Dreams and nightmares abound at the New York independent art fair

Some may be anticipating a shift towards abstraction in the contemporary art market as a whole, but figuration is still at the center Independent art fair this year. With 69 exhibitors from galleries around the world spread across multiple floors of Tribeca’s Spring Studios, the fair held its VIP preview Thursday, May 11, and by the end of the day, 15 galleries had sold out all of the artwork on their booths. , a sign that the buyer is interested in the identity. -before, the fanciful paintings and sculptures do not fade yet.

The grotesque and moribund aspects of mid-2000s surreal imagery are largely absent from the fair, replaced by softer explorations of the psychic weight of embodiment, such as Jessica Stoller’s striking small-scale sculptures of eerie female figures. exhibited with New York. PPOW Gallery.

“With this corpus, she reflected on the history of knowledge related to the female body,” explains Ella Blanchon, associate director at PPOW. “She reflects on how this knowledge has been lost, controlled or inhibited, and therefore women have not been able to take care of themselves.”

Delightfully strange table porcelain from Stoller, Uuntitled (Eve’s herbs) (2022), which depicts an old woman tending to a pile of abortive weeds, was sold at the end of the VIP day, along with the rest of the booth to two PPOW artists, including a collection of paintings Grace Carney’s warm bodies.

This emphasis on depicting inner life or hypnagogic alternate worlds abounds throughout the fair, which, now in its 14th year, maintains a cool boutique atmosphere and a historically informed bent (Independent 20th Century, the edition September of the fair, focuses specifically on the re-contextualization of 20th century art).

This abiding interest in women’s stories across time is particularly clear in the inclusion of Gina Litherland, a 68-year-old Wisconsinite whose detailed and psychologically charged oil paintings of blind witches and glowing wolves are on display at the Chicago gallery. Corbett vs. DempseyIs standing.

“Gina does quietly, and without any interest in the artistic fashion movement, what she has been doing for forty years,” explains John Corbett, one of the gallery’s co-founders. “We absolutely love him for it.” The works available from Litherland cost between $16,000 and $35,000.

This edition of Independent features 20 solo or two-artist booths featuring Bipoc (Black, Indigenous and Artists of Color), including stunning presentation by New York gallery’s D’angelo Lovell Williams Top Images. Williams’ poignant and haunting photographs and weaves use dynamic, performative compositions to follow the arc of black queer intimacy – the artist’s sold-out booth featured pieces ranging from $2,500 to $3,500.

Nowhere is Indepedent’s adventurous spirit more evident than in the presentation of artist Will Thornton on the Ricco Maresca Gallery stand on the first floor of the fair.

“Will was a hairdresser, completely self-taught,” says gallery co-founder Frank Maresca, a longtime advocate for art that challenges orthodoxies. “The first time I looked at his work, it hit me straight away. He talks a lot about the past and the classics, but also about the future. He sees them as portraits, and they are – I love because I have looked at art all my life, and with Will’s work, I am completely transported; of the countless paintings I have seen in my life, I cannot refer to anyone else when I look at his works.

The pieces in question – dark, gnarled representations of glistening viscera – are rendered from life, thanks to the palm-sized models, reminiscent of the old-world worry dolls, which Thornton fashions as the first stage of his artistic process. Thornton’s largest oil on linen compositions are priced at $6,000.

The charming, age-old flatness of Wendy Park’s larger-than-life still lifes on the Los Angeles-based gallery’s stand Various small fires shows viewers that even small dreams can lay the groundwork for a different kind of belonging.

“This specific job is about his family’s family picnics; they couldn’t afford to go on vacation any longer, so they had these family barbecues,” says Adrian Zuniga, director of the gallery’s Dallas outpost. “You see all these visual references to Korean elements of a very American experience. It was an embarrassment for the artist growing up, but now she looks at them endearingly, through the prism of her childhood, c It’s a very graphic aesthetic, then, and Park’s bright, thoughtful works were sold out by the end of Thursday’s preview.

If nightmares can be differentiated from dreams by virtue of waking the sleeper, then artist Michelle Uckotter’s furious, voyeuristic oil pastels of a girl alone in an empty house work like an artistic espresso.

“She’s inspired by the interstitial spaces of a house, really influenced by a sense of American horror,” says Alec Petty, founder of New York gallery King’s Leap, which offers Uckotter’s bizarre compositions at inclusive prices. between $13,000 and $18,500. “A lot of characters are less self-portraits than dolls or mannequins on which she can put gestures, which she can control as she pleases. She plays with ideas of prescribed femininity and how these figures might be the ones pursued or the ones pursued.

All the inventive and surprising figuration gives the fair an undeniable visual punch which, based on opening day sales, has drawn closer to collectors. As one sarcastic VIP overheard in the aisles put it: “It was a bit unfinished in the past, but for 2023 they absolutely everything worked out.

• Independentuntil May 14, Spring Studios, New York