In New York, what’s old is new again—and has been for the past few years. Galleries across the city have started to regularly spotlight artists of the past in need of greater attention, jumping on the canon-expanding bandwagon with aplomb. And the trend shows no sign of dying down, either, which may be why the Independent 20th Century fair looks to remain a staple of the fall season.
Now in its fourth edition, Independent 20th Century is more modest than the Armory Show, the 230-gallery mega-fair that is open concurrently this week. (By contrast, Independent contains just 31 exhibitors.) Located in the Battery Maritime Building, at the southern tip of Manhattan, the fair also has a specified focus: art of the 20th century, with attention often paid to female artists, queer artists, and artists of the Global South who aren’t yet famous.
In part because of the fair’s size, in part because of its relaxed spirit, and in part because the event kicked off at the same time as Armory, Independent’s VIP opening on Thursday was not filled wall to wall with people. But the calmer atmosphere allowed for more contemplative viewing.
Taking advantage of the fair early on was at least one notable figure of the New York art world: Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He could be seen admiring a booth filled with first-class work by the Surrealist painter Leonor Fini. More on that booth, as well as four other standout presentations, below.
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Leonor Fini at Weinstein Gallery
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews
How rare and beautiful it is to encounter a bona fide masterpiece in the wild, outside museum walls. That treasure is Leonor Fini’s 1941 painting L’Alcôve, which depicts a sleeping man beneath a sheet, along with a woman gazing at him. Both figures are nearly naked, and the fact that it’s the female figure doing the looking here renders this encounter fraught, for the man—who is androgynous, to be sure—is submissive and supine. She is in power, so no surprise Fini herself once labeled this woman “a true revolutionary.” It’s the kind of erotic tension one expects from Surrealist art, but it’s all the more interesting because Fini was one of the few female artists who broke into the movement’s largely male inner circle.
Weinstein Gallery founder Rowland Weinstein trotted out this painting at the 2022 Venice Biennale and is now selling it for $3.5 million, making it one of the expensive works available for purchase at a New York fair this week. It’s on view here alongside quite a few other Fini gems, including a cat mask made from pebbles.
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Lucia Di Luciano at Lovay Fine Arts
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews
This Italian artist, another alumna of Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, was affiliated with the Arte Programmata movement of the 1960s, whose purveyors made heavy use of grid-like structures. Di Luciano’s paintings of the era are filled with undulating lattices painted in black and white that are rendered so precisely, they appear to have been spit out by a computer. In fact, Di Luciano painted them by hand, and up close, you can see where her acrylic strokes just barely exceed the lines she sketched out in advance. The joy of these works is watching Di Luciano’s rigid sense of order descend into chaos. That may explain why the artist, now 93 years old, has continued to make her repetitive paint strokes with a freer hand. One untitled piece from 2024 features cascades of blue dashes, some of which curl into spirals.
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Luis Ouvrard at Calvaresi
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews
One work hanging in this booth depicts a leaf painted in such a manner-of-fact manner that you barely notice how weird it is. Beneath that leaf are several animals—horses, maybe—that are rendered as little blobs amid a brownish field. Why is that leaf so big, and why don’t the animals notice it? Perhaps because Luis Ouvrard was trying to represent the landscape not as he saw it but as he imagined it. The son of French immigrants, Ouvrard was based for much of his career in the Argentinean city of Rosario. He spent a career capturing the rural areas around the city in ways that recalled Impressionism—one work here even depicts a group of haystacks, a clear homage to Monet’s “Meules” series. But based on what’s in this terrific booth, Ouvrard was better when he trained his eye on the land’s peculiarities, as he did in Mushrooms (1983), in which fungi sprout from grassy ridges in all directions.
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Balraj Khanna at Jhaveri Contemporary
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews
When Balraj Khanna’s daughter Kaushalia recently wrote that her father was “blowing his energy into his canvas,” she meant it literally: Khanna really did breathe into tubes placed close to his paintings, creating areas speckled with color. The unusual process implied that his paintings could not be divorced from his own body and, by extension, his own experience—they were not merely formalist experiments. Born in India and based in England, Khanna produced abstractions that sometimes referred to landscapes in that latter nation, with the ones here meant to represent the ponds of London’s Hampstead Heath park. Kaushalia wrote that Balraj felt that his “contact with nature dwindled” after leaving the Indian state of Punjab, which was once rich with forests. In abstractly depicting the critters that lay just beneath the pond’s surface, Khanna powerfully rekindled his relationship with the surrounding landscape.
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Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias at Danielian
Image Credit: Alex Greenberger/ARTnews
One remarkable painting in this booth features a train hurtling toward us, its headlight sending out a burst of illumination through the black night. The painting’s maker, Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias, knew a lot about trains such as this one—he worked for a Brazilian railway company. And he was able to paint images such as these because he witnessed them firsthand. When he started making these works, however, mainstream institutions in Brazil generally elided artistic perspectives such as his own. He was born in 1940 in Eugenópolis, an agricultural town in Minas Gerais, a state with a large Black population, and he did often represented elements of the Afro-Brazilian experience, including Candomblé rituals. Even though Ozias’s visual language was spare, it’s still evident that he closely observed what he depicted. Note the individuated gazes of the iyalorixá (priestesses) in one painting here: as they go about their business, two women briefly turn away to stare at a white bird soaring overhead.
Correction, 9/5/25, 10:35 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated how many editions of Independent 20th Century there have been. There have been four, not three. Additionally, the fair has 31 exhibitors, not 30.