, three disparate artists who are each engaged in extending and upending the visual languages of historical modernisms. Guérin’s vibrant paintings tease the line between object and abstract, finding a place of productive ambivalence in their shapes, colors, and textures. These formal explorations take on a different meaning in her Raku ceramic works to equally beguiling effect. Working in the historical lineage of Midwest Surrealism, Litherland has spent the last four decades making exquisite magic realist paintings, many of them dealing with the natural world. Co-founder of the groundbreaking avant-garde jazz group the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Mitchell has been painting since the early 1960s. His recent canvases combine a highly musical compositional sense with a slyly humorous approach to narrative and portraiture. 

William Scott | Creative Growth 
Oakland-based non-profit art center Creative Growth, which advances the inclusion of artists with disabilities, will present a solo exhibition of William Scott. Practicing with Creative Growth since 1992, the self-taught artist frequently describes himself as an architect. Scott’s paintings reimagine his home city of San Francisco as the utopian “Praise Frisco”, a compelling vision of civic design and social equity. His portraits of predominantly Black figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama to his alter-ego, basketball star “Billy the Kid”, combine personal history with popular culture and wider questions of citizenship and community. Scott’s alternative realities are animated by a fundamental belief in the potential for positive transformation.

Alina Perez | Deli Gallery
Deli Gallery presents a solo show of new works by Alina Perez. Building up lush layers of charcoal and pastel on paper, Perez uses drawing as a tool of identity and remembrance. Her intimate figurative tableaux emerge from her own past experiences and traumas, as well as weaving more speculative narratives. “What if you could draw a memory that you wish you had?,” she asks. The presentation at Independent follows Perez’s dual exhibition with Arel Lisette at the gallery’s New York location, Not Dark Yet (February 24-March 25, 2023), an exploration of memory and the “personal hauntings” that reverberate in the present.

Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson | Derek Eller Gallery
Derek Eller Gallery presents works by Brooklyn-based artist Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson, following his 2022 solo exhibition at the gallery. Wilson’s palimpsest of references ranges from extinct animals to imaginary machines to an all-star basketball player, blending the iconography of American pop culture with African folklore. Rather than ascribing any singular narrative to his paintings and drawings, Wilson deploys his cast of characters in scenes of “fantasized armageddon” or “ritualistic dance” that can be read as allegories of the present moment. His free-flowing practice re-mixes and fuses multiple images, histories, and philosophies.

Abe Odedina | Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Abe Odedina will make his New York debut in a solo presentation with Diane Rosenstein Gallery. The Nigerian-British artist, who is based between London and Bahia, Brazil, creates bold compositions centered on the figure but they are not portraits in a traditional sense. Blending formal elements of Renaissance portraiture with influences ranging from Haitian Vodou to African studio photography to folk art, Odedina describes them as “figurative propositions, devices to explore ideas around our shared humanity, the triumphs and tragedies of daily life.” Infused with a kind of magical realism, his iconography also plays on the symbolic significance of recurring motifs such as birds, which connote a divine force and a higher state of consciousness in Yoruba culture.

Rande Cook | Fazakas Gallery 
Fazakas Gallery, a specialist in contemporary Indigenous art, will dedicate a solo presentation to the Kwakwaka'wakw multimedia artist Rande Cook. Based in Victoria, British Columbia, and a hereditary chief of the Ma’amtagila people, Cook preserves ancestral stories and teachings through new material contexts. His practice enfolds culture, science, and a collective response to the land his forebears have occupied and stewarded for thousands of years. Cook’s work invokes a sense of urgency around rising resource extraction on the Pacific Northwest Coast, particularly the loss of old-growth forests through industrial logging. 

Ron Nagle, Jesse Harrod, Dorothy F. Foster, Julian Martin, and James Castle | Fleisher/Ollman
Fleisher/Ollman’s group presentation focuses on formal and conceptual affinities across the works of five artists: Ron Nagle, Jesse Harrod, Dorothy F. Foster, Julian Martin, and James Castle. Nagle and Harrod both mine hobbyist craft traditions in the creation of very different bodies of work. The stunning finishes in Nagle’s cups bely the humble origins of his mastery: he first learned techniques such as slip-casting, china painting, and the use of decals from his mother’s basement ceramics club. Harrod’s wall sculptures embrace the material vernacular of macramé with a keen awareness of the irony of using paracord, a synthetic cord devised by the military, for their queer imaginations of the body. Fleisher/Ollman recently organized the first solo exhibition of Foster’s work since her death in 1986. She made hundreds of small, iridescent drawings during the last decade of her life, blending cartoonish and ethereal figuration and pattern with the underlying imagery of magazine and newspaper clippings. Martin’s vibrant pastel drawings—resonating strongly with the color sensibility of Harrod and Nagle—testify to his vigorous process with visible smudges, fingerprints, and tool marks. The presentation will also include previously unseen color drawings exploring the space between representation and abstraction by Castle (1899-1977), who was born deaf in rural Idaho and found his primary means of expression through art-making.

