Independent takes a big leap this year: With 76 exhibitors, most of them bringing solo or two-person shows, it’s now bigger than Frieze (about 68 galleries), and it’s moved to Pier 36, a hangar-like space on the far end of Chinatown, to accommodate the change. (They even hired the architects So-Il, who previously did Frieze’s tent on Randall’s Island.) The fair remains tightly curated and esthetically consistent. The downside is that it can be hard for work that breaks the mold to stand out, like Johan Samboní’s carved-brick figures in an installation at SGR Galería (110) or Chakaia Booker’s recycled rubber-tire sculptures, paired with Miguel Rio Branco’s vivid photographs of street scenes at David Nolan (303). But the upside, which is considerable, is that you can count on a broad vista of strong, tasteful, harmoniously colorful work. Here are some other standout artists.
Michael Bühler-Rose (203)
The New York-based artist Michael Bühler-Rose has been traveling to India for 30 years, first to study philosophy and Sanskrit as a young Hare Krishna, and lately to oversee a team of artisans in Mysore. Together they produced the fabulous marquetry panels he’s showing here with the Belgian gallery Stems (203). The panels depict fantastical versions of studio bookshelves, which hold Neil Young mixtapes, a pile of Bhagavad Gitas, and bottles of Topo Chico seltzer, using only the natural colors of various types of wood. The Topo Chico label is made with yellow jackfruit wood; the red star on a bottle of San Pellegrino, from African padauk.
Carrie Schneider (212)
For this year’s Venice Biennale, the New York-based artist Carrie Schneider used a specially constructed room-size camera to make a kilometer-long photograph. With David Peter Francis (212) at Independent, she’s showing a discrete section of the same project, which renders an eight-second clip from the middle of Chris Marker’s cult sci-fi short “La Jetée” as an oversaturated sequence of faces on a long sheet of paper tightly rippling between two walls of the booth. It’s a thrilling convergence of grand ambition and art fair architecture.
Nina Hartmann (400)
Born in Miami, based in Queens, Nina Hartmann creates resin lightbox sculptures that she is showing concurrently with Silke Lindner (400) here and at Lindner’s Tribeca gallery. They are genuinely unusual, combining glitchy, internet-sourced photography; geometric shapes that evoke astrology, esoteric religious traditions or tattoos; and luminous, not-quite-candy colors, making for objects that are at once appealing and hard to place.
Kim Stolz and Raphael Egil (506)
In a fair — and fair week — awash with painting, the German artist Kim Stolz and Raphael Egil of Lucerne, Switzerland, showing here at YveYANG (506), stand out for their serious approach to the medium. Egil’s half-finished-looking dark green horse, especially, practically trembles with philosophy — you can see the painter struggling over questions of truth, pleasure, memory, and mimesis in every slick, stylish brushstroke. And Stolz’s smaller geometric efforts are trancelike in their intensity.
John Brooks (508)
The poet and artist John Brooks of Los Angeles titles each of the 6-foot-high colored pencil drawings that line the walls of Diane Rosenstein Gallery’s booth (508) with a phrase from a W.S. Merwin poem, “Islands Are not Forever,” a meditation on impermanence and pleasure. Together they show a continuous panorama of the pop and art historical celebrities and sites that inhabit the background of the artist’s imagination: Marlene Dietrich, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s cabin in Davos, John Wayne in a bunny suit, Miss Piggy. With workmanlike drawing, neon colors, wallpapery backgrounds and meme-like knowingness, they feel very of the moment — so much so that I felt as if I were still looking at them after I left.
Day passes are $48; a run-of-show weekend pass is $75. May 15-17 at Pier 36, 299 South Street, Manhattan; independenthq.com.
The post Six Unforgettable Artists at the Biggest Independent Fair appeared first on New York Times.
