Independent is pleased to announce further details of the artists and galleries participating in the fair’s 17th edition. Taking place from May 14th to 17th in its new home at Pier 36 on the Lower East Side, New York, the fair will feature exhibitions by more than 100 artists presented by 76 participants.

Reinforcing Independent's renown as a place of discovery, nearly half of all exhibitors in the 2026 edition are participating in the fair for the first time, while more than a third of the presentations will showcase artists marking their first New York solo display through the curatorial initiative Independent Debuts. Across the fair, more than 70% of the presentations will showcase individual exhibitions, allowing for in-depth engagement with each artist’s practice. This year’s fair brings together a diverse roster, with 42% of participating galleries based internationally, from Colombia and Reykjavik, to Cape Town and Athens.

Independent's new location positions it strategically along the East Side of Manhattan, close to a thriving gallery community and important contemporary art institutions. Many of Independent's new East Side gallery neighbors will be exhibiting at the fair for the first time, including Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Kiang Malingue, David Peter Francis, Superhouse, OSMOS, and Post Times, while Uffner & Liu, MARCH, Long Story Short, and Jupiter will return to the fair this year, creating a strong local presence.

The fair's curatorial approach to design, site-specific commissions, and installation reflects Independent's commitment to reimagining the art fair experience. The research-based design studio D_P_S (Diogo Passarinho Studio) is leading the exhibition design, drawing on a community of thinkers, artists, and theoretical discourse to create an innovative interior environment. In conjunction, the internationally recognized architecture and design firm Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu (SO–IL) will take on the exterior design of the venue, ensuring the fair's integration with its Lower East Side surroundings.

The works on show reflect a growing sense of global anxiety that are a product of our uncertain times. An overarching theme of dystopia can be found among the presentations, many of which tackle some of the pressing issues the world faces today. These include the challenges of our “post-truth” society, in which images and meaning are manipulated and recontextualized through the use of artificial intelligence and other rapidly developing digital tools. Our complex relationships to place and belonging are also explored, including those brought about by political and social upheaval as well as environmental and ecological disasters. Across both figurative and abstract works, many of the artists make direct references to a sense of emotional and psychological tension. Some depict their everyday lives as a reflection of dissonance while others create imagined worlds for their subjects that elicit feelings of isolation, introspection, and escapism. Independent will create a dystopic installation at the fair’s entrance that will immerse visitors in this theme from the outset.

Returning to Independent, David Kordansky Gallery will present a solo of the New York artist Jason Fox whose work inhabits charged psychological spaces within American culture, as well as within the medium of painting itself. Suffused with Dadaist humor, Fox combines portraits of well-known figures and pop culture characters, such as Homer Simpson, Barack Obama, and Bob Marley, with images of his dog, demons, and angels to create hybrid creatures that are at once familiar and deeply personal.

Jack Shainman Gallery will debut at Independent, marking their first New York art fair participation in more than six years, with a presentation of works by a new generation of artists to their stalwart gallery program, including Lyne Lapointe, Donyel Ivy-Royal, and Charisse Pearlina Weston. Its participation in the fair comes as the gallery reaffirms its commitment to New York in its next chapter, expanding its footprint downtown with the grand opening of their Tribeca space last year.

For its first participation at Independent, James Fuentes will present a group of rising, New York-based artists central to the gallery program: Oscar yi Hou, Stipan Tadić, Keegan Monaghan, Izzy Barber, and Hannah Lee. The exhibition will be shaped by the artists’ shared experience of living and working in New York and the city’s role as a source of visual inspiration.

Almeida & Dale and David Nolan Gallery will co-present works by Chakaia Booker and Miguel Rio Branco, highlighting a shared attentiveness to material, body, and environment as sites where histories of inequality are inscribed. The exhibition will show Booker’s sculptures made of recycled black rubber tires alongside Branco’s photographs to create a powerful dialogue between these two major masters in their own unique mediums.

Independent Debuts

Across its 17 year history, Independent has a proven track record of hosting more New York solo debuts than any other fair, in collaboration with nominated galleries, demonstrating its ongoing commitment to celebrating rising talent. This year, 26 Independent Debuts will represent artists of all generations and stages in their career coming from around the world.

Pu Yingwei, one of the most radical ‘political conceptual’ artists of China's new generation, will be presented by galerie Sator. Ying’s work addresses important issues of our contemporary world, by revisiting and parodying political and historical texts and images and linking them to collective memory, personal history, utopia, identity, and geopolitics. At Independent, he will show new paintings that introduce his concept of ‘ChinAmerica’, positing the evolution of China-American relations as a pivotal discourse shaping our future.

The Berlin-based German artist Bettina Pousttchi, whose sculptural works are inspired by the structures of public space and everyday street objects such as bollards, crowd barriers or bike racks, will have her New York debut with Buchmann Galerie.

The elaborate tapestries of the emerging Icelandic artist Arna Óttarsdóttir, whose notebooks of thoughts and drawings act as source material for her weaving, will be shown by the Reykjavik-based i8 Gallery.

A Lighthouse called Kanata will present Masanori Maeda, an artist trained in Nihonga—a centuries-old Japanese genre of figurative painting made with mineral pigments and ink—but who is part of an emerging school of contemporary Japanese painters who use traditional materials and techniques inspired by the Mono-Ha 80s movement to create bold, abstract works.

Frank Gaard—who has held survey exhibitions at the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts but will have his first solo show in New York at Independent—will present his vibrant, satirical works that include references to pop culture, politics and personal relationships with Post Times.