Leonard Baby | Fortnight Institute 
Following his recent solo exhibition with the gallery, Fortnight Institute presents paintings by Leonard Baby. Isolating single images from films as the basis for his compositions, Baby alludes to a narrative while leaving the viewer in suspense. The cropped hands or concealed faces of his protagonists force us to imagine who they are and what might be happening beyond the painted frame. Baby unifies these incongruous scenes with a color palette associated with classic Looney Tunes animations, masking their different cinematic sources through a new directorial vision. The artist’s technique creates a further sense of intimacy, as he holds each small-format panel in his lap while he paints rather than using an easel. 

Keith Sonnier and Tala Worrell | Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Parrasch Heijnen
A dual presentation by franklin parrasch gallery and parrasch heijnen will pair works by the late post-Minimal sculptor Keith Sonnier and emerging painter Tala Worrell. Sonnier came to prominence in the late 1960s as part of a generation of American and European artists who reinvented sculpture with unorthodox industrial and ephemeral materials. Neon tubing became his signature, enabling him to draw in space with light and color, as in the decades-long Ba-O-Ba series of abstract constructions and numerous large-scale public art installations. Worrell’s investigative process of abstract painting is steeped in her experience as a Lebanese-American raised in Abu Dhabi, attuned to switching between languages, value systems, and cultural traditions. Her visual lexicon of openness and spontaneity, often responding to quotidian physical encounters, is defined by the use of diverse and seemingly incompatible materials.

Dana Kavelina | Fridman Gallery
Fridman Gallery presents drawings and a film by the Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina that address military violence from a feminist perspective. Kavelina, who is currently living in Germany in exile from the war in Ukraine, originally created her drawing series Exit to the Blind Spot for a 2019 exhibition at the Kmytiv Museum of Soviet Art. These meditations on rape as a weapon of war seek to give voice to the women who have been silenced in the dominant narratives glorifying male military heroism. They are part of Kavelina’s ongoing project to “speak about history as a whole without leaving out the blind spots, in order to not leave any wounds untreated.”

Pam Glick | Stephen Friedman Gallery
Stephen Friedman Gallery will dedicate a solo exhibition to the recent practice of Pam Glick, who joined the gallery this March. Characterized by the juxtaposition of repeated segments of line with layers of gestural mark-marking, Glick’s paintings attest to her interest in the universal language of abstraction. Describing her experimental process as a “playground,” the artist uses calligraphic pencil marks to disrupt the grid structure of the canvas. She organizes the works into sections to create rhythm, alternating between movement and stillness, strong lines and intuitive, free-flowing forms. Drawn to edges and the division of space, Glick refers to her primary motif as a “zip.”

Dozie Kanu | Galerie Francesca Pia
Galerie Francesca Pia will mount a solo presentation of sculptural works by Dozie Kanu. The artist’s experimental formal language lies at the intersection of art and design, undermining any rigid division between the genres. Bringing new life to found objects and industrial readymades, his assemblages allude to functionality while also transcending and disrupting utilitarian value. The complex symbolism of Kanu’s work is infused with his lived experience as a Nigerian-American. “I think I’ve been influenced to continue to amplify—or maybe further develop the visibility of Black pictorial literacy within the material realm,” he has said.

Richard Van Buren | Garth Greenan Gallery
Garth Greenan Gallery will present a selection of recent and historical works by sculptor Richard Van Buren. Although he featured in Primary Structures, the Jewish Museum’s landmark 1966 exhibition that defined Minimalism, Van Buren never fully conformed to the formalism and sleek aesthetic of the movement. From his early hard-edged geometric works to the freer organic forms of the 1970s onward, he has manifested a deep interest in the interplay of light and color. Throughout his career he has experimented with the properties of diverse materials, questioning the relationship between natural and synthetic. His most recent practice simultaneously challenges and depends upon our material-driven culture, incorporating substances such as dry pigment, fiberglass, adhesive, glitter, and shells into plastic biomorphs. 

