Amidst a tremendous amount of great art on display at  Art Basel Miami Beach this year, three curated sections threw up new discoveries and mined historical blind spots. In Survey, 16 historical projects presented individual artists across a spectrum of cultures, generations and approaches. Hackett Mill, a gallery from San Francisco, showed terrific late paintings by David Park made shortly before his untimely death in 1960. One of the founders of Bay Area Figuration, Park’s late paintings oscillate between abstraction and figuration, and carry an indelible charge of innocence. Their chromatic structures have been largely pared down, with an equal economy of brushstrokes, which are nonetheless, expressive and authoritative. Positions, meanwhile, is devoted to  emerging artists, showcasing  14 ambitious new projects this year,  including a dynamic installation by Tschabalala Self at Thierry Goldberg which  sets up a bodega interior as the setting for her signature paintings, replete with a checkered floor and hand drawn “wallpaper.” Self, who was part of the group show, “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” at the New Museum last year, works at the intersections of race, gender and sexuality to comment on black feminisms and futures. Her large canvases with rough-hewn collage made of fabrics exhibit black bodies in action. Tiffany Chung, a Vietnam and US-based artist who shows with Tyler Rollins, New York, stands out in the Nova section of solo, two- or three person shows. With concise methodology, her  woven maps and detailed line drawings , elegantly translate research data regarding war, natural disasters and migration into art that is poetic and political. 

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Before detailing the manifold seductions of Art Basel/Miami Beach as the site of a virtual festival of the arts, it should be noted that the anchor fair was in good form. In fact, we thought that this year’s fair featured better examples and greater diversity than those of the past few years. The highly selected 267 galleries representing 32 countries brought to Miami Beach many of the popular blue-chip artists we read about in well-advertised one-person shows and contemporary art auctions. For those far from the Whitney Museum Frank Stella retrospective, many galleries displayed his paintings, providing a mini-Stella exhibition. There were also outrageous works like a 7-foot tall pair of blue and white polar bears by Paola PIVI made of foam, plastic and feathers at Galerie Perrotin and ingenious works like the wooden stools by John Preus at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery made from materials salvaged from recently closed Chicago Public Schools and selling for $800.00. Disturbingly, this year’s fair even included an actual stabbing event that was misinterpreted by some fair goers as performance art and others as an act of terrorism. We also sampled several of the close to twenty satellite fairs spread throughout Miami and Miami Beach and found the quality generally high.

There was a time just fourteen years ago when Art Basel/Miami Beach was a singular event of excellence that was accompanied by a handful of satellite fairs for those priced out of the main event or in search of emerging artists. While it is still a top-notch fair, its role has changed. Now, for art lovers internationally and for the Miami area, it gradually has taken on the role of a catalyst that sets in motion a veritable festival of the arts—in the spirit of Black Mountain College where many art forms collided and interacted. Indeed, one of the most Black Mountain-like events involved a collaboration between Silas Riener, a former Merce Cunningham dancer, and Martha Friedman, a Brooklyn-based creator of seductive soft sculptures that morphed into dance costumes at the Pore exhibition at Locust Projects.

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, provided a powerful dialogue between the great Holocaust poet, Paul Celan and the Holocaust-drenched sculpture and painting of Anselm Kiefer at the top of his angst-filled game. In Geheimnis der Farne, weighing 50,000 lbs and set in a 2,500 square-foot room built especially for it, the common theme shared by the poet and the sculptor was a focus on ferns, a powerful metaphor for time, given their status as the ancestors of all plants. Along with two other major sculptures and several paintings and drawings occupying 18,000 square feet, this group of seven works is the largest exhibition of Kiefer’s work in the United States to date. In a neighboring room at Margulies’ Warehouse is another compelling dialogue — an immersive sound installation by the Turner-prize winner, Susan Phillipsz, dedicated to the Oscar-winning Austrian composer, Hanns Eisler. Using 12 speakers and 12 canvases, she depicts the struggles of this talented composer who went into exile and emigrated to New York in 1938 after the Nazis banned his work. Ten years later, after writing numerous movie scores in Los Angeles, he was investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, blacklisted, and finally deported. Each speaker plays one violin note that collectively combine to form somber tones accompanying the canvases that reveal Eisler’s handwritten and notated archival scores, under the typewritten reports from his FBI file with their own handwriting and deletions. Together with Magulies’ permanent collection of sculpture and photographs, the Warehouse is an essential destination for any serious art lover.

