Independent 20th Century returns to New York City for its third edition and will be accompanied by the fair’s online platform, which will launch as a preview on August 29. First held in 2022, the fair is dedicated to artists and international avant-garde movements between 1900 and 2000 and will take place from September 5-8, 2024 at Cipriani South Street in downtown Manhattan’s historic Battery Maritime Building, which was built in 1908.
Image above: Abdias do Nascimento, Oricha’s Mother (Mother Nature), 1971, Buffalo, New York, USA, Courtesy Galeria MaPa, São Paulo
Independent 20th Century brings together internationally recognized and lesser-known artists and stories to redefine the canon of 20th century art. Led by founder Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s newly expanded curatorial team has nominated 32 exhibitors for the 2024 edition, 15 of whom are making their Independent debut, including Alison Jacques, London, Gomide&Co, São Paulo, and Fair Warning, New York, a curated auction platform founded by Loïc Gouzer.
Independent 20th Century will present a broad spectrum of approximately 65 artists, including solo presentations highlighting the evolution of artistic creation, 20th century women artists, Black and Indigenous artists from the Americas and beyond, and works from the 1990s. Several galleries will also honor artists whose work is curated by major institutional exhibitions, including the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.
Elizabeth Dee, founder of Independent, explains: “Independent 20th Century expands our understanding of the canon by presenting important artists and movements that are currently being re-evaluated in our cultural landscape. We provide a platform for well-informed collectors and museums to actively engage with opportunities to explore new art historical themes. Our mission as a fair is to connect the past with the present of contemporary art.”
Solo surveys
Nahmad Contemporary pays tribute to the profound but under-appreciated legacy of Raoul Dufy, who emerged in early 20th century Paris with works that embody the experimental painting techniques of the Impressionists and the bold colors of the Fauves. The presentation features paintings and works on paper created between 1920 and 1948, showing the artist at the height of his career. The John Szoke Gallery will present a constellation of works on paper by Pablo Picasso that are among the nearly 2,500 prints the artist produced over the course of his 70-year career. Almine Rech will focus on the artistic development of Karel Appel in the 1950s and 60s, when he entered into a long and fruitful collaboration with the New York gallery owner Martha Jackson. The Dutch-born artist was a founding member of the short-lived but highly influential European avant-garde group CoBrA, which was active from 1948 to 1951. Alison Jacques introduces Lenore Tawney, an avant-garde figure of fiber art in the second half of the 20th century. Tawney’s groundbreaking woven forms, which achieved a strong sculptural presence, are her best-known series. Over the course of five decades, however, she developed a diverse body of work that includes large-scale sculptural installations, box-like assemblages, intricate collages and graphic drawings. James Barron Art presents a selection of Sol LeWitt’s vibrant gouaches that explore variations in color and form, as well as extraordinary works from the R series that employ folding, tearing and cutting as methods of drawing. Diane Rosenstein Gallery will show significant works from 1959 to 1998 by Sarah Schumann, a German figurative painter and collagist who used her personal life as a queer artist to create heroic depictions of women in post-war Europe. She was a pioneer in the feminist scene of 1970s Berlin, joining the activist collective Bread and Roses and co-curating the seminal feminist survey exhibition Women Artists International 1877-1977.
Women artists, from surrealism to the present day
Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a group exhibition bringing together 12 pioneers of surrealism from ten countries and four continents: Butterfly Time, titled after a work by Toyen, which will also be on display at the recently opened gallery in New York. The artists on show include British painter and photographer Eileen Agar, Czech avant-garde artist Bĕla Kolářová, who used everyday objects in experimental photographic works and assemblages, and Lebanese surrealist Juliana Seraphim, whose dream-like paintings intensively explore the liberation of female sexuality and agency, nature and spirituality. James Barron Art will feature works on paper by self-taught artist Janet Sobel, who is increasingly known for her influential contributions to Abstract Expressionism during her brief career in New York in the 1940s, skillfully combining influences from the folk art of her native Ukraine with Surrealism and all-over abstraction. In a joint presentation by Galerie Michael Janssen and Marisa Newman Projects, Susana Wald will present her feminist view of international surrealism. Wald’s series Mujeres de (The Wives of) from the 1980s mixes humor with physical transformation and shows women in the form of furniture inspired by the professions of their male partners. The American artists presented by Van Doren Waxter, Rosemarie Beck, Zoe Longfield and Vivian Springford, embody a spirit of contemplation of people and landscapes before they were stylistically categorized as abstract or expressionist painters. Each of them experimented with a wide range of media and created unique works with a strong sense of materiality. Luxembourg + Co. presents works by Simon Hantaï and a response by contemporary artist Rebecca Ward, who draws on Hantaï’s pioneering method of ‘pliage’, in which the canvas is folded before the paint is applied. Ward deconstructs the linen surfaces of her paintings by fraying them into individual threads, exposing the underlying support structures. Dutton makes his independent debut with a double exhibition of Rose deSmith Greenman, who began making art in her 70s and created an astonishing number of drawings over a seven-year period while struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. She interpreted her Boston home, garden and family with great attention to detail, creating transformative works from her imagination.