 Otis Houston Jr., Ken Tisa, Janet Olivia Henry, and Sanou Oumar | Gordon Robichaux
Gordon Robichaux will present a group show with Otis Houston Jr., Janet Olivia Henry, and Sanou Oumar. Since 1997, Houston has maintained an ever-evolving installation beside the FDR Drive highway in Harlem, where he stages performances, assemblages of found objects, and banners expressing his protests and beliefs. His democratic approach to art-making began while he was incarcerated; a series of collages from this period will be shown for the first time at Independent. An artist and educator based in Queens, New York, Henry produced the seminal magazine Black Currant in the 1980s, showcasing the Black artistic community of Just Above Midtown Gallery. Her own mixed-media practice incorporates toys, dolls, and tchotchkes in commentaries on American culture, patriarchy, and race. Oumar, too, embraces humble materials in his mesmerizing pen and marker drawings, channeling visual order as a healing ritual that recalls his roots in Burkina Faso, West Africa.

Johnny Abrahams and Sophie Treppendahl | Jack Hanley Gallery
Jack Hanley Gallery will present a dual exhibition of Johnny Abrahams and Sophie Treppendahl. Abrahams’s abstract compositions, arranged in geometric blocks and curved shapes, meld minimalism with an Op Art sensibility. The paintings are meditative, relying on the balance of color and void. Oil paint is thickly applied with a palette knife in his signature Elemental series, bridging the realms of painting and sculpture. Treppendahl’s vivid interior scenes seek to transfer ordinary moments of joy to canvas. She draws on her own life experiences and recorded observations as a springboard to explore pattern, color, light, and shadow. According to the artist, “Through painting, I aim to capture not the likeness to an image but the overwhelming feeling of the space or a memory.” 

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Studio K.O.S. | Jay Gorney
Jay Gorney will present works by the 1980s art collective Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) and by Studio K.O.S. The collective grew out of a transformative educational program conceived by the artist Tim Rollins at a South Bronx public high school, merging art-making with reading and discussing literary texts. Rollins and his students exhibited at Jay Gorney Modern Art in New York in 1986, and later at the Venice Biennale, Documenta 8 and the Whitney Biennial. The presentation at Independent will contextualize this history, featuring works on book pages created by the original collective in the 1990s as well as more recent works by Studio K.O.S., which continues Rollins’s legacy of art and youth mentorship following his passing in 2017.

Savannah Marie Harris, Emmanuel Shogbolu and Ruby Dickson | Harlesden High Street 
Harlesden High Street, an experimental northwest London space dedicated to artists of color, will present a group show by Savannah Marie Harris, Emmanuel Shogbolu, and Ruby Dickson. Harris’s intuitive, gestural abstract paintings can be read as a stream of consciousness and a performative act, inviting viewers to plumb their own memories as they journey through her complex layers of color, light, and texture. Shogbolu’s multidisciplinary practice focuses on the documentation of the self and of the hyper local; his latest body of work is an autobiographical immersion into UK street culture in the mid-2000s. Accompanying them will be a new work by emerging figurative painter Ruby Dickson. The fair presentation will follow the artists’ current solo projects with the gallery: Emmanuel Shogbolu: Pieces of a Scattsman (January 23-February 23) and Savannah Marie Harris: Looking into the Shimmer (February 4-21 offsite, then February 24-March 18).

Judith Bernstein | Kasmin Gallery
For Independent, Kasmin Gallery presents the first focused exhibition of Judith Bernstein’s Word Drawings (1989-2009). First shown at The Drawing Center in New York in 2017-18, these charcoal on paper works depict single words in the explosively gestural manner of the artist’s monumental penis-screw hybrids from 1969 onwards and her 1986 mural of her own name, Signature Piece. Over more than five decades, Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. Since her earliest inspiration from the scatalogical graffiti in the men’s bathrooms of the Yale School of Art, she has explored the connection between sex and politics in works of trenchant feminist critique, humor, and direct visual impact.

Beverly Semmes and Stanley Stellar | Kapp Kapp
Kapp Kapp will present a duo show featuring Beverly Semmes and Stanley Stellar. Semmes explores the complexities of representations of the female body, both as a child-bearing vessel and an erotic object. Her early textile installations of monumental dresses amplify a medium long disparaged as “women’s work.” Her ongoing Feminist Responsibility Project conceals photographs of women from the pages of vintage Penthouse magazines, subverting their original voyeuristic purpose. Stellar has photographed the beauty, fear, and intimacy of queer life in New York City since the 1970s, when homosexuality was still criminalized. His lens observed the early gay liberation movement as well as the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Stellar’s portraits capture masculinity with depth and humanity so that “one senses the person and not just the body.”

