Independent: Booth 513

Independent

Uffner & Liu

Booth 513

May 14–17, 2026

Uffner & Liu returns to the Independent art fair, New York, with a two-person booth featuring new paintings by Bernadette Despujols and freestanding sculptures by Sacha Ingber. Working across painting and sculpture, both artists engage deeply with themes of home, family, migration, and womanhood, subjects shaped by their Latin American backgrounds and refracted through the lens of new motherhood.

Working in earthy tones and with physical, tactile mark-making, Bernadette Despujols depicts friends, relatives, and members of the Venezuelan diaspora in scenes drawn from everyday life. Her figures are often situated in gardens and amongst plant life, a reference to tenets of ecofeminism that draw connections between the exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of women. Despujols works from candid photographs she takes of her subjects and begins the compositions with faces, conceiving the lines and contours that make up her figures’ emotive expressions before expanding outward to their limbs, poses, and settings. She constructs each portrait with heavy impasto, building paint up with frenetic brushstrokes then carving lines out to reveal the underpainting beneath. Her unstudied portraiture, combined with sculptural surfaces and vigorous mark-making, evokes a profound sense of interiority.

In dialogue with Despujols’ oil paintings, Sacha Ingber’s freestanding sculptures introduce a materially rich and sculptural counterpoint. Drawing on the forms and textures of Brazilian modernist architecture and craft traditions, Ingber constructs hybrid objects that oscillate between furniture, architectural structures, and human figures. In her recent sculptures, produced following the birth of her son, the female body becomes increasingly morphed with the form of a house—its strength and protective quality echoed in swelling forms, biomorphic supports, and surfaces that seem both armored and tender. Ingber’s presentation at Independent follows her second solo exhibition at the gallery in March 2026.

Together, Despujols and Ingber create a booth grounded in personal narrative yet expansive in cultural resonance. Their works speak to the complexities of origin, caregiving, and identity formation across borders, offering a nuanced and contemporary expression of Latin American diasporic experience.