Still, it remains the New York art fair whose edge most deserves to be called cutting, the one where you stand to learn the most about promising new art, albeit of a rather attenuated, hermetic sort. With around 40 participants, it is also the most pleasantly manageable of all the city fairs. It is arrayed, as before, on an open plan, with little in the way of formal booths or even aisles, on the three upper floors of a building once owned by the Dia Center for the Arts on West 22nd Street. The airy, white-cube architecture of the interior, so redolent of artistic seriousness, continues to be a boon. I can never quite decide if the Independent is intimate or just clubby, but in this it is probably an apt reflection of the art world: basically, it is both.
As usual, nearly two-thirds of the participating galleries are from elsewhere and — also as usual — they are responsible for the bulk of the new information. Over all, the artists tend to be young and fairly obscure.
An exception, at the Paris gallery GB Agency, is the American Conceptual artist Mac Adams, now nearly 70. His “Blackmail,” a noirish 1976 installation of a violently disturbed dinner for three, suggests a very physical argument, if not an actual crime. Clues are abundant; not for nothing was Mr. Adams’s brand of Conceptualism called Story Art or seen as a precursor to Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills.” Another exception to the general youthfulness, at Susanne Zander, are the tenderly lascivious drawings of scantily clad women by Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011), the Czech outsider artist known for surreptitiously photographing his subjects, using homemade cameras.
Among the new participants, the Third Line, a gallery from Dubai, is introducing the work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, an 87-year-old Iranian artist whose handsome glass and mirror mosaics are grounded in Islamic interpretations of numbers and geometry. Another newcomer is Labor, a gallery from Mexico City that is featuring Pedro Reyes’s “Surplus Reality,” a double narrative that presents, in storyboardlike form, a photo-novella about the struggle for land reform in Brazil and also recounts the censoring of that work when it was displayed there.
If this year’s Independent has a prevailing look, it centers on stylishly abject variations on Post-Minimalist abstraction, played out in lots of small, often appealing, if rather mute, sculptures and several spare installations that are frequently by women largely unknown and unshown in New York.
On the third floor, at Sprüth Magers, Thea Djordjadze has assembled a meditation on blue in the form of a huge piece of smooth synthetic carpet that climbs from floor to wall and is flanked by several scrappy sculptures, including Plexiglas volumes that echo the hue in atmospheric terms. At Meyer Riegger, a young Czech artist, Eva Kotatkova, takes a darker turn, painting a corner black and festooning it with shelves displaying altered vintage books, cutout collages and paper sculptures.
This result, titled “Re-education Machine,” conjures a compartmentalized, overanalyzed, possibly totalitarian environment where young minds are assiduously molded. Ms. Kotatkova joins a tradition of deft image recycling that begins with Hannah Höch and continues to the Polish artist Goshka Macuga. At Freymond-Guth, Tanja Roscic, also Czech, commands a wall with a diamond grid that frames contrasting colors and textures and several very robust collages.
At Andrew Kreps, a raftlike hanging sculpture by Andrea Bowers draws the eye; it is colorful, almost decorative, so it takes a minute, and a look at the label, to realize that it is a functioning tree-sitting apparatus, outfitted with buckets, bottles and a hammock and ready to be hoisted up an endangered redwood.
Nearby at Jack Hanley, the DIY spirit is echoed in “Archipelago (Seq 14),” a large sculpture by a young artist named Marie Lorenz, who is known for building small boats that she uses to explore New York Harbor. Here she combines the decaying hull of a boat she found with a fresh white Fiberglas cast of it. Placed upright, they suggest an improvised shelter and also a monument (maybe to Bruce Nauman).
The Independent runs through Sunday at 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; independentnewyork.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 9, 2012
An earlier version of this review misspelled the surname of Thea Djordjadze.