Michelle Uckotter | King’s Leap 
King’s Leap will present the noirish interior scenes of Michelle Uckotter. Devoid of human presence or inhabited by sultry femme fatales, the confined spaces she invents appear ominously close to collapse. Uckotter’s unsettling narratives are vividly cinematic yet mysterious, with a lineage derived from the paintings of Francis Bacon, erotic doll photographs of Hans Bellmer, and the haunted-house horror of The Shining or Resident Evil video games. They are at once sinister and consciously camp, playing upon the fantasies and clichés of the genre with humorous intent. The gallery has commissioned curator and critic Alan Longino to write a new text responding to Uckotter’s presentation at Independent.

Tamara Gonzales and Kemar Keanu Wynter | Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
A duo exhibition by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery will pair works by Tamara Gonzales and Kemar Keanu Wynter. Gonzales’s amalgams of patterned motifs are frequently inspired by thrifted textiles that she collects from around the world, particularly lace, which she uses as a distinctive stencil for spray paint. Other pieces emerge from her own generative mark-making and visionary collaborations with the Shipibo people of Peru. Wynter’s dynamic color fields of oil-pastel pigment are also expressions of everyday life, nourished by his years of cooking and eating with family and friends. Each painting pays homage to a particular meal, a practice the Jamaican-American artist describes as “a form of archiving—both of my family’s recipes and the stories attached to them.”

Connor Marie Stankard | Lubov
Lubov will dedicate a solo presentation to paintings and sculpture by Connor Marie Stankard. The cyborgian girl subjects of her canvases are the product of the AI-based image creation tool Artbreeder, which enables users to edit a face’s “genes” or “crossbreed” one photograph with others. Extrapolated from images of aspirational celebrity muses, the resulting machine-born mutations amp up the traits of conventional feminine beauty to the point of monstrosity, so they appear “hardly human at all.” Stankard’s visceral multimedia practice explores art-making as a Frankensteinian science experiment, shapeshifting between paint, olfactory potions, video, and narrative writing.

Chason Matthams and Stan VanDerBeek | Magenta Plains
Magenta Plains will present an intergenerational dialogue between the historic collages of the late multimedia artist Stan VanDerBeek and new hyper-realistic paintings by Chason Matthams. A visionary experimental filmmaker known for his pioneering work in art and technology, VanDerBeek created his early animations in the Surrealist tradition of collage, splicing magazine clippings with original and found footage. The selection of works on paper at Independent will complement a concurrent exhibition of VanDerBeek’s single-channel films at the gallery (May 3 – June 17). Matthams depicts isolated objects in exhaustive, anthropomorphic detail, dwelling on the recurring motifs of cameras, flowers, and antique busts. Conceived as metaphors for perception itself, his paintings seek to capture the ephemeral and fragmentary nature of human consciousness.

Behrang Karimi, Chioma Ebinama, Max Hooper Schneider, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kaye Donachie, Peter Hujar, Paul P.,Gillian Wearing, Sarah Jones, Fiona Connor and Studio K.O.S. | Maureen Paley
Maureen Paley brings together a group of works that reflect on dreamlike states of being and question perceived notions of reality. Central to the presentation is Behrang Karimi’s large-scale painting Matrix (2019) (work pictured above) that depicts a series of figures moving through a geometric tapestry of color, architecture, and space. Chioma Ebinama’s watercolor Piscean dream (2022) and Max Hooper Schneider’s assemblage Pillscape (2023) explore notions of site as imagined through astrology and hallucination while Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs of sky and water in Ultrachrome II (2021) and Congo night (b) (2018) present visions of an elemental world. Alongside these landscapes are a cast of characters drawn from the imagination and art history in Kaye Donachie’s Maria (2021), Peter Hujar’s Paul Hudson’s Leg (1979), Paul P.’s Untitled (2020) and Gillian Wearing’s Max Ernst, Dada and Surrealism artist, husband of Dorothea Tanning (2022). Sarah Jones’s photography and Fiona Connor’s sculpture reference forms of mimicry and simulation. Jones’s Mynah (Mimic) (I) (2021) documents a mynah bird, known for its ability to imitate the human voice, and Connor’s carefully produced simulations Community Notice Board (Coin Laundry) (2022) and Untitled (folding chair) (2020) challenge how we interpret peripheral forms and spatial details. Completing the presentation is a series of new collages by Studio K.O.S. from their project A Midsummer Night’s Dream (after Shakespeare and Mendelssohn) (2023).

