The Independent, More Inclusive Than Ever

If you just really want a painting to go over the couch, you will find one here. But many works thoughtfully question what painting is today, its history and relevance. The Dutch artist Kinke Kooi’s “Mutual Friends” (2023) at the Portland, Oregon gallery Adams and Ollman (Booth Q. 5) is a triptych made with acrylic, gouache and colored pencil on paper that answers back to Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (1490-1500). Like Bosch, Kooi’s work includes strawberries and other earthly delights, but also feminist motifs, like a cartridge of birth control pills nestled in the vegetation. Tamara Gonzales’s tapestry-like grid of paintings at Klaus von Nichtssagend (Booth G. 5) conjure spirits of the Indigenous Americas alongside Kemar Keanu Wynter’s abstract canvases, whose titles have referred to delectable Caribbean dishes from his native Jamaica.

Finally, at the London and Basel gallery Vitrine (Booth A. 1), the Danish artist Cecilia Fiona’s painted marks spill out from the canvas onto a folding screen, and even costumes she has created for a performance on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Here, the artist and a cohort will perform in the booth, wearing the hand-painted costumes and masks inspired by her recently deceased grandmother, who came to Fiona in a dream, as a bird. Call it painting, ritual or séance, there’s something poignant about this in an art fair in TriBeCa, where performance art used to be quotidian, rather than the exception.