Independent’s 2026 edition opened at Pier 36, marking its inaugural run at the hangar-like venue. While representing 76 galleries, the fair’s format prioritizes solo and two-person presentations, making each booth immersive and open to experimentation. The venue, however, left this year’s special projects feeling like obstacles—none more so than Rei Kawakubo/COMME des GARÇONS’s display, which triggers the same claustrophobic encumbrance of scaffolding (while likely the desired effect, it limits the mobility the fair demands). Amidst the array of singular and colorful booths, SGR Galería, David Peter Francis, Kiang Malingue, David Nolan Gallery, and Silke Lindner were among the highlights.
In his New York debut at SGR Galería, Johan Samboni stages his carved brick sculptures. Inspired by brick’s prominence in Colombian architecture, especially in unfinished housing—obra negra—Samboni engages with brick’s cosmological dimension as animate, constituting life and humanity’s extended relationship to nature. A highlight is Grandmothers Grow Younger with Each Passing Century (2026), wherein Samboni riffs on a sculpture from the San Agustín Archaeological Park. He serializes the figure across five registers, where it gradually deteriorates until rubble at the row’s end, then regains detail in the next. Overall, Samboni’s composition reflects the cyclicality of nature and time.
At David Peter Francis, photographer Carrie Schneider exhibits her latest series shot using a room-sized camera of her own construction that exposes chromogenic paper. The standout is First Living Woman (Broken Kilometer, frames 213-221) (2026), where gargantuan rolls of photographic paper transform the series into sculpture. Based on the only eight seconds of video in Chris Marker’s otherwise photographic science-fiction short La Jetée (1962), the work deconstructs the film’s storytelling logic, demanding the viewer to navigate time and image the way Marker’s protagonist does.
Kiang Malingue presents Tseng Chien-Ying’s solo show, Melancholy of Imperative. The Taiwanese artist uses ink, gouache, and mineral pigments to render thin black outlines and shading reminiscent of ukiyo-e, portraying distorted, hyper-focused body parts. Illumination (2026) depicts a lit match in cupped hands: while the palette of reds, yellows, and oranges recreates the sensation of fire, the hand’s black shading and ink detailing render the body palpable.
In the collaborative booth of David Nolan Gallery and Almeida & Dale, Chakaia Booker’s rubber-tire sculptures are paired with Miguel Rio Branco‘s photography. Booker layers strips of rubber tire, material symbolic of her African-American heritage and its connections to industrial labor, to monumentalize detritus—as in the totemic Destiny’s Doorman (2003). Rio Branco is a Brazilian photographer known for his intensely saturated, painterly color work documenting marginalized Afro-Brazilian communities. In Exuzinho Looking Forward (1991/2017), a child boxer straddling the ring’s corner ropes creates tension through hyperpigmented red and blue. Together, the two artists share in a diasporic dialogue across the Americas, using material and color to signify identity long rendered invisible.
At Silke Lindner, Nina Hartmann shows shaped encaustic panels, resin sculptures, and lightboxes that excavate the history of US government surveillance and covert research programs. Reality Collapse (Networked Diagram) (2024) diagrams the interconnections between US-funded parapsychological projects. Encaustic’s layers simultaneously preserve and obscure; the lightboxes illuminate without fully revealing. Together, they echo the half-buried nature of the information they index.
Other booths of note include Antonio Darden’s Wake (2026) at Kendra Jayne Patrick; Dorothy Cross at Kerlin Gallery; Taína Cruz at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler; Lyne Lapointe’s tactile paintings at Jack Shainman; Patrick H. Jones’s Ensor-esque Crowd Juggling (2026) at The Sunday Painter; Thomas McDonell at Europa; Steve Kahn at House of Seiko; and Hannes Heinrich at Sofia Sominski.
