NEW YORK, NY.- Independent 20th Century announced the artistic program for this year’s inaugural edition, selected by founding curatorial advisor Matthew Higgs and co-produced in collaboration with leading international galleries. Over 70 artists, 22 solo and duo artist presentations and special projects have been commissioned especially for this new fair, presented by 32 galleries.
Embracing a hybrid model and digital opportunities for storytelling, the fair will continue to present its critically acclaimed online platform, which will open the week before the event, from September 1, and run through September 30. Home to over 15 new features produced for Independent 20th Century, the online platform constitutes a research-oriented, digital preview to the physical fair.
A list of the solo, duo and special project presentations follows below:
Dada and Surrealism | Galerie 1900-2000*
Galerie 1900-2000 will exhibit works on paper, paintings and photographs by artists associated with Dada and Surrealism up until the 1960s, including Hans Bellmer, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Pierre Molinier, Francis Picabia and Raoul Ubac. Following its precursor, the Galerie des Quatre Mouvements, the Paris gallery has championed Surrealism since its inception in 1981, and expanded into the field of photography in the 1990s. The group show at Independent 20th Century will reflect the historic intersection between photography and Surrealism.
Vincent Smith | Alexandre Gallery
Alexandre Gallery presents mixed-media paintings and watercolors from the 1970s and 80s by Vincent Smith (1929-2003). A transformative encounter with Paul Cézanne’s paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952 inspired Smith to quit a job in the postal service and train as a professional artist. His early urban scenes were infused with the energy of the jazz clubs and pool halls he frequented in Harlem and his native Brooklyn. Galvanized by the struggle for civil rights in the 60s, he joined the Black Arts Movement and became increasingly engaged with social and political subjects. Alexandre’s solo presentation focuses on Smith’s deep connection with African history and culture, forged during his extensive travels in West Africa from the 70s.
Wallace Berman, André Cadere, Jay DeFeo, John Giorno, George Herms and François Morellet | Hervé Bize and Nicole Klagsbrun*
A joint presentation by Hervé Bize and Nicole Klagsbrun will establish a dialogue between the two gallerists’ missions to nurture artistic experimentation since the 1980s. The group show will feature European conceptual and abstract artists represented by Bize, such as François Morellet and André Cadere, and members of the American Beat Generation selected by Klagsbrun, including the poet and performance artist John Giorno, assemblage sculptor George Herms and mixed-media practitioners Wallace Berman and Jay deFeo. Bridging between the two continents with a focus on the period from the 1960s to 80s, the works present will manifest a strong relationship to language across different media and overlapping generations of artists.
Stanislao Lepri | Galleria Tommaso Calabro*
Galleria Tommaso Calabro presents the work of the visionary Italian painter Stanislao Lepri (1905-1980). Descended from a noble family in Rome, Lepri followed a diplomatic career to become the Italian consul in Monaco and Brussels. He resigned after the Second World War to pursue painting, encouraged by his lover, the Italian-Argentinian Surrealist Leonor Fini. The two lived together in Rome and Paris, where they formed an enduring ménage à trois with the Polish writer Constantin Jelenski. Like Fini, Lepri conjured up otherworldly universes populated by magical or demonic figures and animals bordering on the monstrous. But Fini rejected any easy comparison between their work. Lepri “had such a world of his own that it seemed simplistic to say that he ‘followed’ me”, she wrote. “No, never.”
Ron Gorchov | Cheim & Read
Cheim & Read will present works by Ron Gorchov (1930-2020) that have never been seen in public before. Born in Chicago, Gorchov was among a number of artists in New York in the 1960s and 70s who pushed at the limits of abstract painting and chafed at the formal purity of Minimalist sculpture. After years of experimentation he invented his signature form in the late 60s: “saddle” or “shield” shaped canvases pulled over bespoke warped stretchers. In a 2011 interview, Gorchov recalled his opposition to the conventional rectangular format and his quest for “a more intentional form that would create a new kind of visual space”. Playing with scale, vibrant color contrasts and biomorphic motifs, he continued to make the sculptural curved-edge works for the rest of his life.