New York Now

Almost a third of exhibitors at this year’s edition of Independent are based in New York. This focus reflects the quality of the galleries in the city; the persistent importance of the fair setting in bringing local presentations together; and the position of New York as the global capital of the art market. Independent operates its two annual fairs exclusively in New York, ushering the international art world to the brand’s hometown each year.

According to The New York Art Market Report authored by acclaimed economist Clare McAndrew and commissioned by Independent, New York’s strength as a global art capital is based around three fundamental areas: the strong base of wealth within the city, and the US as a whole; a highly developed cultural infrastructure including leading galleries, auction houses, museums and private foundations; and its position as one of the most transparent centers worldwide for the art trade.

In homage to New York’s evolving and enduring role as an artistic hub, Independent and James Fuentes will produce an updated version of the gallery’s map of the “New Bowery” gallery scene. Originally made in 2007, coinciding with the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, the project captured nearly 100 art spaces that had existed in—and made their mark on—the lower Manhattan neighborhood since 1968. Fortuitously published soon after the reopening of the newly expanded New Museum, the updated map will be available for free to visitors at this year’s fair.

Visual and Cultural Histories

References to art history, popular culture, and other cultural signifiers are used to explore topics of identity and authority in a number of presentations at Independent.

For Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-Ying’s debut solo presentation in the US, Kiang Malingue will show new pieces developed by the artist while in residence at the Lower East Side studio 99Canal from April 2026 as well as works created in Taiwan. The everyday realities of Taiwanese society informs his distinctive queer aesthetic that merges with a sustained engagement and experimentation with Asian artistic traditions. This international dialogue between New York and East Asia is echoed in Kiang Malingue’s broader program, following the gallery’s recent expansion to the Lower East Side from their flagship space in Hong Kong.

Stems will feature Michael Bühler-Rose’s intricate wood inlay works that reflect on history, authorship, and the unseen narratives that shape artistic legacy. Trained as a photographer, the artist creates trompe l’oeil compositions that reflect his influences, from growing up in both the Hare Krishna movement and the punk music scene to his own studio practice and experience in art academia.

Deconstructing Images

Several galleries are showing artists who alter and recontextualize images taken from personal archives and historical sources, often using AI and digital editing tools to create works that reflect on pertinent issues of meaning, relation, and “truth” in contemporary society.

Hunt Kastner will present a series of new paintings by Jaromír Novotný and photography-based work by Jiří Thýn, who both explore the importance of material, the act of making, and the construction and negotiation of meaning and form in an increasingly digital visual culture.

Interval will show Petra Cortright’s video and digital paintings on aluminium that are made in response to Old Master artworks and 15th-century manuscript leaves, exploring aesthetic dialogues and connections between contemporary art and art history.

New sculptural wall works by Nina Hartmann that explore the functionality and malleability of proof in our age of information through the use of AI and other digital tools will be featured by Silke Lindner.

Tensions of Emotional and Psychological Space

Across both figurative and abstract compositions, many artists on show in this year’s fair draw either from personal memories and everyday life or create imagined worlds for their subjects that elicit feelings of isolation and introspection. 

Rika Minamitani, known for her paintings of expressive and emotive cartoonish figures, will be featured by Tokyo-based Tomio Koyama Gallery.

Fredericks & Freiser will show a duo presentation of new paintings by Danielle Roberts in dialogue with sculptural works by Louisa Owen, that together create an environment of intimacy and disquiet.

Ricco/Maresca Gallery will present Norwegian artist Trude Viken, whose distorted portraits and large-scale, otherworldly scenes feature strange creatures that pose unsettling questions around our fantasies, neuroses, and life experiences.

Presented by EUROPA, Thomas McDonnell will create an immersive booth installation of sculpture and painting made from daily newspapers and detritus from a disused drapery factory in Los Angeles, exploring the persistence with which society surges toward the technological.

Superhouse will bring together a rare concentration of assemblage wall works by Dan Friedman, produced in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, that merge day-glo painted found objects with repeating symbology including pyramids, eyes, telephones, and graphic explosions.

Ideologies of Place

Several presentations at Independent will approach the natural landscape and the built environment from a variety of political, conceptual, and ecological perspectives.

A new body of work by the Los Angeles-based artist Ian Davis—whose darkly humorous works often depict dystopian scenes—will be on show with Galerie Judin, including one of his largest paintings to date: a monumental, post-apocalyptic mining landscape. The artist was included in the first part of the 18th Istanbul Biennial titled The Three-Legged Cat (2025).

Corbett vs. Dempsey will pair David Hartt’s photographic tapestry work with Gregg Bordowitz’s Tetragrammaton monotypes.

Kerlin Gallery’s multidisciplinary group exhibition presents works by Dorothy Cross, Callum Innes, and Hazel O’Sullivan who are in turn inspired by the relationship between living beings and the natural world, the material tension between control and fluidity, and the symbolic materiality of artefacts, culture and architecture.

Hostler Burrows will feature the delicately sculpted botanical forms of Danish ceramicist Marianne Nielsen that, when displayed together, resemble a herbarium.

Charles Moffett will present tapestries from the estate of Silvia Heyden, whose work was inspired by her natural surroundings and passion as a violinist.

The fair is curated by Independent’s founder Elizabeth Dee, founding curatorial advisor Matthew Higgs, Berlin-based advisors David Ulrichs and Alexandra Alexopoulou, chief operating officer Sofie Scheerlinck, and manager of curatorial affairs Kyle Penner.