On Thursday, Independent inaugurates its seventh edition, this time in a new TriBeCa home, Spring Studios. Forty-four galleries from nine countries participate in the fair this year. And despite the fact that the fair's new space required a slimming down of its exhibitor list, they still managed to bring six new dealers into the fold for 2016. “Every year we try to have a certain amount of new galleries, to rotate in fresh perspectives,” said director Laura Mitterrand.
In the past, those galleries have set up shop right alongside Independent standbys like Gavin Brown's enterprise and Peres Projects. Thanks to their change in venue this year, however, Mitterrand and her team decided to pull those fresh faces out into a special section on the building's ground floor, Independent Firsts. “They're not necessarily young galleries,” said Mitterrand of the selection, which “developed organically” with galleries “coming from all different backgrounds.” Ahead of the fair, we caught up with the lot to find out what they have in store for fairgoers this week.
Chelsea's Garth Greenan Gallery was founded in 2013, following Greenan's purchase and subsequent rebranding of Gary Snyder Gallery, where he was formerly co-owner and director. Today, the gallery prides itself upon the support of artists whose work warrants more widespread attention—89-year-old painter Rosalyn Drexler, 72-year-old artist Howardena Pindell, and the late Paul Feeley among them.
At this year's edition of Independent, the gallery will show Ohio-born painter Mark Greenwold's “cult masterpiece” Bright Promise (for Simon) (1971-75), a seven-foot-tall painting foretelling a threesome amongst a meticulously detailed bedroom. (The twin bedspread, bespeckled with some 1,2000 pompoms, reportedly took Greenwold a year alone to paint.) “It is one of only three paintings that the artist made during the early to mid-1970s and the one most frequently censored,” says associate director Alison Dillulio, who notes that it's Independent's focus on curatorial projects and site-specificity that drew the gallery to the fair. “It's huge—in terms of both size and content,” she adds of the work, “and has been shown only three times since it was painted.”