Despite oversaturation, market wobbles, the relentless pace, the sheer expense and every other complaint you may hear this week from a gallerist on a cigarette break, it’s art fair time again in New York — but that’s not without its merits. Fairs like Spring Break, Volta and Clio give younger and less established artists chances to see and be seen while providing city dwellers glimpses of what’s happening elsewhere.
Independent 20th Century, a major fair held in a historical setting — the 1908 Battery Maritime Building at South Ferry, on the southern tip of Manhattan — adeptly walks a narrow line between safety and excitement. This year is the third edition, and its tight curation features 32 exhibitors, some of which are sharing booths and nearly half of which are Independent 20th Century debuts.
The 20th-century focus guarantees that you’ll find plenty of familiar names. Pablo Picasso is here (with a fine lineup of prints at John Szoke Gallery), as are Karel Appel (blaring into your rods and cones at Almine Rech) and Sol LeWitt (with vibrant, curvy drawings at James Barron Art). And a strong contingent of Brazilian artists, along with a couple of female artists who never quite got their due, means you’re likely to find some surprises, too. These are the booths I found most striking.
Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) is most famous for her groundbreaking textile art, and the rich purple weaving that opens this exhibition — and the fair as a whole — shows why. (She also lived and worked at nearby Coenties Slip.) A precarious intersection of pattern and line, color and emptiness, the weaving seems to shimmer as it first disappears into the background and then takes over the room.
But also on display, along with half a dozen other weavings, are lesser-known small sculptures and works on paper that translate Tawney’s inward, minor-key aesthetic into such forms as a pale blue box of iridescent feathers or a grid of peppercorns glued to a page of old Scandinavian black letter.