An additional collaboration occurred outside on the terrace of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in a newly commissioned, three hour multimedia extravaganza spread across eight stages. Each featured a dancer choreographed by the popular visual and performance artist Ryan McNamara and an accompanying musician or vocalist performing a new composition written by the British music sensation, Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange). Each duo, bathed in a different colored light, performed a unique routine that encouraged a kind of “movable feast”. Inside PAMM was an outstanding exhibition of nine West Australian Aboriginal artists from the Miami-based collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl. Among the standouts were works by Warlimpirringa Tjapaljarri whose recent exhibition of swirling lines of small dots at Salon 94 in New York City was mesmerizing in its gentle opticality.

Another powerful strand of this festival of the arts was the presence of two well-selected surveys of Los Angeles Light and Space Art.   At the Surf Club in Miami Beach, Joachim Pissarro, in consultation with Terence Riley and John Keenan, curated LAX – MIA: Light + Space, which included both vintage and new sculptures as well as recent paintings by Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, John McCracken, Laddie John Dill, Helen Pashgian, and DeWain Valentine. Set in an airy glass-encased building by Richard Meier right off the ocean, it provided an East Coast simulation of the Light and Space that so inspired the West Coast artists represented here. The curators of this show, who used this exhibition to launch their consulting group, Parallel LLC, exemplified another theme of this year’s art week, namely, new attempts to combine art, architecture and design. This was also in evidence at the Design Miami Fair where the interdisciplinary collaborative, Revolution, introduced Volu, (a prefabricated dining pavilion designed by Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher), which also included the participation of the designer, Marcel Wanders on a panel held inside the new structure.

The other Light and Space exhibition occurred at Miami’s MANA in Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection. Among the approximately 100 exhibited works chosen from Weisman’s trove of more than 1300 paintings and sculptures made in the Golden State since the 1950s was a dimly lit chapel-like room.   It featured a striking Corner Lamp by Larry Bell and an exquisite white disc by Robert Irwin with its classic four overlapping shadows.

Beyond these two Light and Space surveys was, in effect, a mini-retrospective of Larry Bell, the emperor of chemically-coated glass, a technique that created lyrical and ambiguous qualities in his sculptures. In addition to his iconic cubes on display in at least three different galleries at the fairs, another unusual standout was Bell’s island of thirty-six specially treated six-foot square sheets of standing grey, clear, and partially-coated glass panels.   First exhibited at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, it is now presented at the White Cube’s space in Miami’s Design District. This compelling standing wall installation changes dramatically as one moves through and around the glass panes and as they absorb, reflect and transmit the different amounts of daylight.

Given our recently re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba, it is not surprising that Cuban art was very much in evidence in the fairs, galleries, and museums. A standout was the first U.S. exhibition of Gustavo Pérez Monzón at CIFO. The 70 drawings and installations were completed between 1979 and the late 1980s at the height of his prominence in the Cuban art community. Combining aspects of Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, he used Tarot cards, numerological concepts and a variety of fragile and mixed media on board to represent abstract systems which are simultaneously quasi-logical and emotionally evocative. For this exhibition, he also re-created a complex room-size spider-web-like installation using the elastic threads from socks along with stones and wire.

Our six days in the Miami area left us with our heads spinning. For this year, at least, there is simply nothing on the North American art calendar like the broad array of high-level aesthetic choices available during the week of Art Basel/Miami Beach. We left wanting to see more, but comforted in knowing that we’ll have another chance next December.

Also discussed in this Report 

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings, Sculpture, Installation, and Susan Phillipsz: Innovative Sound Installation, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, October 29, 2015 to April 30, 2016

No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting at Pérez Art Museum Miami, September 17, 2015 to January 3, 2016

LAX – MIA: Light + Space, Curated by Parallel LLC, The Surf Club’s Richard Meier Pavilion, Miami, December 2 to December 12, 2015

Volu Dining Pavilion: Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher for Revolution at Design Miami, December 2 to December 6, 2015

Made in California: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Collection at MANA, Wynwood, December 3 to December 6, 2015

Larry Bell 6 x 6: An Improvisation at White Cube, 3930 NE Second Avenue, Melin Building, December 2, 2015 to January 9, 2016

Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Tramas, Selected Works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection at CIFO Art Space , Miami, December 2, 2015 to May 1, 2016

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How to stand out at or among art fairs: Art Basel Miami, Aqua, Seven

Works, visitors, galleries, memories: it is easy to get lost in the ubiquitous sprawl of an art fair. As if in collective punishment for the sins of modernism, all are victims of the grid.