Antonius-Tín Bui | Monique Meloche Gallery 
Monique Meloche Gallery will exhibit hand-cut works on paper by Antonius-Tín Bui. The Vietnamese-American artist, who identifies as genderfluid, views this intricate, meditative process as a means of visualizing their fellow marginalized communities. Each sheet of paper becomes an archive of memories as Bui metaphorically carves out space for historically underrecognized narratives. In their larger-than-life cut-paper portraits, Bui depicts their chosen and biological family, reflecting their kinship, beauty, and resilience. Their series of exploding ceramic vessels emerged from the artist’s observations of Asian art collections in museums, and offer a counterpoint to the siloed Orientalist past represented by those objects.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Chelsea Culprit, Kenny Rivero and Borna Sammak | Morán Morán
Morán Morán will present a group of vibrant figurative works on paper by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, new large-scale paintings by Chelsea Culprit and Kenny Rivero, and an intricate heat-transfer piece by Borna Sammak. All four artists have their own approach to translating imagery that swings between narrative and symbolism. Adeniyi-Jones’s depictions of stylized figures and flora are steeped in West African aesthetics from a distinctly diasporic perspective. Moving freely between the pictorial imagery of folk art and the materiality of the real world, Culprit’s works are composed of feelings as much as descriptions. Rivero’s paintings and drawings are containers of his personal history, exploring what he perceives as the broken narrative of Dominican-American identity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles. Sammak’s striking compositions embed and encrypt the material of daily life, splitting and recombining mundane objects and texts, signs, slogans, clothes, or cartoons, into compressed metaphors and dense patterns.

Robert Zehnder | Mrs.
Following the artist’s recent solo debut with the gallery, Mrs. will present works by Robert Zehnder. Assuming the guise of a “map-maker”, Zehnder produces fictitious surrealistic landscapes that are devoid of figures or objects, emerging from a private psychodrama. Notions of estrangement, interiority, and social anxiety come into play in his reductive, expressionistic depiction of nature and expanded middle grounds. Zehnder looks to the tormented post-industrial landscapes of American Regionalists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton for inspiration, like them constructing psychic allegories of volatile and uncertain times. 

Jordan Kasey, Quentin James McCaffrey, and Willie Stewart | Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery presents a group show with three rising painters—Jordan Kasey, Quentin James McCaffrey, and Willie Stewart—who share a close focus on uncanny domestic interiors and talismanic objects, evoking notions of memory, absence, and introspection. Kasey tightly crops the statuesque bodies in her bold canvases, enclosing them in spaces that could be read as either intimate or claustrophobic. McCaffrey’s subtly rendered wallpapered rooms, presented in the artist’s gallery debut in December 2022, are devoid of figures yet filled with plants, mirrors, and miniature paintings that seem to stand in for missing personages. Stewart’s contemporary still-lifes compile pseudo mise-en-scènes informed by the conceptual tenets of Pop and the Pictures Generation.

Christine Wang and Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack | Night Gallery
Night Gallery presents a dual exhibition of Christine Wang and Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack, two artists who reuse materials to construct their work. Wang’s materials are digital: she translates memes and other popular internet images onto canvas with humor and exacting detail. Her paintings can be considered, she says, as “a form of documentation of the history we’re currently living through.” Self-taught artist Gaitor-Lomack repurposes thrift-store finds into intricate assemblages in his ongoing Guardians of the Afro Fantasy series. These sculptures suggest spiritual beings whose power radiates from the surprising combinations of their disparate parts. 

Rob Davis | Nina Johnson 
Nina Johnson will present hyper-realistic paintings by Rob Davis. Their non-hierarchical mixture of everyday subjects, from a rotary telephone to an empty bed, echoes the fragmented nature of memory. Through this seemingly happenstance selection of images, Davis interrogates his personal experiences growing up in a working-class home in Norfolk, Virginia, in tandem with the larger formation of American identity. In anticipation of the fair, gallery founder Nina Johnson features in this week’s special episode of the Voices on Art podcast, produced in partnership with Independent. 

Kimathi Donkor | Niru Ratnam 
For their debut at Independent, Niru Ratnam will present works by the London-based artist Kimathi Donkor. Appropriating the classical styles of Western art, Donkor reinstates and centers the Black subjects who have been erased from that canon. Following a hiatus from art-making in the 1990s, when he focused on social activism, he returned to painting in the 2000s. He developed a series depicting police brutality against the Black British community alongside representations of historical figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Harriet Tubman, which anticipated current debates about the decolonization of art history. Donkor’s solo presentation will feature works from a series marking the bicentenary of Haiti’s independence, precipitated by L’Ouverture’s revolutionary leadership of freed slaves against French colonial rule.

