More than two years of tremors in the art market have accelerated the reshaping of an industry where transformative change has been talked about much more than it has been acted on. The latest structural shift sees a powerful auction house with its own financial challenges allying with one of New York’s best-known art-fair organizers.
Sotheby’s and Independent announced on Monday that they have entered into a multiyear commitment that will bring Independent 20th Century art fair — focused on art made between 1900 and 2000 — to the Breuer building in Manhattan starting in 2026. The agreement represents a first-of-its-kind partnership between notable players in the auction and art fair sectors. It is also an indication of how differently Sotheby’s New York headquarters may approach public programming after the company officially takes up residence in the Modernist landmark at 945 Madison Avenue this November.
“When we acquired the Breuer, we knew it would open a whole world of possibilities, but we didn’t know what they were,” Charles Stewart, Sotheby’s chief executive, said in a group interview on Sept. 3. “This is one of those possibilities that’s come about because of this architectural icon.”
Independent 20th Century will debut at the Breuer from Sept. 24 to 27, 2026, with more than 50 exhibiting galleries — a 50 percent increase in size compared to the four editions of the fair staged at Casa Cipriani inside the Battery Maritime Building. The recent iteration, which closed Sunday, hosted 31 galleries.
Although Sotheby’s and Independent declined to disclose further terms of the deal, both companies confirmed that other prospects under discussion include additional programming and exhibitions.
“None of us at this table are interested in a landlord-tenant relationship; we’re interested in going beyond what fairs can be,” Elizabeth Dee, Independent’s founder and creative director, said during the interview with Stewart; Independent’s chief operating officer, Sofie Scheerlinck; and the gallerist Alma Luxembourg, who is also a member of Independent 20th Century’s founding committee.
Luxembourg, a partner at the London and New York gallery Luxembourg + Co and a former director of Sotheby’s private sales for contemporary art in Europe, was the matchmaker in the new alliance. But Dee added that it was “mission driven.”
“We got in a room, started talking about all the things that are working and not working in culture, and we’re all aligned in terms of how to work together to move forward and innovate,” Dee said.
Although its effect on Sotheby’s bottom line will be minimal, the pact has tangible value to the company. Madeline Lissner, Sotheby’s global head of fine art, said working with Independent will help position the company as “more than an auction house,” and the Breuer as a cultural hub that attracts attention “for moments that are not just selling-focused,” as the company is also seeking to do with its new locations in Hong Kong and Paris.
The financial ups and downs of Sotheby’s and Patrick Drahi, the French-Israeli telecom billionaire who acquired the auction house in a take-private deal in 2019, have received particular attention amid the art market’s larger struggles. Sotheby’s reported $2.2 billion in auction sales in the first half of 2025, a decrease of 4 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Its $4.6 billion in auction sales in 2024 represented a year-over-year decline of 28 percent. (Both figures topped their equivalents at Sotheby’s rival, Christie’s, which posted auction sales totals of $2.1 billion from January through June 2025 and $4.2 billion in 2024.)
Sotheby’s sold a stake of between 25 percent and 30 percent to ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, last fall, in a deal valued at $1 billion. The auction house then laid off 68 its 1,800 staff members worldwide in December, trimming its work force by around 4 percent, it said Sunday.
A slew of contemporary galleries have permanently closed since that time, while four art fairs — including the ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory — have canceled or postponed forthcoming editions.
An alliance between an auction house and an art fair — and by extension, the galleries who show there — has been a long time coming. Ever since the 1973 evening auction of contemporary artworks owned by the New York taxi magnates Robert and Ethel Scull, at what was then Sotheby Parke Bernet, auction houses and galleries have operated less and less as occupants of distinct sectors of the art trade than as competitors whose specialties increasingly overlap in shared territory.
The best known example is the two-part evening auction in 2008 at Sotheby’s London in which Damien Hirst bypassed his galleries to sell more than $200 million worth of his new art directly to buyers.
But the door swung in the opposite direction, too. In 2020, for instance, the late real estate tycoon Donald Marron’s collection of Modern and postwar artworks, estimated to be worth $450 million, was sold jointly by Acquavella Galleries, Gagosian and Pace Gallery rather than an auction house. These milestone events were natural outgrowths of longer-running processes, as major auction houses built up robust private-sales departments, and public auction prices increasingly influenced the demand for new works by the same artists in galleries.
Independent offers two annual fairs by invitation; the second, a larger contemporary fair simply called Independent, is held in New York each May. It will also double its square footage by moving to Pier 36, an event venue at 299 South Street.
Compared with Art Basel, a storied competitor in Switzerland that typically includes about 300 galleries, there were 82 exhibitors at the most recent edition of Independent in May 2025, and the company employs only eight full-time staff members.
On the other side, partnering with Sotheby’s could unlock the resources of a multinational corporation that draws Modern art buyers who typically acquire at auction. But will the fair have to trade in some of the autonomy that has underwritten Independent’s success?
“Sotheby’s will not have any curatorial voice within our exhibition,” Dee said when asked. “Why would we, after 17 years, not want to pursue a curatorial vision in the Breuer building?” She added, “Why would we want to become a part of the monoculture we’re fighting against?”
Conceived as the first custom-designed site for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1966, the Breuer temporarily hosted exhibitions by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016-20, and the Frick Collection, 2021-24. Sotheby’s only stewards works of art for, at most, a few months at a time — and all in the service of passing them on to new owners at the highest prices the market will bear.
Both Sotheby’s and Independent believe this distinguished setting matters to how buyers see — and value — works of art.
Under the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, in partnership with PBDW Architects, parts of the Breuer’s interiors are being remodeled to function largely as permanent exhibition spaces, a boon for Independent’s galleries and a sharp counterpoint to the cubicle format of the average art fair. The venue change will also lower exhibiting galleries’ costs by an average of 25 percent compared with Independent 20th Century’s most recent edition, Scheerlinck said.
Dee cautions that doubling the fairs’ footprints will not mean doubling its exhibitor capacity. Doing so would improve the organization’s margins but would cut against its quality-over-quantity ethos.
“If it were a pure numbers game, we would stuff the Breuer and we would stuff Pier 36, but we’re not going to,” Scheerlinck said, “while being very mindful of course that everyone has to survive.”
Joe Nahmad, the founder of Nahmad Contemporary gallery, who is also on Independent 20th Century’s founding committee, said that “what excites me about this new wave on the Upper East Side is how architecture and world-class exhibitions will be coming together to make the historic feel contemporary.”
Whether the experience will “spark passion in a new generation of collectors,” as Nahmad predicted, is still to be seen.
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