{"id":1936475,"date":"2026-05-14T23:45:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T20:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1936475"},"modified":"2026-05-14T23:45:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T20:45:57","slug":"the-best-booths-at-independent-new-york-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1936475","title":{"rendered":"The Best Booths at Independent New York 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tFar from the hubbub of Frieze\u2019s monster midtown affair sits Independent, newly relocated to Pier 36, a 70,000-square-foot venue on Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side. It remains the most refined offering in New York Art Week\u2019s buffet of fairs, though the term \u201cboutique\u201d may soon feel strained: the new location is more than double the size of the fair\u2019s former home at Spring Studios, accommodating an expanded roster of exhibitors and ambitions. (The venue\u2019s architect, SO\u2013IL, also designed Brooklyn\u2019s Amant Foundation, and that same sleek sensibility translates well here.)<\/p>\n
\n\tElizabeth Dee, the fair\u2019s founder, told ARTnews<\/em> that its eyes are on greater attendance and institutional influence; last year\u2019s edition reported a 25 percent uptick in foot traffic. Seventy-six exhibitors are participating this year; notably, 26 of them mark an artist\u2019s New York debut. The opportunity has not been wasted: several of the strongest booths spotlight rising talents, the majority of whom seem inclined, at least glancingly, to register the histories unfolding far beyond the art-fair circuit.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn that vein, don\u2019t miss Spr\u00fcth Magers\u2019 timely re-staging of\u00a0TV Text & Image (PEOPLE WITH AIDS)<\/em>, a self-described \u201celectronic theater\u201d by the late\u00a0artist Gretchen Bender. Conceived in the 1980s, this contemporary iteration interrupts the fair\u2019s usual programming with a dispatch from a more familiar, dystopic register.<\/p>\n
\n\tBelow, more memorable presentations at this year\u2019s\u00a0Independent Art Fair, running through Sunday.<\/p>\n
\n\tOmar Mismar\u00a0makes his New York debut with \u201cRoot and Branch,\u201d a show of abstract paintings on salvaged PVC felt banners once used for advertising and now bleached and cracked, appearing at first glance like ancient maps or barren terrain. A closer look reveals them as palimpsests concealing the personal and political: faintly visible are graffiti slogans linked to the 2019 wave of anti-government protests across\u00a0Lebanon. Mismar pairs these works with mosaics; they recall those on view in\u00a0National Museum of Beirut while spinning a more personal mythology. Faceless fragments of male bodies encountered on dating apps are elevated here into artworks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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David Peter Francis\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of David Peter Francis and Independent.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tA section of one of Carrie Schneider\u2019s gargantuan photographs, a hit at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale, commands a corner of David Peter Francis\u2019s booth. Produced using a monumental camera, the sequence unfurls an eight-second excerpt from Chris Marker\u2019s 1962 sci-fi featurette La Jet\u00e9e,<\/em> a trippy meditation on nuclear annihilation in which its time-traveling protagonist discovers there\u2019s no outrunning human nature. Here, Schneider repurposes the booth into a cinema, albeit slowing the story to a pace through which we may imagine a new ending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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YveYANG<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy YveYANG and Independent.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tThe paintings at Independent reflect the fair\u2019s signature position as the cool option of Art Week, where much of the figuration elsewhere toward the languid and meme-aware. That\u2019s what makes the work of Kim Stolz and Raphael Egil at YveYANG so head-turning. These are works of efficient near-abstraction\u2014like Egil\u2019s green horse and its rider, their charge smearing into comet-like trails of motion. The horse\u2019s body seems held together only by fraught, searching strokes. Stolz\u2019s small, geometric paintings, meanwhile, function as compact portals: removed from place, but not space.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Kiang Malingue<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of Kiang Malingue and Independent.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tTseng Chien-Ying, another artist making his New York debut, is presenting new works, created in Taiwan and at the artist residency 99 Canal, at Kiang Malingue. Tseng\u2019s ongoing practice charts epic themes of mythology, power, and violence, distilled here into their most intimate expression: hands, ears, and genitals straining against the picture frame. They may be removed from our spiritual plane, but the psychological world on view looks much like our own\u2014crowded with culture and mostly alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Silke Lindner\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Courtesy of Silke Lindner and Independent.\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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\n\tAmid this year\u2019s notably tactile spread, the Miami-born, Queens-based sculptor Nina Hartmann shines. Hartmann is showing a new body of resin lightboxes, more of which are on view at Silke Linder\u2019s Tribeca gallery under the name Actualization Machine<\/em>. Here, irregularly shaped sculptures illuminate sordid U.S. government intelligence projects, the sort typically buried in the dredges of the digital realm\u2014exactly where Hartmann went fishing for the photographs framed throughout. A viewer can easily enjoy the hyper-saturated panels that riff on reverence and cosmology, but a deeper reading requires homework.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tUffner & Liu brings together the work of Venezuelan artist\u00a0Bernadette Despujols and Brazilian artist Sacha Ingber in a duo presentation that threads questions of motherhood, migration, and the wandering self across textured painting and near-functional design. Ingber\u2019s backgammon table can certainly sustain a game, though water may not hold in her perforated vessel\u2014two empty bodies shaped like homes, tenuously bridged. Meanwhile, in Despujols\u2019s textured paintings, the lights are on and everyone is home: family members crowd the frame and seem to merge with vegetation in an ecofeminist vision of generational continuity. But this is life, not fiction. In one work, a quiet figure crouches beside a snarling dog, a flicker of domestic tension cutting through the chatter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
\n\tIn Colombia, despair might taste like red brick dust. As attendants at SGR\u2019s booth explained, inexpensive construction bricks\u2014ubiquitous and often left exposed in buildings\u2014are commonly scraped by people struggling with cocaine addiction, who use the residue to extend their supply. This, of course, simplifies complex social conditions that reduce individuals to their worst days. Johan Samboni returns to them a degree of selfhood by reclaiming red brick as the medium of one of the fair\u2019s most impactful booths. He has carved a legion of figurines in the pre-Columbian Indigenous tradition, arranged in unblinking rows along the booth walls and bearing imperatives as titles\u2014\u201cResist,\u201d \u201cCollapse,\u201d \u201cEmbrace.\u201d It was no easy feat hauling this metaphorical mountain of brick to New York, but the result feels all the more necessary for it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/spruth.png?w=1024″] Far from the hubbub of Frieze\u2019s monster midtown affair sits Independent, newly relocated to Pier 36, a 70,000-square-foot venue on Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side. It remains the most refined offering in New York Art Week\u2019s buffet of fairs, though the term \u201cboutique\u201d may soon feel strained: the new location is more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1936475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1936475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1936475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1936475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1936475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1936475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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