Michael St. John and Mitchell Charbonneau | Off Paradise
Off Paradise will debut new works in an intergenerational duo presentation by Michael St. John and Mitchell Charbonneau. A rigorous chronicler of contemporary American culture, St. John explores notions of violence, desire, racism, and consumerism through strategies of appropriation and assemblage. His works glean their iconography without hierarchy from a wide range of source materials, mixing found images from advertising, cinema, and the news with passages of trompe l’oeil painting. Charbonneau’s sculptural interventions similarly deconstruct and recast everyday commercial objects, from folding chairs to air fresheners, with material exactitude and visual wit.

Irving Marcus, Marley Freeman and Keegan Monaghan | Parker Gallery
Parker Gallery will bring together paintings by the late Irving Marcus together with new works by Marley Freeman and Keegan Monaghan in an intergenerational group presentation centered on color and the rewards of slow looking. Marcus created his delirious compositions via a fastidious process of transforming grainy images culled from newspapers. Freeman’s glowing abstractions, made in dialogue with the history of textiles, testify to her deep sensitivity to subtleties of form and feeling. Monaghan’s densely textured canvases render the everyday extraordinary with close-cropped details and skewed perspectives, evoking the subjectivity of visual perception.

Jeremy | Peres Projects 
Peres Projects features paintings by Jeremy that investigate the fluidity of queer identity and the constraints of heteronormativity. Intensified by a saturated color palette, his androgynous and hybrid figures probe at the relationship between desire and repulsion. Their twisted and transgressive bodies connect with ideas of abjection from the lineage of European surrealism and magical realism. Jeremy’s practice interrogates the essence of the human body through the lens of queerness, as a space in which the political and biological contradictions of the self are perpetually renegotiated. The presentation at Independent will follow the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Berlin, Jeremy: Mourning Opulence (February 17-March 17, 2023).

Jessica Stoller and Grace Carney | P·P·O·W
In a dual show, P·P·O·W will exhibit the porcelain sculptures of Jessica Stoller alongside works by emerging artist Grace Carney. Stoller’s elaborate tableaux of flowers, food, and female body parts marry the seductive and grotesque with a subversive feminist wit. Playing on porcelain’s historic associations with desire and consumption, her masterful depictions of aging and blemished flesh challenge idealized images of femininity. A complex corporeality can also be seen in Carney’s gestural, abstracted paintings and recent series of large-scale drawings of wrestlers, in which the figures’ entangled limbs merge into an ambiguous landscape suggesting both aggression and intimacy. 

Melissa Joseph | REGULARNORMAL
REGULARNORMAL presents a solo show of works by Melissa Joseph. The artist’s practice addresses themes of diaspora, personal histories, and the politics of bodies occupying space, particularly those who identify as women of color. Since her father’s passing in 2015, Joseph has reconstructed images from her family archive in an active process of “re-seeing” the past. With an emphasis on textiles, crafts, and natural materials, she situates her works at the intersection of labor and gender: they are objects first and images secondarily. Her primary medium of wool felt fuses the two, with a soft distortion that complements the reminiscences she represents and the slippage between past and present.

HYDEON and Will Thornton | Ricco/Maresca
Ricco/Maresca presents a dual exhibition of HYDEON and Will Thornton, marking the New York debut of both artists with the gallery. HYDEON (Ian Ferguson) distills a broad range of references from Baroque, Gothic, and Victorian architecture; Medieval, folk, and outsider art; fairy tales and myth, into arresting narrative scenes with enigmatic characters. A self-taught painter and sculptor, Thornton makes “quiet portraits” of his own handmade fabric or clay objects in a palette reminiscent of the Old Masters. Through their variations in color, mood, and rhythm, the portraits are “the practice of embedding an object with my hopes and fears to then release into the world”, Thornton says.

Eleanor Antin | Richard Saltoun Gallery
Richard Saltoun Gallery’s solo booth focuses on Eleanor Antin’s seminal mail-art project, 100 Boots (1971–73). Critiquing America’s participation in the Vietnam War, Antin documented the staged travels of 100 black rubber army boots from California to New York City. The work comprised 51 photographic postcards mailed to around 1,000 artists, writers, institutions, and others via the US postal service. Initially engaged in everyday activities such as going to church or the bank, the boots later trespassed on private property, announcing their solidarity with the anti-war movement. The series culminated in an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1973, shortly after the end of the war. The presentation at Independent, which also includes drawings from Antin’s Death and the Maiden series (1974–75), marks 50 years since the peace accords. 

