Standout Booths at the Independent Art Fair 2025
In its 16th edition in New York City, the Independent Art Fair continues to serve as the go-to spot for discovering new and international artists. There’s a very noticeable energy in the air, where visitors genuinely ask galleries about their artists, rather than adhering to the more transactional environment typical of other fairs: if you’re buying, you’re expected to know all the names around; if you’re not buying, don’t linger. Here, questions and closer looks feel more meaningful and genuine. The work is examined and supported not for its high-profile name, but because people are excited by something truly new.
Below are some of the most noteworthy booth highlights from the 2025 Independent.
Shafei Xei, A Normal Day (2023–2025). Installation view of P420, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
P420: Shafei Xia
Shafei Xia’s work is immediately striking. During my time in the booth, I didn’t see a single person pass by without slowing down to look—what more could a gallery or artist ask for? What initially may have been double-takes out of shock always became an earnest interest in the intricacies of these paintings and ceramics. Xia, having previously and fittingly exhibited at the Museum of Sex, refuses to shy away from the erotic nature of everyday life. It’s a confrontation that is too sincere to be hostile in any way.
Even in a vivid palette, reddened in arousal, everything feels oddly soft and even welcoming. There’s a lavishness in the sensual comfort of Xia’s imagery. Domestic motifs like floral wallpaper and common household furniture turn intimacy into something both extravagant and matter-of-fact. These works narrate a new visual language for sexuality, and we should be keen to listen.
Alicia Adamerovich, Double-knot (2025). Installation view of Michael Kohn Gallery, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Michael Kohn Gallery: Alicia Adamerovich
An Independent debut for both the gallery and artist, Michael Kohn exhibits a booth with work by Alicia Adamerovich that vibrates on a frequency distant from the rest of the fair. The paintings appear to wobble, not only in an optical sense, but also in how they resist a single logic. Swirls and daubs of paint create odd landscapes—strange spatial plausibilities with little familiar topographical sense. Shadows help morph peaks and valleys across the surface, and shapes round off as if they exist somewhere between total flatness and dimension. Differing visual logics assert themselves so confidently that they become true: you believe in these landscapes because the paintings do.
These works explore spatial form not just in image but in material. In some pieces, sculptural elements like tassels and even a scrunchie tease expansion. In less capable hands, the tension between sculpture and flat painting often feels very gimmicky. Here, it feels fully committed to the questioning of rules in a landscape. Adamerovich’s smart use of space is proven further in the floor itself, transformed into part of the installation. Hundreds of painted, little wooden blocks tile the floor loosely, with just enough satisfying give underfoot. Just like the paintings above, the floor vibrates with thoughtful colors and firm insistence. This booth is guaranteed to stay with you long after visiting.
Mandy Franca, On Being Light and Liquid (2025). Installation view of Night Café, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Night Café: Mandy Franca
With Mandy Franca’s series On Being Light and Liquid, Night Café offers a meditation on mobility, stillness, and their contradictions in being. Here, painted canvas is treated differently than at any other booth, acknowledging the object of an otherwise flat image. There is deliberate rhythm and momentum in the hanging of paintings, each one acting as breaths or beats in the overall conversation. In the middle of the booth, there is an enacted rest–work placed horizontally on the ground, tenderly breaking the usual posture of paintings. The body of work is versed in movement, rest, and stability.
Franca draws from her experience of being confined to her bed due to illness to consider the mobility and power she witnessed in the clouds outside her window. Through this visual exploration, the clouds became a way to think through illusions of control and predeterminism. Some of her paintings roll in like fast-moving storms, whereas others crawl with the weight of a dense shroud. Expression arises from witness, and in turn, the work invites us to enter the rhythm of movement, pause, and rest.
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Janitorial Cart) (2025) and Untitled (Janitorial Closet) (2024–2025). Installation view of Abattoir Gallery, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Abattoir: Michelle Grabner
“Is she done painting?” I heard someone ask the gallerists at Abattoir Gallery from Cleveland, Ohio. Michelle Grabner’s pivot was a shock and delight, often yielding the fair question. Her continued exploration of domestic life and invisible labor reaches a new peak with these large-scale, realistic cast sculptures. In these new works, her familiar gingham pattern transforms but still presents itself in subtle ways, most tangibly in the beautifully glazed towels in the sink basins. The familiarity at once softens the blow of her hard material turn and continues her thematic focus.
Excitement comes from both the instant recognition of these objects–spray bottles, sponges, janitorial cart–and still being taken in by the illusion. Their presence, despite the hard material, evokes a softness that gives quiet respect to the labor they imply. Minimalistic, muted, and intentional colors feel beholden to the silhouette of the objects. The three large sinks in particular are strangely comic in how they highlight the material and conceptual rigor in these everyday clones. There is impressive commitment throughout the whole scale of works: from larger, anchoring pieces like brooms or janitorial carts, all the way to tiny Ivory soap bars and brush bristles. Grabner’s work here highlights these often unspecial utility objects, successfully mirroring the invisible labor they aid.
Terran Last Gun and Jay Kvapil, various works. Installation view of Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Diane Rosenstein: Terran Last Gun and Jay Kvapil
The two-artist presentation at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery booth, featuring ledger drawings by Terran Last Gun and ceramics by Jay Kvapil, stood out as one of the most thoughtful pairings at the fair. Though their mediums and visual languages greatly differ, the works are in a clear conversation, each presenting personal landscapes rooted in place and experience.
Last Gun, based in Santa Fe and born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation, carries Indigenous abstraction forward with vibrant, geometric compositions. Kvapil, based in the craggy coastal terrain of Sonoma, creates rock forms that straddle a line between control and chance, the manmade and the natural. Together, these works offer an honest, human take on landscapes, even if they’re approaches to surface feel miles apart. It is less topographical than it is emotional, shaped by memory and origin rather than strict representation. The choices in color and form by both artists feel truly energetic and intuitive. To me, this was the only booth showing multiple artists that felt deeply cohesive, making it all the more impressive.
Alicia Adamerovich, Double-knot (2025). Installation view of Michael Kohn Gallery, Independent Art Fair 2025. Photo by Parker Ewen.
Independent has solidified its place in the city’s art ecosystem. In many ways, like its format and the audience it draws, the fair has become fairly indistinguishable from other institutional art fairs. What sets it apart, though, is the sheer number of new voices debuting their work in New York. Here, unprecedented ideas are excitingly inherent. Even during one of the most crowded weeks on the New York art calendar, with more traditional blue-chip staples like Frieze concurrently running, Independent easily holds its ground.
The Independent Art Fair runs from May 8 to May 11, 2025 at Spring Studios, New York.
Edited by Jubilee Park
