The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Independent 20th Century

Seeing art in Marcel Breuer’s brutalist masterpiece feels like reconnecting with a lost love. Independent 20th Century launched in 2022 at the Battery Maritime Building and has now moved to the Breuer, allowing it to expand to nearly twice the size of previous editions.

Almost 80 percent of the presentations focus on one or two artists, making many of the galleries – yes, galleries, not cookie-cutter white booths – feel like museum exhibitions in miniature.

While all of this work is ‘historic’, per the fair’s premise, plenty of it still feels as urgent and intentional as it likely did when it was made. In fact, one thought bedevilled me as I walked the fair: why does so much of the art made today feel like it won’t survive into the next century? 

The fair offers irresistible treats for smart collectors, but it should also be required viewing for younger artists – particularly those finding easy success through likes and subs.

Here’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly from this year’s edition of the fair.

Mimmo Rotella, Untitled, c. 1960, décollage on canvas, 27 3/4 x 25 in. Courtesy of VOENA.

The Good: Voena’s solo presentation of Italian artist Mimmo Rotella’s layered, torn-poster collages is like encountering Rauschenberg’s long-lost Italian cousin and a group of lusty drawings of men made during the 1950s by Andy Warhol (shown by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) is bracing enough to make any fairgoer stand to attention. 

But my award for the most audacious offering goes to Salon 94 and Ryan Lee’s collaboration, which is packed with a surprisingly coherent mashup of works by Emma Amos, Norman Lewis, Camille Billops, David Hammons, Vivian Browne, Frederick J. Brown and Jean-Michel Basquiat – all orbiting Ed Clark’s vividly erotic abstraction, Erection Paris (1961).

Vivian Browne, Guard of the Palace, 1971-1972, acrylic on canvas, 45 3/4 x 46 x 1 1/2 inches ©️ Vivian Browne. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94.

Honourable Mention: Weinstein Gallery introduces viewers to the art of Hilla von Rebay, better known as the Guggenheim Museum’s co-founder and inaugural director and a noted champion of modernist abstraction. Mariane Ibrahim’s two-person exhibition, featuring American artist Lorraine O’Grady and Uruguayan artist José Gamarra, unites O’Grady’s canny reflections on race and sex with Gamarra’s helicopter-strewn landscapes.

The Bad: I appreciate the inclusion of late twentieth-century artists whose work goes beyond eye-catching paintings for the wall. But Esther Schipper’s combo platter of Young British Artists Angela Bulloch and Liam Gillick, as well as French artist Pierre Huyghe, looks more like the set of an experimental play. With rotary phones, light works and a poetic text piece, it reads as a random collection of eccentric stuff rather than a thoughtful presentation honouring the conceptual agenda of each artist. 

Similarly, David Nolan Gallery and Gió Marconi’s collaboration, titled The Obsessive Image, cobbles together a puzzling array of historic and (for some reason) contemporary works. The overall effect is less than the sum of its parts. While it’s always fun to run into a Martin Kippenberger gnome statue, the connection between British pop artist Richard Hamilton’s crayon-on-paper depiction of American violence (Kent State, 1970) and an abstract rubber-tire sculpture by Chakaia Booker from last year is lost on me.

Honourable Mention: The works of Yves Klein presented by Lévy Gorvy Dayan are certainly museum-quality but something about seeing them all together feels underwhelming. Perhaps a decade of seeing International Klein Blue in the branding of nearly every art-related startup has dulled its impact.

GENERAL IDEA, White AIDS, 1993, gesso on canvas, 24 by 24 inches. © The Estate of General Idea, Courtesy of The Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

The Ugly: Work by Canadian collective General Idea, presented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash, brings back one of the bleakest moments of the late twentieth century. Their AIDS logo sculptures and paintings include White AIDS (1993), a monochromatic work that recasts Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE logo in the manner of a Robert Ryman painting. 

Two of the collective’s members, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, died in 1994 of AIDS-related causes. They were among the many significant artists associated with New York’s downtown art scene whose lives were cut short by the disease, including Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Having died in the prime of their lives, each artist is condemned to being a twentieth-century figure. They deserved to have careers stretching long into the twenty-first.

John Deakin, Francis Bacon at Roland Gardens, South Kensington, 1967, signed by Francis Bacon in blue ink verso, vintage silver gelatin print, with paint and ink on the surface and verso, paper size: 27.9 x 35.5 cm (29629-JOD) © The John Deakin Archive. Bridgeman Number: JDK5317910. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

Honourable Mention: Michael Hoppen Gallery covers the blood-red walls with ‘a small but precious collection of paper found on the floor of Francis Bacon’s studio’, assembled by the dealer over more than two decades. Archival images from Bacon’s South Kensington studio reveal a chaos that tips from disorder into derangement, and the mélange of works here – including portraits of the artist by John Deakin and Peter Beard – feels both caustic and intimate.