Independent 20th Century brings blue-chip deep cuts to the Breuer

Where can you find one of Philippe Parreno’s famous snowmen, a dialogue between the 20th-century heavyweights Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, and dye-transfer prints by Joel Sternfeld all under one roof this autumn? Look no further than the storied Breuer building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the home of auction house Sotheby’s and, later this month, the new venue of the Independent 20th Century fair (24-27 September).

Following Independent editions all over Manhattan in the past 17 years, as well as one in Brussels, the dealer, curator and fair founder Elizabeth Dee has pulled off perhaps the most impressive coup yet—getting Sotheby’s top brass to host the fair in the Breuer building, which the auction house acquired in 2023 for $100m.

“It just seemed like a natural fit,” Dee tells The Art Newspaper. She describes conversations with Sotheby’s chief executive Charles Stewart that “resulted in a commitment right away. Everything just fell into place.”

Every inch covered

Not only will the fair programme every inch of the Breuer building, but this edition of Independent 20th Century will be 75% bigger than previous iterations, with around 57 exhibitors and more than 130 artists. Dee says it has been a dream of hers for decades to curate a show at the Breuer. That dream persisted while she ran her own gallery and watched a roster of high-profile institutions occupy the Breuer over the years, from the Whitney Museum of American Art (which commissioned the building from Marcel Breuer in the 1960s, then moved to the Meatpacking District in 2015), the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Met Breuer (2016-20), followed by the Frick Collection’s Frick Madison (2021-24) and now Sotheby’s.

Dee is excited about the many threads and connections that will be drawn across numerous in-depth and rigorous presentations at the fair. For instance, there will be what she calls “a special conversation” between Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana via Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a second-time exhibitor, and longtime participant Nahmad Contemporary, respectively. On the Breuer’s fourth floor, in front of its signature large geometric window, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will present Klein works primarily from the early 1960s including a Blue Rain installation and several of his signature Cosmogonies, paintings that bear the marking of natural forces like rain or wind. Nearby, Nahmad Contemporary’s solo stand of works by Fontana will focus on the city of Venice and its impact on the evolution of the artist’s works between 1956 and 1961.

Both Klein and Fontana “deal with a connection to light and nature”, Dee says. “They were friends who admired each other throughout their lives and shared this obsession and fascination with physical space and breaking the boundaries of traditional painting.” (Fontana was also the subject of a large survey show at the Met Breuer in 2019.)

The Berlin mainstay Esther Schipper’s presentation at Independent 20th Century will celebrate 40 years of “relational aesthetics”, the term coined by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud. Its stand will include works by Philippe Parreno, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Angela Bulloch and Pierre Huyghe. “Relational art is kind of the touchstone of [Schipper’s] art and the generation that she helped guide,” Dee says.

Moving on up

Art market

Independent 20th Century adds 75% more exhibitors as it moves to the Breuer Building

Carlie Porterfield

Independent 20th Century’s takeover of Sotheby’s building is not only a significant expansion from previous editions at the much smaller Cipriani South Street, but also a major achievement for an organisation that launched at the height of the Great Recession in 2008 as a small non-profit named X (long before Elon Musk’s rebranding of Twitter).

“I got together a group of 100 gallerists, artists, museums, institutional leaders, historians, academics, critics—basically an entire ecosystem of the art world,” Dee says, adding that X was designed to exist for 12 months to address the challenges happening at the time, and occupied the former Dia Art Foundation building in West Chelsea for a year.

“It became a kunsthalle and a kind of town hall, where people signed on to the philosophy that we needed to think about how we worked, and exhibition-making for a new generation,” Dee says. “We had 75,000 people come through in 12 months.”

The fledgling organisation also hired a little-known curator who had recently finished her master’s at Bard College, Cecilia Alemani. “She was our only employee, we said here’s 40,000 sq. ft, here’s the exhibitions we want to do and we have no budget,” Dee recalls.

That combination of seriousness and scrappiness has helped propel X and the ensuing fair all the way to the Breuer building nearly two decades later.

“I’m excited to see Independent bring its distinct vision into Sotheby’s extraordinary spaces at the Breuer, particularly this fall, which marks the 60th anniversary since the Breuer opened,” says Madeline Lissner, the auction house’s global head of fine art. “The combination of the fair’s curatorial strength and the building’s architectural legacy will create a remarkable experience for galleries, collectors and the public alike.”

• Independent 20th Century, 24-27 September, Sotheby's, Breuer building, New York