Ross Caliendo | ​​Ross+Kramer
Ross Caliendo’s surrealistic depictions of the natural world will be the subject of a solo presentation with Ross+Kramer. In dialogue with the divisionist tradition of Neo-Impressionism, the Los Angeles-based painter harnesses the tension between complimentary colors to charge his wildernesses with energy and luminosity. Seen up close, the repeated motifs of trees and vegetation dissolve into abstract textures of loose stippling marks, lattices of sgraffito, and passages of thick impasto, mimicking nature’s fractal architecture. Defamiliarizing the conventions of landscape painting with chromatic intensity, Caliendo also invokes the primal symbolism of the hunt, staging a suspenseful encounter between predators and prey across multiple canvases.

Hamish Pearch | Sans titre
For the gallery’s Independent debut, Sans titre will present new works by the British artist Hamish Pearch. Following his recent experimentations with bronze, the artist will produce a new body of works inspired by elements of the domestic context, transposed into the Anthropocene era. He will also present a new series of works on paper, a relatively unknown aspect of his practice. These will be the subject of a publication to be released during the fair. Pearch reflects on the complex structures humanity occupies, exploring the materials, objects, and spaces that make up our worlds. Through sculpture, installation, drawing and sound, his practice gives form to human experiences and systems that are mundane and magical in equal measure.

Wendy Red Star | Sargent’s Daughters
For her solo presentation with Sargent’s Daughters, Wendy Red Star has created print editions of 12 vibrantly colored acrylic paintings presented last year in her debut public art exhibition. Titled Travels Pretty, the project took place across 300 bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, and is a celebration of parfleches: intricately painted rawhide bags traditionally made by certain nomadic tribes of the North American Great Plains to store and transport personal possessions. Throughout her multimedia practice, the Apsáalooke (Crow) artist casts light on the complex histories of Native Americans through a feminist Indigenous lens. The Travels Pretty series masterfully reinterprets parfleche designs that Red Star researched within major US museum collections. At Independent, the prints will be shown alongside the artist’s own collection of historic parfleches.

Mette Madsen | STARS 
Independent will mark the first showing of Mette Madsen’s paintings in nearly three decades. This solo exhibition by STARS presents the artist’s richly colored, psychologically charged organic forms, inspired equally by the mysteries of nature and the energy of the downtown New York scene. The canvases were created between 1993 and 2003 in her loft on the Bowery, an otherworldly environment filled with her collection of vintage architecture and uncanny natural specimens. Sensual and enigmatic, the paintings lure in the viewer’s gaze, mirroring Madsen’s study of her personal cabinet of curiosities. 

Yayoi Kusama, Lynda Benglis and Beverly Semmes | Susan Inglett & Specific Object
A joint presentation by Specific Object and Susan Inglett Gallery will showcase a range of media interventions addressing and reclaiming sexuality by Yayoi Kusama, Lynda Benglis, and Beverly Semmes. Increasingly aware of the limitations of the art-world press in the 1960s, Kusama infiltrated the territory of men’s magazines, launching her own soft-core tabloid as a vehicle to document her New York happenings and events. These periodicals will be shown with a set of previously unseen color photographs and associated ephemera. Benglis financed the advert featuring her infamous nude self-portrait in the November 1974 issue of Artforum by selling a run of hand-painted t-shirts, examples of which will appear at Independent together with her iconic “centerfold.” The presentation will also include works on paper from Semmes’ Feminist Responsibility Project, initiated in the early 2000s, in which the artist conceals and complicates pornographic images culled from vintage issues of Hustler and Penthouse, forcing us to re-examine the conventions of the genre.

Merike Estna | Margot Samel and Temnikova & Kasela
In a joint presentation, Margot Samel and Temnikova & Kasela will exhibit works by Merike Estna, one of Estonia’s foremost contemporary artists. Her process-based practice challenges traditional hierarchies, embedding patterns and color combinations from the overlooked vocabularies of craft into an expanded language of painting. From canvas, she has progressed to producing clothes, objects, and entire spaces. Estna transforms the materials and techniques of Estonian folklore into works of personal archaeology, as seen in the immersive installations created for her 2022 retrospective at the Kai Art Center in Tallinn.