Before and After Imagism | Corbett vs. Dempsey
Corbett vs. Dempsey’s group presentation unites works by various artists who were active in Chicago before, during and after Imagism. Roger Brown, Ed Flood, Art Green, Philip Hanson, Christina Ramberg and Richard Wetzel were among the figurative iconoclasts who coalesced around the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and showed together at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their wild blend of Surrealism, Pop, folk art, cartoons and humor posed a heady alternative to the cool abstraction then dominant in New York and Los Angeles. Exploring points of continuity and divergence between the Imagists, the selection will also include works by fellow traveler Robert Lostutter, the earlier painters Miyoko Ito and Gertrude Abercrombie, and later figures such as Diane Simpson, Brian Calvin and Rebecca Shore.
Ivens Machado | Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel*
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel will show sculptures and works on paper by Ivens Machado (1942-2015). The Brazilian artist came of age in the 1970s under the country’s military dictatorship, part of a generation that succeeded the abstract Neo-Concrete movement. Working in video, photography, drawing and sculpture, his primary medium, Machado diverged from the interactive protest art of his peers to pursue a formally rigorous yet politically engaged practice. Incorporating raw construction materials such as concrete, rebar, timber, plaster and broken glass, Machado’s sculptures combined a brutalist aesthetic with soft curves and protrusions alluding to the human body. The self-taught artist resisted imposed readings of his work, focusing instead on the physicality of his craft and aesthetic quest for “the primitive”.
Juanita McNeely | James Fuentes*
James Fuentes will present paintings, drawings and ceramics by Juanita McNeely (b. 1936), a pioneer of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York. For more than 50 years, McNeely has explored the vitality and suffering of the human figure. Her bold palette and expressionistic style testify to early encounters with modernist works by Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Max Beckmann. Yet McNeely’s visceral portraits of women’s bodies are a drastic departure from the traditional nude, confronting taboos of sexuality, menstruation and abortion. A survivor of multiple medical traumas, the artist has described her work as a fundamental expression of her life. McNeely defied doctors’ expectations after a serious spinal cord injury in 1982, continuing to make large-scale works into her ninth decade.
Chico da Silva | Galatea*
Galatea will spotlight the self-taught Brazilian Indigenous artist Chico da Silva (1910-1985). Born in the Amazon rainforest, he began making art as a house painter in Fortaleza on the northeastern coast. Da Silva used found materials such as charcoal, bricks and leaves to create murals on the walls of fishermen’s houses. His work was championed by the Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz, bringing Da Silva to national and international attention. His vibrant and richly patterned gouaches of birds, fish and dragons are rooted in the Indigenous cosmologies and oral storytelling traditions of northern Brazil. Founded by Antonia Bergamin, formerly of Bergamin & Gomide, the São Paulo gallery is making its Independent debut.
Gerald Jackson | Gordon Robichaux and Parker Gallery
Gordon Robichaux (New York) and Parker Gallery (Los Angeles) jointly present the category-defying work of Gerald Jackson (b. 1936). Through a six-decade career, Jackson has ranged across drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, fashion, printmaking and poetry. After moving to New York from his native Chicago in the 1960s, he became immersed in the downtown art and jazz scenes, socializing with the likes of David Hammons, Keith Haring and Ornette Coleman. His expansive mixed-media practice has employed debris salvaged from the street, spray-paint stencils and photocopying technology. Jackson’s works can be dense with cross-cultural symbols or pared back to color-field abstraction. An ongoing series meditates on the universal, even spiritual, connotations of blue and green.
Al Loving | Garth Greenan Gallery
Garth Greenan Gallery will present 1970s works from the estate of Al Loving (1935-2005). In 1969, Loving became the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His early abstract paintings drew on the vocabulary of Minimalism and Op Art, characterized by prismatic forms, disorienting figure-ground relationships and acid colors. Feeling “stuck”, Loving soon broke away from the strictures of his acclaimed signature style. He destroyed many paintings, turning the scraps into his first torn canvas works. Informed by memories of his mother and grandmother making quilts, the series assembled dyed canvas strips into richly layered wall hangings. Less well known are Loving’s cardboard collage reliefs, which continued his evolution towards a freer, more intuitive abstraction.
