Talk to almost anyone at Independent, Armory Week’s three-year-old alternative art fair, and they will tell you three things. They love the natural light, they love the open floorplan, and they love the atmosphere. The first two certainly help facilitate the latter, and all three, it seemed, helped facilitate brisk sales on opening day. The event, which politely describes itself as a “temporary exhibition forum” rather than a fair, opened at the former Dia Art Foundation building in Chelsea on Thursday with 42 participants, a new design, and a handful of notable guests, including former first daughter Chelsea Clinton and actor James Franco.
Like the Armory Show, Independent boasted a new layout this year. Designed by Christian Wassmann, all the elements of the floorplan are based on an angle of 29 degrees, which orients the visitor to true north and south rather than the city grid. The design kept visitors circulating throughout the boothless fair, and may have even encouraged some unlikely sales. “I think it’s democratic, in a way,” said Spruth Magers’s Andreas Gegner of Independent’s design. “So many collectors come in and dart into the booths they know. But here, you can’t tell what work belongs to what gallery.”
“There’s something about being here,” said Wilfried Lentz, of the eponymous Rotterdam gallery. “There’s not all this pressure you get at other fairs.” The art on view — or some of it, anyway — seemed to reflect this sense of playfulness, though many works were on a smaller, more commercial scale than in years past. At Lentz’s booth, a series of surreal photographs of carrots floating in a white frame for $7,500 by D.C.-based artist Michael Portnoy turned interactive: viewers were invited to press a button on the frame and listen to the artist recite a long-winded, semi-comprehensible joke. Waiting for the punchline that never comes, one recalls the phrase, “All carrot and no stick.”
Still, the carrot came for many dealers in the form of strong sales. In the fair's first hour Modern Institute of Glasgow sold at least three of Nicolas Party’s jolly rock sculptures, which are painted to look like pieces of fruit, for $1,500 to $3,000 a pop, depending on the size. (By mid-afternoon, it seemed as if the only Party piece that hadn’t been scooped up was a rock that was painted to look like a slab of raw meat. Perhaps Independent caters to vegetarian collectors.)
The Lower East Side gallery Untitled sold well over a dozen works on carbon paper by 73-year-old artist Joshua Neustein. The works, delicate brown and black cut-paper arrangements, were made between 1974 and 2011 and cost $4,150 each. Across the way, London gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art was displaying work by one of the younger artists at the fair, 26-year-old Colombia-born painter Oscar Murillo. Almost all of the works had sold by late afternoon, including stacks of three canvases propped against the wall and decorated with debris. (One had the word “Yoga” scrawled in big letters across the front.) The groupings were sold as a set for £12,000 ($18,800) each. Merillo, who is just out of art school, is currently doing a residency at New York’s Hunter College Studios.
Other successes included International Art Objects Galleries (formerly known as China Art Objects), of Los Angeles, which created a kind of funhouse environment with a hanging, multicolored mirror piece (available for $80,000) and spray-painted fake plants by Pae White on the windowsill. The gallery sold at least four works by California artist J.P. Munro, whose complex paintings and drawings look like a cross between Hieronymus Bosch and a battle scene in a video game. One large oil-on-linen painting, which took three years to make, sold for $45,000, while drawings sold for $4,500 each.
An exception to the playful tone was McCaffrey Fine Art, the Upper East Side gallery that specializes in Japanese art. Its muted but stunning presentation of postwar artist Jiro Takamatsu juxtaposed works on paper that he had delicately torn up and then repasted onto the page with a concrete sculpture that he whacked until the concrete began to crack. They share a surface texture — cracked and fractured — as well as a monochrome, minimalist elegance. By the end of the first day, almost all the works on paper had sold at prices ranging from $15,000 to $30,000.
“I have no complaints about this fair,” said dealer Jack Hanley, who sold at least 10 intricate portrait drawings by New Hampshire-based Aris Moore for $1,100 a pop. Indeed, the only complaint anyone seemed to harbor was that there now seemed to be too many good fairs and too little time and money to participate in them. The majority of the dealers at Independent have signed on to do another New York fair in May (either Frieze or NADA). “I’m hoping that by the time it comes along I’ve forgotten about this one,” said Hanley, when asked about the fast-approaching Frieze. Meanwhile, some dealers, like Spruth Magers and David Kordansky Gallery, are already doing two fairs concurrently, exhibiting at both Independent and the Armory Show this week. “It’s a great way to show our young artists and our more established artists at the same time,” said Gegner.
Spruth Magers, which sold a brand new textile collage by Sterling Ruby for $155,000, had perhaps the most striking booth. It invited artist Thea Djordjaze to create an installation on the spot without any idea what she would create. Throughout the last several days, Djordjaze added small, minimalist objects and constructions to the booth, which was anchored by a large, light blue carpet that covered both the wall and floor. “At first, she said she liked the carpet so much she wanted to leave it on its own,” said Gegner, smiling. “And we said, ‘Oh yes, that looks nice, but maybe you could add something else?’”
Perhaps the most bizarre display was that of London’s Hotel, which presented a group of three white massage chairs affixed with large paintings bearing a mute symbol, by the artist Alistair Frost. “We thought, let’s just take the wrongest thing you can show at an art fair — a white massage table,” said Darren Flook, who co-founded the fair with New York’s Elizabeth Dee. (In fact, they weren’t so wrong — by late afternoon one had sold for $18,000.) Asked how the fair has changed in the last three years, Flook said, “I think the first time around we put the whole thing together in four months. Now, people know their jobs.”
“Every year, I’ve said, never again,” he said. This year, he’ll be doing Frieze New York before he has to decide whether to revive Independent — which was originally intended as a one-off — for a fourth edition. How has the profusion of fairs affected him? “This has become a job,” he said. “I used to think I was a curator. Now I know I’m not.”