Events like Art Basel Miami are staged in vast convention centers which are bizarre equalizers: top galleries that ordinarily inhabit swank, architecturally distinct real estate are barely distinguishable from country cousin private or provincial dealers willing to rent a booth of the same size. Visitors, meanwhile loose their bearings.  There are few visually meaningful landmarks.  You make a brash artwork into one and next thing you know, its gone.

The organizers of New York’s upcoming, 2012 Armory Show are savvy to this problem: they have contracted architects Bade Stageberg Cox (of National Academy Museum make-over success) to “spatially contextualize”  the piers’ fairs next year, which means creating memorable sightlines and trails.

Art Basel Miami know they have a problem too: they are victims of their own success. Miami-goers just love the overload, but still suffer its consequences.  Basel opts for neat Swiss taxonomy.  Their “sectors” help chop up the sprawl, either conceptually or geographically. Art Positions and Art Nova function as mini-exhibitions within the exhibition and get their own corner quadrants and placard color-coding.  But their discreteness is more evident on the map than on the ground.  Positions has booths for single artists presenting work on a singular theme, such as Sven Johne at Klemm’s with three circus projects in different mediums: photos he took of empty plots once the circus left town, pictures he found online of sleeping (or dead) circus animals, and an enticingly rousing video of an actor announcing acts that on’t actually materialize.  Nova is for new work by small groups, such as Murray Guy’s complementary presentation of Barbara Probst and Lucy Skaer.  Art Kabinett, meanwhile, is a trail you can follow of space delineated within participating booths for solo concentrations. It is more an honorific – like landmark status from a monuments commission-  than a tangible display within the display. And Art Video (to be reviewed here soon) is a segment of film work from participating galleries, curated by Artprojx of London’s David Gryn.

And yet, however much such sub-categorizing tries to negotiate overload, it actually contributes to it, sorcerer’s apprentice-style.  Rather than dividing the mass is creates a matrix of intersecting grids.

One way for booths to defeat the white cube effect is to wallpaper their way out of the problem.  As luck would have it, two spectacular efforts in this direction ended up next door to one another, almost defeating the purpose of the exercise.  L&M Arts used Warhol’s legendary cow and self-portrait wallpapers inside and out for their mini-drawings retrospective while Mary Boone had Barbara Kruger “textorate” their exterior with an excoriating statement about money making money worth less.  Although both visual statements yearned a sea of white to help them pop, the sightlines of one to the other were actually amusingly sumptuous.  Another way to subvert the ubiquity of the white walls – besides painting them black, as London’s Alison Jacques Gallery did to exquisite effect for her moving two-woman Lygia Clark/Hannah Wilke display, or inviting one of your artists to make a wall drawing, as in the case of the Viennese Galerie Nächt St Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder and Ernst Caramelle – is to have your artist puncture holes in your walls.  No one does that more artfully than Sarah Oppenheimer at Annely Juda.

And yet, however seasoned a fairgoer one is, the booth effect is draining upon aesthetic experience.  The pleasures of getting lost in the stacks wears off after a while.  The Seattle-based boutique fair Aqua offers an antidote. Recalling “The Waves” in it name and “A Room of One’s Own” in its organization, it achieves a stream of consciousness.  This courtyard-accessed two-story motel on Collins Avenue is perfect for Aqua’s 45 domestically-oriented galleries.  Each gets a similar, nicely-proportioned, emptied-out deco bedroom.  And this means they get what no one paying exponentially more in a convention-center fair can wangle: real walls and natural light.

As if in emulation of the modest modernism of these surroundings, stand-out  exhibits at Aqua included McKenzie Fine Art’s salon hang of Don Voisine; the subtle understated architectural white reliefs of Sarah Bostwick at San Francisco’s Gregory Lind Gallery, who was also showing Sarah Walker and others;  precisionist matchbox-sized grids based on Artforum ad page layouts by Norwegian Lisa Liedgren at Seattle’s Prole Drift; and the funky abstractionist stable of Conrad Wilde Gallery of Tucson, Arizona, amongst them the sensual encaustic monochromes of Joanne Mattera and the biomorphic reliefs of Ruth Hiller.

But some dealers are determined to go yet further in their bid to beat the grid with its  relentless compartmentalization.  For some years Soho gallerist Ronald Feldman and Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery shared warehouse spaces in the Miami Design District.  This year, for the second year, they have expanded to form Seven, with Postmasters, P.P.O.W., London’s Hales Gallery, BravinLee programs, and Winkelman Gallery. In a raw, sprawling industrial space on the North Miami Avenue  gallery street (Diana Lowenstein, Bernice Steinbaum, Hardcore et al.) the seven galleries have created a show where the labels alone identify gallery affiliation.  Curating is by “passive-aggressive consensus” according to one participant.  The fortuitous juxtapositions that arise by serendipity in a big grid fair are aesthetically composed here: the way a painting by Veteran West Indian-born abstract expressionist Frank Bowling sets off a dialog with a Fabian Marcaccio, for instance, or a Ward Shelley speaks to a David Diao.

