The expanded Independent 20th Century fair offers abstraction of all stripes

The Independent 20th Century fair in New York has moved from Downtown to Uptown and expanded its footprint substantially, but in its fifth edition it is still fundamentally doing what it set out to do in 2022: provide visitors with opportunities to discover works from the previous century by long-overlooked artists or rarely exhibited bodies of work by familiar Modernists. Now, with 57 exhibitors (an 84% jump from last year’s 31) spread across four floors of Sotheby’s Marcel Breuer-designed headquarters on the Upper East Side, the canon-expanding fair has in many ways found the perfect venue: what better place to make the case that an artist, movement or set of works belong on the family tree of Modern art history than to show their work in a purpose-built museum building?

Art fairs

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

Eileen Kinsella

This edition of the fair (until 27 September) shows plenty of worthy canonical addenda, from lesser-known Surrealists (Richard Saltoun Gallery’s stand devoted to the Austrian Italian artist Manina is a knockout) and Pop artists (Garth Greenan Gallery’s delightful show of Rosalyn Drexler to accompany a solo exhibition at the gallery) to the women of Abstract Expressionism (from Berry Campbell, Olney Gleason and Bueno & Co) and the Black artists of the Soho scene (in a joint stand from Salon 94 and Ryan Lee Gallery). One particularly strong cohort at the fair is artists who took unconventional approaches to abstraction.

The most location-appropriate work in the fair may be at the stand of Galerie Lelong, which is devoted to works by the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-71) made between 1955 and 1964, and includes two paintings that previously hung in the Breuer building in 1973—when the Whitney Museum of American Art gave Mason her first and, to date, only institutional retrospective. The stand also features works that debuted at the influential Green Gallery run by the dealer Dick Bellamy, where Mason and other abstractionists anticipated the coming of Minimalism and hard-edged abstraction.

“This was a really pivotal period for Mason, the late 1950s into the 60s, and we see the work she was making during this time as a precursor of Minimalism,” says Katherine Chan, a director at Lelong. The stand features eight paintings, whose compositions range from muted vertical forms on pale backgrounds to vivid bands of yellows, oranges and blues, as well as canvases evocative of a cityscape and a seascape. Works are priced between $100,000 and $200,000.

Across the room, the New York gallery Ortuzar has also focused its presentation on one artist’s production over a decade, specifically the painter Mary Grigoriadis’s canvases from the 1970s. The stand features six square paintings: three at her smaller 12in-by-12in format, three at her 66in-by-66in scale. They feature ornate shapes and patterns rendered with increasingly sculptural quantities of paint, evolving from crowded, symmetric configurations earlier in the decade to slightly askew compositions with large areas of raw canvas later.

“In addition to co-founding the feminist art space AIR Gallery, Grigoriadis worked as an assistant to the Guggenheim Museum curator Lawrence Alloway when he was preparing his influential exhibition Systemic Painting,” says Maddie Klett, an associate director at Ortuzar. “So she has one foot in hard-edged painting and one foot in the Pattern and Decoration movement.” Works on the stand are priced at $25,000 for the smaller paintings and $95,000 for the larger canvases.

The San Francisco-based Gallery Wendi Norris, meanwhile, has devoted its booth to Marie Wilson (1922-2017), an artist from the Bay Area who spent much of her life in France and Greece. When, in 1952, she and her partner (the fellow Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen) moved to Paris, Wilson worked with members of the movement including André Breton, and her works of this period share some forms with Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta and others. But from there she evolved an idiosyncratic style of abstraction that calls to mind Buddhist thangkas, the mystic compositions of Hilma af Klint and the otherworldly forms and hues of the transcendental painters of the US southwest.

“Even though the work has this strong influence from European Surrealism, it remained distinctly American,” says Melanie Cameron, a senior director at Gallery Wendi Norris. “She sometimes almost felt as if something was making the work through her.”

The gallery’s stand features 18 works by Wilson, a mix of paintings and drawings, many from her most productive Surrealist period in the early 1950s, as well as subsequent symmetric compositions in more saturated tones. The drawings are priced from $24,000 to $42,000, while paintings are priced between $65,000 and $285,000. The solo show in New York this week follows a well-received exhibition of Wilson’s work at the gallery in San Francisco at the beginning of the year.

Around a corner on the Breuer building’s second floor, the Minneapolis-based Bockley Gallery has devoted its stand to a capsule survey of works that the Ojibwe abstract painter George Morrison (1919-2000) made in his home state of Minnesota. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art just did a show devoted to Morrison’s New York work but, being a gallery from Minnesota, the works he made when he moved back there have always been close to our heart,” says Emily Marsolek, an assistant director at Bockley Gallery.

The works on view span small drawings featuring elaborate, all-over compositions, luminous paintings whose palettes and discernible horizon lines hint at landscapes, and a large bas relief made of found and shaped wood. “There is always a fascination with texture and capturing the materiality of the landscape in his work, and this series he started in 1964, which he called ‘wood collages’, pushed that fascination in a new direction,” Marsolek says. Works on the stand are priced from $20,000 for works on paper to more than $1m for Landscape: Wood Collage (1983).

Visitors who prefer their abstraction completely void of real-world referrents will find nirvana in Hauser & Wirth’s solo stand devoted to nine works on paper by the Swiss healer and self-taught artist Emma Kunz (1892-1963). Her elaborate and colourful geometric configurations on grids of graph paper, made with the aid of a pendulum, were not art for Kunz, but instruments in her practice as a healer and therapist to help her identify and treat ailments. Virtually unknown as an artist during her lifetime, her work has become internationally recognised since the 1970s, although only rarely in the US—a four-artist exhibition at the Drawing Center in 2005 being the main exception.

“The goal was to offer an overview of her practice, including works with and without grids, more colourful examples but also monochromatic pieces,” says Carlo Knoell, a senior director at Hauser & Wirth. “We also installed one work flat, rather than on a wall, to give a sense of how she would have made these.” Works on the stand are priced between $280,000 and $310,000.

“During her lifetime, she considered these to be part of her work as a healer,” Knoell says. “But she also said: ‘My art is tested for the 21st century.’”

The same could be said for much of the most compelling work at Independent 20th Century, which may not have received the attention it deserved in the titular era but is primed for a breakthrough now. Pathbreaking abstraction is on display throughout the Breuer building, with additional strong presentations including Luxembourg & Co’s stand examining the influence of Constructivism on Sue Fuller (1914-2006) and her prismatic choreographies of thread; James Fuentes Gallery’s pairing of monumental canvases from Al Held's (1928-2005) Alphabet Paintings series, which blur the boundaries between text art and hard-edged abstraction; and Weinstein Gallery’s historical survey devoted to the electric compositions of Hilla Rebay (1890-1967) and the artists who showed at her Museum of Non-Objective Painting.

"What connects these extraordinary artists is their relationship to the avant-garde movements of their time, inclusion that stood in direct defiance to the era's norms," Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder and chief executive, tells The Art Newspaper. "It's a testament to abstraction that it united political and social discourse across a broad cultural spectrum. What was once radical is now embraced."

• Independent 20th Century, until 27 September, Sotheby’s, 945 Madison Avenue, New York