white light walls, the incandescent independent

March 9, 2016

The Independent Art Fair’s new location at Spring Studios in Tribeca is a luminous stage for this year’s roundup of over 40 exhibitors on four floors, organized by founding gallerists Elizabeth Dee and Darren Flook.  The floor-to-ceiling windows provide a flood of natural light that lends the artwork on display an immersive and playful intimacy that is immediately warm and welcoming, almost as if you are outdoors.

Charles Mayton’s shimmering tinsel mound, for example, playfully covers a large portion of the floor space at David Lewis, gleaming in the New York spring sunlight.  Its presence is emphasized by its proximity to the window-walls, making clear Independent’s stress on the artworks themselves. 

The fair is undoubtedly dominated by painting, with splashes of photography, sculpture, installation and literal splashes of performance.  The Box’s booth features a video game room by Corazon del Sol, which despite being tucked away in a corner of the 5th floor cannot resist the daylights intrusion and feels more like the quasi-pervy play room belonging to a teenager whose parents insist on leaving the door half open.  Plant with Lamp (2016), a potted plant sculpture by the Los Angeles based artist Evan Holloway at David Kordansky, sportively invokes this feeling of being in an outdoor playground, brimming with incandescent objects irresistible to the eye and tempting to touch.

Wolfgang Tillmans’s photograph at Maureen Paley furthers the charmingly fun setting, with its colorful spectrum reminiscent of disco balls and bad juke box lighting.  No doubt the adolescent in all of us can relate to that.  The indexical marks lining a section of the booth at Peres Projects by Donna Huanca are residuals of a performance that took place during the shows setup.  Physical traces of the playful act are accompanied with several paintings by Huanca, all bringing to mind, along with the performance piece, the body at work, or play.  An amalgamation of Yves Klein’s body works and Helen Frankenthaler’s color field paintings, Huanca’s furthers the lively tone of the fair.

The ground floor features what they call Independent Firsts and the galleries in this basement-like conclave are just that: Independent Art Fair beginners.  The space and artwork are more intimate and lack the lustrous light of the three floors above.  However the artworks on display are delightful and delicately crafted, and the exhibitors are sure to someday climb the stairway.