Writing these notes prompts an observation about  journalism that relates the strange equalizing power of fairs to the ubiquity of booths: Fairs are like states in the UN or the senate.  However much the critic reminds himself that Art Basel is the main event and Seven is, well, just seven, one unit gets at least a paragraph the way Seychelles or North Dakota get a desk in the plenum.  But really, does Red Dot even warrant observer status?

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Art has found its place in the sun.  This week sees the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami, previewing Wednesday,  with a host of other fairs and art events also taking over the Art Deco Miami Beach neighborhood, the Design District, Wynwood and Downtown Miami.  artcritical will be covering the fairs day by day with highlights and personal reports from our regular correspondents and guests.

Art Basel Miami is the US sister event of Art Basel, the Swiss fair that has taken place on the Rhine since 1970.  The Miami iteration, launched in 2002,  quickly eclipsed the preexisting Art Miami and usurped Chicago, the nation’s previous front running expo.  Some say it has even overtaken its Swiss parent in terms of size, if not earnings.

But Miami is not just for 1%’ers, as our title cheekily implies.  With 40,000 visitors expected through this coming weekend Miami can make credible boasts to be the art Olympics.  Besides Art Basel Miami and the persistent – actually reinvigorated – original Art Miami there are over a dozen satellite (or should that be parasite?) fairs, whether informal, pop up fairs in hotels along Collins Avenue or substantial rivals like NADA, the New Art Dealers Association event, striking out at the Deauville Beach Resort in North Beach, where Rachel Uffner’s stand includes the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, or Pulse, in the Ice Palace, where Morgan Lehman features Sharon Louden.  And there are specialist fairs devoted to Asian art, photography, and design.

For all the offshoots and tolerated rivals  (in fact they are encouraged, as Art Basel even lays on free buses) Art Basel does remain the main event.  Aisle upon aisle of blue chip historic shows  (L&M Arts, for instance, with Andy Warhol drawings of the 1950s and ‘60s or Robert Miller with Louise Bourgeois) are cheek by jowl with the latest novelties, or simply fine offerings by mid-career artists like Alexander Ross, on display at David Nolan New York or Nabil Nahas at Sperone Westwater.

For the second year a group of (mostly) New York galleries will present Seven, antidote to the booth after booth overload of the biggies, in which the eponymous seven integrate their artists in a unified display.  Douglas Florian, for instance, is represented at Seven by BravinLee programs.

And this year more than others there are signs of concerted efforts to integrate all this frenzied commercial activity with museum and non-profit cultural centers across the city, offering hopefully more focused and thoughtful displays.  The Bass Museum of Art, for instance, offers a solo exhibition of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm while the reviving Miami Art Museum is showcasing Faith Ringgold paintings of the 1960s.

And many local galleries enter the fray  with curated group exhibitions.  Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art at 158 NW 91st Street presents a ten-person international line up, curated  by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and including New York artists Franklin Evans and artcritical contributing editor Greg Lindquist.  The show is titled “you are here forever…” But as artists, collectors, dealers and casual perusers of art fair craziness must all realize, we are actually here for a weekend.

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For the art world, June is synonymous with Art Basel. Each year, countless international galleries and art professionals flock to Switzerland to exhibit, sell or buy art. Besides its commercial appeal, this, still regarded as the most prestigious art fair, offers something much more important: a global overview. Together with the proximate and concurrent Scope, Volta and Liste fairs, Art Basel provides a solid introduction to what is shown in galleries from Tokyo to Bochum and from Lausanne to Los Angeles. Thanks to its geographic range, trends emerge, whether in regards to art movements, favored genres or aesthetics.

My quick take on 2010: Though there might be less photographs on display than ten years ago when Gursky and Ruff began dominating the international scene, there are still significantly more now than in the past three years, in particular by photographers from Leipzig. In addition, even if the Whitney Biennial might have tried to convince us otherwise, there is a distinct decrease of video works, but an overall re-awakened embrace of sculpture.