Darja Bajagić, Jacqueline Fraser, Marie Karlberg, and Catherine Mulligan | Tara Downs 
Tara Downs’s group presentation will address female sexuality and its mediation through imagery in new works by Darja Bajagić, Jacqueline Fraser, Marie Karlberg, and Catherine Mulligan. Bajagić’s richly stratified compositions contrast tropes of Western beauty with images of gendered violence culled from fan-gore, true crime, the dark web, and religious iconography. In amplifying cultural tendencies towards brutality and perversity, she clears a space in which to explore contemporary moralism. Fraser’s collages and assemblages likewise tackle the violence and virality of visual culture. An ongoing series of installations, The Making of, deconstructs selected films, a process driven by her wilful overexposure to cinema while she works in the studio. Karlberg parodies the cool conceptualism of the leading male painters of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool, in replica canvases stamped with gouache prints of her own ass. Mulligan’s uncanny paintings of “monstrous” womanhood draw equally from the language of art history and the distortion of digital imagery from fast fashion advertising and pornography.

Nicholas Pope | The Sunday Painter 
The Sunday Painter will feature a series of glass chalices and oil bar drawings by British artist Nicholas Pope in a solo presentation. Titled The Conundrum of the Chalices of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues, the series represents the seven deadly sins and seven virtues of early Christian thought: pride, lust, envy, avarice, gluttony, sloth, and wrath, as well as prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity. Pope collaborated with a master glassmaker to translate his exuberant mark-making into absurdist vessels. The installation continues the artist’s fascination with belief systems, which dates back to the resurgence of his practice in the 1990s following a period of serious illness. Pope first came to prominence in the 1970s among a generation of British sculptors including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Antony Gormley. 

Abby Robinson | Tilton Gallery 
Tilton Gallery will exhibit a new body of works by Abby Robinson, an emerging artist and recent Columbia MFA graduate whose intuitive and materially-based practice explores multiple forms of abstraction. Her approach is spontaneous, even playful, in its consideration of formal concerns, with material improvisations that cross the boundaries between painting, drawing, sculpture, and objects. The immediacy of drawing and line runs throughout Robinson’s work, manifested as mark, trace, and spatial delineation across media. The delicacy of her formal environments is accentuated by her palette of soft hues, punctuated with moments of saturation and the dynamism of her worked-upon surfaces. These elements, set in dialogue, underscore the living, breathing nature of visual experience that Robinson’s practice explores. 

Wendy Park | Various Small Fires
Various Small Fires will present a solo show of new works by Wendy Park. Catalyzed by the recent passing of her father in 2019, her paintings capture bittersweet childhood memories of her parents’ pursuit of the American dream during the 1980s and 1990s. Paying homage to their experiences as first-generation Korean immigrants and working-class vendors in Los Angeles, Park’s gaze zooms in on objects associated with the family’s labor at swap meets as well as snatched moments of leisure at the end of the working day. By sharing fragments of her personal reminiscences in high-key color, Park seeks to honor the communities in which she grew up and bring a greater sense of awareness to others.

Jessica Westhafer | Vito Schnabel Gallery
Vito Schnabel Gallery will dedicate a solo presentation to Jessica Westhafer, following her debut exhibition with the gallery last November. Westhafer’s darkly humorous imagery meditates on childhood experiences both real and imagined. Her unsettling paintings are fueled in part by her upbringing within a Jehovah’s Witness community in Arkansas. Yet in embodying the conflicting emotions and vulnerability of growing up, they also achieve a universality that invites viewers to relive their own formative memories. In a radical shift away from the human figure, Westhafer’s new body of work emphasizes the archetypal power of objects and places. 

Cecilia Fiona | VITRINE
For the gallery’s Independent debut, VITRINE presents a solo show by the Copenhagen-based painter Cecilia Fiona. Her dynamic paintings explore the existential mysteries of life and the interconnectedness of all living beings in a state of constant change. Fiona’s imagery is mystical and metamorphic, inhabited by hybrid human figures that dissolve into the natural world. Her lyrical dreamscapes are created using a mixture of rabbit skin glue and natural pigments, an intuitive process that yields ethereal traces of previous attempts. Fiona recently expanded her practice into three dimensions, painting on free-standing folding screens and making unique costumes for performances animating the gallery space. 

Harold Ancart, Tony Cokes, Julien Creuzet, Erik Parker, Mosie Romney, and Uman | White Columns
White Columns, New York City’s oldest alternative art space, will present its 2023 Print Portfolio, a set of six screen prints by Harold Ancart, Tony Cokes, Julien Creuzet, Erik Parker, Mosie Romney, and Uman. This will be the tenth print portfolio that the gallery has produced since 2012. The presentation will also introduce the intimately-scaled paintings of the New York-based artist Na Kim. 

 

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