Al and Channing Hansen | Susan Inglett Gallery*
Susan Inglett Gallery will present a dual show of the Fluxus pioneer Al Hansen (1927-1995) and his grandson Channing Hansen (b. 1972). While serving in the US Air Force during the Second World War, Al Hansen performed what may have been the first Happening, pushing a piano out of a bombed-out building in Frankfurt, Germany. Later restaged as Yoko Ono Piano Drop, the action was characteristic of his drive to merge art and life. Hansen’s “event scores” for Happenings had their roots in John Cage’s influential 1958 composition class at the New School in New York. Today they directly inform the computer-generated algorithms used by Channing to make his hand-knitted textiles.
Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle | Inman Gallery*
Inman Gallery presents paintings and works on paper by Toni LaSelle (1901-2002). The American modernist developed a language of geometric abstraction that continually experimented with color, space and movement. She assimilated influences from European avant-garde movements such as Cubism and the Bauhaus, as well as from contemporary American painting. Inman’s presentation will focus on the transformative period in LaSelle’s work in the late 1940s, when she spent her summers studying with the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Robert Duran | Karma
Karma will present paintings and works on paper from 1974-79 by the California-born artist Robert Duran (1938-2005). The period marked the height of Duran’s career in New York, when he participated in the Whitney Museum’s surveys of American art and exhibited at Bykert Gallery. After the gallery’s closure in 1977 he withdrew from the public sphere, only showing his artwork to close friends and family until his death. Following the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist’s estate in 2019, Karma is returning his color-saturated abstract works to view.
Joan Miró | Luxembourg + Co.
Luxembourg + Co. will show a group of Masonite paintings executed by Joan Miró (1893-1983) in 1936 with a response by contemporary artist Peter Fischli (b. 1952). Miró famously declared in 1927 that he would “assassinate painting”. For the next decade he experimented relentlessly with new techniques and materials. Working in his native Catalonia in summer 1936, amid the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Miró made 27 paintings on exposed Masonite, a hardboard commonly used in construction. Mixing paint with sand and tar, he added rough textures and accents of color to his characteristic calligraphic forms, giving these a sculptural presence. Positioned on easels, a selection of Miró’s Masonites will be displayed at the fair alongside a group of Fischli’s painted cardboard sculptures resembling humble cans of house paint or food—a juxtaposition that questions the historical division of art into traditional media.
Mario Schifano | Gió Marconi
Gió Marconi will show 1970s paintings by the Italian artist Mario Schifano (1934-1998). A charismatic autodidact, Schifano rose to prominence in 1960s Rome with his bold enamel monochromes. His international debut in the 1962 New Realists show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York catapulted him into the orbit of American Pop. Canvases appropriating the Coca-Cola and Esso logos gave way to multimedia experiments reminiscent of Andy Warhol, as Schifano mixed photography, film, left-wing politics, legendary parties and a short-lived psychedelic rock group. Gió Marconi presents Personaggi TV, a series of freeze-frame television images retouched in lurid color that were first exhibited in 1970 at the Studio Marconi in Milan.
Giorgio di Chirico | Nahmad Contemporary*
Nahmad Contemporary will explore the lesser-known Gladiators series of the Greek-born, Italian modern master Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). The artist’s early Metaphysical paintings of eerily deserted city squares had a profound impact on the Surrealists. But from 1919 onwards, De Chirico turned away from modernism to embrace motifs from antiquity and traditional painting techniques. Groups of Roman gladiators frozen in combat became a major theme of his neo-classical work in the late 1920s, beginning with a series of large-scale canvases created for the home of the Parisian art dealer Léonce Rosenberg.
Gérard Schneider | Perrotin
Perrotin will dedicate its booth to the Swiss-born painter Gérard Schneider (1896-1986), whose estate the gallery recently began representing. With vivid gestural paintings and works on paper ranging from the 1940s to the 80s, this solo presentation anticipates a major retrospective at Perrotin’s Matignon gallery in Paris this October. Schneider was a leading proponent of mid-century Lyrical Abstraction alongside his friends George Mathieu, Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages. Their instinctual, dynamic approach to painting was part of a broader artistic tendency that emerged in post-war Europe as a counterpart to American Abstract Expressionism. Schneider likened the “emotional interiority” of abstract art to music: something to be felt deeply rather than simply seen.