A general tendency towards simplicity stood out. In place of glitz, gold and sparkle there was a striking focus on purity, coming for example in the form of monochrome paintings by Günter Umberg at Galerie Nordenhake (Stockholm, Berlin) and Studio Invernizzi (Milan) or Gotthard Graubner at Galerie m (Bochum). Along these lines, a large array of black and white works formed a thematic undercurrent: for example, Marlborough (London, New York, Monaco) offered four of Ad Reinhardt’s rare “Black Paintings,” Acquavella (New York) showed a fantastic 1964 black and white sunset by Roy Lichtenstein, and Galerie Thomas offered an exquisite Gerhard Richter “Tubes” painting from 1967. This trend along with recent auction results, might also explain the remarkable amount of Group Zero and Arte Povera works at the fair. While good examples of Lucio Fontana’s work are increasingly rare, paintings by Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Jan Schoonhoven were prominently displayed in several booths. The most attention, however, was given to the German artist Günther Uecker who in the 1960s began to employ nails as an artistic means of expression. Several examples of his white kinetic paintings covered with nails could be found around the fair, but a work propped on a pedestal with two connected round charts entitled “Weisse Muehle” (1964) at the Mayor Gallery (London) stood out.

Discovering new names in a sea of artists is a pleasure, but so is working out which established artists are being hyped, the definition of which, in art fair terms, is being showcased in various galleries despite their differing programs. Though Gerhard Richter continues to fall in this category, the group this year also included Jaume Plensa, Anish Kapoor, Rebecca Horn, Markus Schinwald and the Bulgarian Nedko Solakov. The works by these artists have little in common. Plensa has become increasingly known for his ethereal figurative sculptures, some of which involve strings of words. An example of one of his mesmerizing marble heads could be found at Galerie Alice Pauli (Lausanne), which will host a solo exhibition this October. Represented by the New York powerhouse Gladstone Gallery and London’s Lisson Gallery, among others, Kapoor is by no means little known, but one does get the sense that the best is yet to come. The quality of his work is solid and he often manages to stand out in juxtaposition to other artists in a booth. Though the oeuvre of German sculptor and installation artist Rebecca Horn is multi-faceted, it was her nature-inspired kinetic works that could be found in various galleries. Blue butterfly wings animated by ominous little machines and parrot feathers that are moved by mechanics like a hand fan (as seen at Galerie Lelong, Paris/ New York) make for an interesting symbiosis of nature and human control and manipulation. They are as stunningly beautiful as they are disturbing and one wishes that one of Horn’s works would have been included in the important “Dead or Alive” exhibition at New York’s Museum of Art and Design (through October 24).

The work of the Austrian painter Markus Schinwald stands out for its embrace of classicism. Schinwald’s paintings, great examples of which could be found at Yvon Lambert (Paris/New York) and Galleria Gio Marconi (Milan), fuse 19th-century academicism with hints of psychoanalysis and gore. Schinwald appropriates antique oil paintings, which he restores, by outfitting them with unidentifiable appendages that suggest 19th Century medical braces or medieval torture devices. Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv) was one of at least three galleries, where the ink drawings of Nedko Solakov could be found. Solakov represented Bulgaria at the 1999 Venice Biennale after its three-decade long absence and showed at Documenta 12 (2007). His drawings at the fair, most of which belonged to a body of work entitled “99 Fears,” which each address a personal worry, are striking in their simplicity and humor. Solakov’s attitude hits the nerve of our time. As the world we know seems to be threatened daily and anxiety mounts, what better to keep in our toolkit than a unique sense of humor?

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on view with Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh at Art Basel Miami Beach, Booth J39 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, through Sunday December 6

This was an artcritical PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2009.

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on view with David Lusk Gallery at Art Miami, Booth B8, NE 1st Street at 32nd Street, through Sunday, December 6

This was an artcritical PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2009

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on view with Rebecca Ibel Gallery at PULSE MIAMI, Booth E-100, The Ice Palace, 1400 North Miami Avenue, through Sunday, December 6

This was an artcritical PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2009

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on view at It Ain’t Fair, presented by O.H.W.O.W., 3100 NW 7 Avenue, Miami, Florida 305 633 9345, featuring Deitch Projects, Peres Projects, Nueva Galeria De La Barra, A.S.S. Gallery, A.M.P., Picturebox and TV Books with curators Tim Barber, Kathy Grayson, Andreas Melas, Dan Nadel, Pablo de la Barra, Nicola Vassell and Terence Koh, through December 7

This was a PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2008.

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on view at Caren Golden Fine Art, Booth #E-16, along with works by Tom Burckhardt, Bradley Castellanos, Roland Flexner, Nicol López, McCallum & Tarry, Paul Henry Ramirez and Julie Rofman at Art Miami, Midtown Blvd (NE 1st Avenue) between NE 32nd & NE 31st Street, Miami Florida, December 3 – 7

This was an artcritical PIC OF THE FAIRS in December 2008.

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