Black and indigenous artists from North and South America and beyond
RYAN LEE presents an intergenerational exhibition of two artists who share a desire to celebrate the humanity, strength and beauty of the black body. Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé created refined and romantic depictions of black figures that referenced classical sculpture. His rare early casts, including African Boy Dancing (1937), are juxtaposed with newly published works by Emma Amos from the 1980s, a time when she was inspired by media images of black athletes and dancers such as Josephine Baker and Bill T. Jones. Galatea and Simões de Assis will jointly exhibit the work of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Heitor dos Prazeres. Personal memories, scenes from the everyday life of the Afro-Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and carnival celebrations were the main themes of his paintings. As a musician, singer, composer and founder of two of the first samba schools in Rio, he also played a pioneering role in the history of samba. The Galeria MaPa exhibits paintings by the Afro-Brazilian artist, scholar and statesman Abdias do Nascimento as well as a collection of sacred iron tools associated with religious Candomblé ceremonies. Nascimento was a committed pan-African activist and a leader of the black movement in Brazil. He began painting in the late 1960s while living in self-imposed exile in the United States during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Gomide&Co presents a double exhibition by Julia Isídrez and Maria Lira Marques. Following a centuries-old indigenous tradition in Paraguay, Isídrez draws on the techniques of her Guarani ancestors to create her sculptural vessels, which are characterized by an expressive vocabulary of whimsical animal figures from the Paraguayan Chaco. The artist, who lives in the Jequitinhonha Valley in south-eastern Brazil, has concentrated on the Meus Bichos do Sertão series since the 1980s: mineral pigment paintings of imaginary animals that spring from the artist’s inventive spirit. OSMOS presents historical and contemporary works by Australian Aboriginal artist Richard Bell, who uses his art as a political vehicle to provocatively challenge Western and white power structures. Bell’s work is both an indictment of the legacies of Western colonization – particularly the dispossession of Aboriginal land by the British – and a statement of solidarity with the global struggles for social justice, particularly the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement.
A look back at the nineties
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with the MACK FOUNDATION will explore the innovative ceramic practice of Heinz Mack. As a co-founder of the German post-war group ZERO, Mack developed his own language of light and color and is considered a leading representative of kinetic art. Less well known is his intensive creative exploration of ceramics, which began rather accidentally in the 1990s. The exhibition Venus Over Manhattan presents early works by Brad Kahlhamer and shows the foundations of his exploration of cultural hybridity and identity, which was influenced by his study of Native American ledger drawings and his immersion in the gritty New York art scene of the 1980s. Salon 94 features life-size sculptures from the 1980s and 1990s by John Ahearn, a New York-based artist who has worked in the South Bronx for nearly four decades. Ahearn’s cerebral busts and dynamic wall reliefs express the humble nobility and emotional fervor of his sitters’ lives and inner selves in painted plaster, bronze and fiberglass. Squeak Carnwath, who is exhibiting at Jane Lombard Gallery, has been active in the Bay Area since the 1970s. Her signature painting style incorporates text, repeated symbolic iconography and abstract patterns in works that are at once intimate and open to all, forming a catalog of her thoughts and daily life. Cristin Tierney Gallery and Abattoir Gallery join forces to present works from the 1990s onward by Lithuanian-born, US-based artist Audra Skuodas, who has created thousands of paintings, drawings and artist books over five decades in Oberlin, Ohio. Skuodas explored the role of man in the universe and the Japanese Zen Buddhist idea of Satori: the special moment of consciousness when the infinite and the finite become one.
Institutional revaluations
For its first participation, P420 will show a selection of works by leading Italian painter Filippo de Pisis, coinciding with his appearance in Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa at the 60th Venice Biennale. Venice Biennale. The P420’s reinterpretation of the artist’s work focuses on his works on paper depicting the faces and bodies of young men, captured with immediacy and loose contours, as well as the expressive power of his later works. Other notable artists who will be represented at the fair and at the Venice Biennale 2024 include Italian surrealist Bona de Mandiargues (niece and student of Filippo de Pisis) and Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins at Richard Saltoun Gallery, and Paraguayan ceramicist Julia Isídrez at Gomide&Co. Other artists announced for Independent 20th Century have recently been the subject of notable retrospective exhibitions at major international museums. These include: Raoul Dufy (Nahmad Contemporary) at Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai; Heinz Mack (Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art with MACK FOUNDATION) at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; Abdias do Nascimento (Galeria MaPa) at Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Heitor dos Prazeres (Galatea and Simões de Assis) at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro; and Janet Sobel (James Barron Art) at the Menil Collection, Houston. Works by Lenore Tawney (Alison Jacques) were included in a number of museum exhibitions in 2024, including Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; and The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican Centre, London, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Tawney will also be featured in the exhibition The Artists of Coenties Slip, opening October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Thursday, September 05 – Sunday, September 08, 2024
WHERE?
Battery Maritime Building
10 South St
New York
NY 10005
United States
