Sales were steady and aisles were crowded during the opening hours of Independent art fair’s VIP preview Thursday. Founded by gallerists Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook in 2010, Independent is now in its fifth year in the former Dia Art Foundation building in Chelsea and continues to be a manageably sized, light-filled alternative to the Armory Show’s fluorescent behemoth uptown. Instead of traditional booths for its more than 50 participants, the fair has an open floor plan, which, this year, has been designed by architects Andrew Feuerstein and Bret Quagliara so that every gallery’s space is based on a triangular shape.
Independent, which bills itself as a more curatorially-driven fair, has found an alternative model that also seems to be quite lucrative. They recently announced that they would stage a second iteration of the fair during the week of the November auctions in New York. There are other changes, too. While entry to past editions of the fair has been free, they’ve introduced a $20 ticket price for the first time this year — a measure, fair organizers say, that will help keep production costs down for participants.
“I think that we really approached it in a different manner in terms of how we give the galleries and we give the artists a voice first, and then we adapt to them,” said director Laura Mitterrand. “We have a lot of artists who are doing site-specific projects and they are much more involved in the organization and the result of Independent. I had meetings with artists throughout the past two months to show the space and then they responded to that because it’s such a beautiful building and has this history with art that really compels them to want to intervene in a particular way.”
While artists tend to say they dislike attending art fairs, Mitterand believes they are not averse to Independent. “In terms of participating, but even visiting, it’s very often that I hear artists say that it’s the only fair they come to see. They don’t usually want to see fairs. It’s not their environment and they don’t feel comfortable in it, but we definitely have a lot of people coming. I think that the artists appreciate how it’s an environment that they can work with and be proud of.”
At least one artist at the fair confirmed Mitterand’s claim. Julia Wachtel, who has a solo show of paintings at Elizabeth Dee’s booth, said Independent is “a little bit more palatable” than other fairs. “Just the structure of this fair is less commercially set up,” she said. “It’s more interactive in terms of the flow from one booth to another. I do think it is a fair that is more about the art and less about the commerce.”
Wachtel, who recently joined Dee’s stable, makes large colorful paintings that juxtapose images taken from the news with cartoons. Thirty minutes into the fair, the smallest of three works on view had sold for $35,000.
Sales were also swift at White Columns’s booth, where a majority of the works had sold within the first hour. All of Patrick Berran’s paintings had been snatched up and all of the ceramic works by Magdalena Suarez Fremkiss had also sold. A small vase with the face of a woman on the front and a bowl depicting a geisha both went for $1,500. Fremkiss, who has been selected to participate in the Hammer Museum’s “Made in LA” biennial this summer, currently has her first-ever solo gallery exhibition at White Columns. “I think she’s 84 although I can’t exactly confirm that,” said director and chief curator Matthew Higgs, who is a creative advisor to the fair. “A lot of the work is making explicit reference to various types of vernacular pottery and various forms of folk imagery and often integrating that with comic book imagery from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.”
Works by another octogenarian ceramicist, Alice Mackler, were on view at the booth of Lower East Side gallery Kerry Schuss. Schuss chose to do a solo presentation of seven of Mackler’s ceramic works from 2013 and 2014 (two of which had already sold) and several paintings from 1968. “You can see these female figures work their way through all of her work,” he said. Mackler, like Fremkiss, didn’t have a solo show until she was in her 80s.
An emphasis on underrepresented artists definitely permeates the presentations at Independent, but in the case of Cologne’s Galerie Susanne Zander, artists weren’t so much underrepresented as totally unknown. “The theme of the booth is ‘Artists Unknown.’ We know nothing about our artists except for what we see in the body of the work that we show,” said gallery representative Monika Koencke.
“We started with outsider art, but we are really interested in these borderline positions in art. Recently we’ve been more and more interested in what we call conceptual outsider, which is often connected to these archives.”
These unknown works include pornographic drawings by William Crawford that were found in an abandoned house in Oakland, California, in the 1990s. Fairly explicit images of sexual encounters drawn in pencil, Crawford’s works were selling for €750 each. Also on display was a series of Polaroids depicting a man dressed in women’s clothing taken from a photo book titled “Martina Kubelk: Clothes — Lingerie.” In various guises, the photographer looks unabashedly into the camera. The set of 388 self-portraits had sold to a museum in Europe that Koencke chose not to name for about €500,000.
Like most of the other exhibitors we spoke to, Koencke voiced that it was a pleasure to show at Independent. “This is our fourth year. The public is amazing. They always seem to be in the perfect mindset to understand our very conceptual booths. The openness with the booth architecture is really so much better than the booths at traditional art fairs. You see the light of day, which is amazing.”
