Artists who defy categorisation take pride of place at Independent 20th Century – The Art Newspaper

The Independent 20th Century fair opened to VIPs on Thursday (4 September), with participating dealers offering deep dives into canonical artists and showing jewel-box surveys of works by shape-shifting Modernists and Postmodernists. The latter group accounts for some of the fair’s most memorable stands, giving visitors the opportunity to take a crash course in under-recognised mid-century abstractionists, singular Post-Minimalists and artists who pursued their own interests against the trends of their times.

“Sometimes the runway for these shows is two or three years,” Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder and chief executive, says of the timeline for bringing certain stands together. “It’s an organic process to some extent. If there’s an important exhibition that isn’t travelling to New York but should be, we’ll try to bring a show by that artist to the fair.”

A prime example of this process at work is on display in Galerie Lelong’s stand, which is devoted to paintings from the 1960s and 70s by Elda Cerrato (1930-2023), an Italian-born artist who moved with her family to São Paulo and then Buenos Aires, and spent most of her life between Argentina and Venezuela.

“She was not very familiar to many people until two years ago, when she was featured in the Bienal de São Paulo,” says Mary Sabbatino, a vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong.

Across eight paintings, the presentation charts Cerrato’s evolution from gestural abstraction to her grid-based Epopeya del Ser Beta (The Epic of the Beta Being) series, the Maps and Multitudes series juxtaposing maps and generic groups of people, and finally her El sueño de la casita propia (The dream of owning a little house) works featuring crowds, fragments of maps and landscapes, and images of rural homes set against bright colour gradients.

“I wanted to give people here a full view of her work,” Sabbatino says. “As her son, who was here earlier, said: ‘She was always searching.’ She was also heavily influenced by the mystic George Gurdjieff and very interested in transcendence.” All the works on the Lelong stand are priced between $80,000 and $100,000.

Also staging a capsule survey of a woman artist not often exhibited in New York is Rosenberg & Co, whose stand is devoted to Gertrude Greene (1904-56). Works on view include drawings and cut-paper collages in a Constructivist vein, a striking composition of painted wood (Black and White Construction, around 1942) and, following her abrupt turn to painting, works in an Abstract Expressionist mode from the late 1940s up until a few months before her death at age 52.

“It is in essence a mini-survey beginning in the 1930s,” says Kadie Ross, a director at Rosenberg & Co. “She was shown somewhat during her lifetime, but we feel there is definitely a need for greater recognition of just how innovative she was.” Works on the stand range in price from $10,000 to $300,000.

Another iconoclast deserving greater recognition is Gregory Gillespie (1936-2000), whose engrossing and surreal paintings from the late 1960s to the 90s are being shown by Forum Gallery (which first exhibited him in 1966). His dense, alluring and often grotesque compositions marry elements of Old Masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder with collage and trompe l’oeil techniques that pull the viewer in to examine half-glimpsed details or understand exactly what they are seeing.

“He received a residency at the American Academy in Rome, living there from 1964 to 1970, and was heavily influenced by the city’s iconography and textures,” says gallery staffer Cheryl Fishko. “He often worked on wood panels, which allowed him to build up these layers of material to create the look and feel of the plaster walls of Roman apartment buildings.”

Some of the works on the stand, which range in price from $40,000 to $165,000, will be featured in a larger presentation of Gillespie’s work opening at Forum Gallery’s space on Park Avenue next week (12 September-8 November). He is also the subject of a new documentary, The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie, which has been shown at several film festivals this summer.

New generation of art-history buffs

There has been much hand-wringing in the art trade about “the great wealth transfer”, reflecting fears that collectors who have sustained the market for the past several decades are leaving their fortunes to Millennial and Gen-Z heirs who have little interest in visual art. This edition of Independent 20th Century offers a rebuttal to those fears, at least as far as the dealer sector is concerned. Dee points out that several of the participants are very young galleries and some presentations by older galleries were organised by their younger staffers.

“This is the first year we’ve seen this younger generation of passionate scholars of Modernism,” Dee says. “These young gallerists are meeting each other and realising they all share a passion for this work.”

One of the youngest galleries at the fair, the three-year-old Miami Beach- and New York-based space Jupiter, is showing the wide-ranging painting practice of Joe Zucker (1941-2024). While the works’ black, white and grey palette is consistent, they represent a selection of different series—from a large painting made by covering a grid of cords attached to a wood frame with acrylic paint (Drifting Hulk of the Doomed Whaler, 1986) to a composition made entirely of cotton balls dipped in paint and a diptych consisting of an armature Zucker poured black paint into, with its wooden dividers becoming the lines defining an image of a sailboat.

“Joe was a very process-driven painter,” a Jupiter staffer on the stand explains. “He worked in about 80 different series, thinking of different ways of painting without oil paint or a conventional canvas.” Works on the stand are priced between $65,000 and $130,000.

Another first-time exhibitor at Independent 20th Century is Tureen, a Dallas-based gallery founded in 2023. Its stand features five sculptures by Jacci Den Hartog, an artist based in Los Angeles who has a substantial West Coast following but has not had a solo show in New York in more than two decades.

“We really wanted to reify her work and her contributions to Post-Minimalist sculpture,” says Cody Fitzsimmons, one of the gallery’s co-founders. The sculptures, made of plaster, polyurethane and poured rubber, resemble miniature landscapes—in most cases, landscapes that have recently been doused by toxic monsoons. Four of the works were made in the 1990s; a fifth, of a diminutive castle doused in purple rubber, was begun in 1992 and completed this year.

“Jacci is partly inspired by a 17th-century Chinese book on landscape painting techniques,” Fitzsimmons explains. “As a challenge to herself, she wanted to translate these traditional approaches to painting landscapes into sculpture.” The works are all priced between $23,000 and $32,000; the gallery is planning a 35-year survey of Den Hartog’s work in the autumn of 2026.

• Independent 20th Century, until 7 September, Casa Cipriani at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, New York