Joe Ray | Diane Rosenstein*
Diane Rosenstein will present a solo show devoted to the Los Angeles-based artist Joe Ray (b. 1944). After serving in the Vietnam War, Ray began making art in the emergent Los Angeles scene of the late 1960s. His early translucent sculptures explored the perception-altering properties of plastics and cast resin, in concert with Southern California’s Light and Space movement. He was part of the inaugural graduating class of CalArts in 1973, mentored by Nam June Paik and John Baldessari, and was a founding member of Studio Z, a collective of Black artists engaged in performative actions around Los Angeles. Never confined to a specific style, Ray’s far-ranging practice encompasses sculpture, painting, photography and performance.
Lee Quiñones | Ross+Kramer
Ross+Kramer will present a solo show of works by the New York street art pioneer Lee Quiñones (b. 1960). Born in Puerto Rico and raised on the Lower East Side, Quiñones was still in his teens when he began creating intricate graffiti with the tag “LEE” on the city’s streets and transit system in the 1970s. A member of the Fabulous 5 crew and a peer of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he spray-painted more than 100 subway cars before shifting to a studio practice in the 1980s. Ross+Kramer will feature studies for classic graffiti drawn from Quiñones’ archive together with recent paintings on canvas incorporating art historical influences, such as the Hungarian Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy.
Kate Millett | Salon 94 Design*
Salon 94 Design will present sculptural furniture and works on paper by the feminist writer, activist and Fluxus artist Kate Millett (1934-2017). Best known as the author of Sexual Politics from 1970, Millett was embedded in the downtown New York art scene in the 1950s and 60s. Her first solo show in the city, held at the Judson Gallery in 1967, marked the debut of a series she later called “fantasy furniture”. These anthropomorphic wooden sculptures were a playful take on coupling and domestic life, made a few short years before her landmark critique of patriarchal power.
Barbara Levittoux-Świderska | Richard Saltoun
Richard Saltoun will present the work of Polish textile artist Barbara Levittoux-Świderska (1933-2019). She emerged as part of a post-war generation who trained at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts and transformed the craft of tapestry into an avant-garde art form—a kind of soft sculpture—in the 1960s and 70s. Like peers such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Levittoux-Świderska adopted a weaving approach that responded to rural folk traditions and improvised with locally sourced materials. Her inventive, earthy-colored hangings combine natural fibers such as hemp or wool, and even pine needles and birch bark, with man-made wires, plastics and industrial scraps.
Francesco Clemente | Vito Schnabel Gallery
Vito Schnabel Gallery presents Dormiveglia, a 1998 series of nine monumental paintings by Francesco Clemente (b. 1952). The title comes from an Italian expression for the state in between sleep and waking, dream and reality. More than ten feet high, Clemente’s canvases depict fragmented goddesses at the horizon between sky and sea or land, merging with animal forms and the elements. Evoking figures from the tarot, these cryptic, metamorphic symbols attest to the artist’s long engagement with the arcane and the sacred. A key figure among Italy’s Transavanguardia painters, Clemente has built a figurative lexicon that embraces influences from classical mythology to Eastern philosophy, informed by his nomadic life.
Balthus, Chris Burden, David Drake, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta and Carla Prina | Shin Gallery*
Shin Gallery will exhibit a number of artists that it has supported since its inauguration, including Balthus, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Carla Prina, Chris Burden and David Drake. The presentation will recreate the apartment of gallerist and collector Hong Gyu Shin, which brims with artworks, memorabilia and artifacts—reflecting his approach to collecting as an impassioned enterprise of actively reshaping the received view of art history. This is exemplified by David Drake, the first known enslaved African-American potter, who carved words and poems into his vessels and jugs: a quiet act of resistance in the face of his masters and the egregious practice of slavery in the United States. Encouraging critical, intelligent viewership, the exhibition will treat Drake’s work as equally important in the art historical canon as that of Balthus, a giant of 20th-century modernism who continues to challenge audiences today.
Paul Gardère | Soft Network*
Soft Network, a new nonprofit supporting emerging artist estates and foundations, presents works by the Haitian-born American artist Paul Gardère (1944-2011). Trained in New York City, where he relocated as a child, Gardère forged a mixed-media practice that shifted in style and form, yet consistently engaged with the complexities of cross-cultural identity. He returned to live and work in Haiti between 1978 and 1984, an intensely prolific period in which he found his artistic calling: juxtaposing themes and symbols from his homeland with imagery from Western art and culture. Gardère viewed this hybrid symbolism as “a kind of metaphysical bridge building”.
*Indicates first time exhibitors.
