Art Basel Miami Beach

Past
Dec 1 – Dec 6, 2020
Online

For the 2020 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, we're pleased to showcase the breadth of our contemporary program, facilitating dialogue across disciplines and highlighting varied perspectives.

Art Fair Details

Art Basel Miami Beach
Dec 1 – 6, 2020

Online Access

(opens in a new window) Art Basel Miami Beach

Above: Robert Nava, Splash Cloud, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 72" × 72" (182.9 cm × 182.9 cm) © Robert Nava

Connect

(opens in a new window) @pacegallery
(opens in a new window) @artbasel

Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis gained recognition in the late 1960s for her groundbreaking “pours”— early ‘ﬂoor paintings’ consisting of poured pigmented latex and polyurethane—that radically confronted the male-dominated art world and deconstructed traditional categories of painting and sculpture. In her seven-decade career, she has continued to develop a diverse artistic practice that spans mediums and materials, challenging our visceral senses in pursuit of pure form. In the 1990s, Benglis turned considerable attention to ceramics. Introducing an industrial element to her hand-building process, she utilized an extruder to produce long continuous shapes. Manipulating rounded or squared tubes of clay that she cut, twisted, pinched, incised, stacked and folded, Benglis created complex compositions that manifest the muscular physicality of her approach to material and bring a sculptural idiom to the realm of ceramics and craft.

Mary Corse

Since the 1960s, Mary Corse’s pioneering approach to painting has probed the medium’s capacity to materialize and radiate light from within. Corse often emphasizes that her paintings are “not on the wall,” but instead suspended in a perceptual relationship between viewer and canvas. For Corse, the essence of painting is therefore not about paint, but rather about underlying structures of visual experience as they unfold in space and time. Beginning in the late 1960s, Corse has pursued this interest in perception by incorporating glass microspheres on the surfaces of her paintings. An industrial material used to enhance the visibility of road markings, the microspheres capture and refract light depending on the viewer’s position relative to the work’s optically rich surface. As one moves laterally through space, lighting conditions shift, revealing or obscuring elements of the composition.

teamLab

Based in Tokyo, teamLab is an interdisciplinary group whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the conﬂuence of art, technology, design, and the natural world. Rooted in the traditions of historical Japanese art, teamLab operates from a distinct sense of spatial recognition that they call ultrasubjective space. Their work explores human behavior in the information era and proposes innovative models for societal development. Since their formation in 2001, teamLab has explored the inﬂuence of ancient Japanese culture through a contemporary digital language.

In Enso-Gold Light (2019), classical calligraphy evolves from brushed ink on paper to a ‘spatial calligraphy’, in which the depth, speed, and power of a single stroke is intensiﬁed and transformed into a three-dimensional form in motion. In Zen, Enso is the disciplined creative practice of drawing a circle in a single uninhibited stroke. The Enso symbolizes an expressive moment of enlightenment, strength, and elegance that gives way to the freeing of the mind in order to allow the body and spirit to create. In its digital suspension, Enso-Gold Light transcends the rhythm, emotion, beauty, and spirituality of the calligrapher’s line, which fuses the ancient art forms of poetry, literature, and painting.

James Turrell

James Turrell, associated with the Light and Space Movement initiated in the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the immaterial qualities of light. Inﬂuenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s work focuses on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with it, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception.

A recent Glass work, Kakeroma, Small Glass (2019) envelops the viewer in the radiance of pure color, resulting in the slow dissolution of the boundaries of the surrounding room. Each Glass work is a unique composition, in which hundreds of vivid combinations of colors seep into and against each other as they slowly shift over time. This series is the culmination of the artist’s lifelong pursuit, generating what the artist has called “spaces within space” in which luminous portals are instruments for altering our perception. Fusing the temporal, sensuous, and illusory qualities of his projection works and architectural installations, the Glass works synthesize several aspects of Turrell’s practice. Unlike his early projection pieces, however, they are not about generating an illusion; instead, they greet the viewer with the actual materiality of light, what Turrell calls “the physical manifestation of light, which we have trained our eyes too readily to look through rather than to look at.”

Keith Sonnier

A pioneering ﬁgure of the 1960s, Keith Sonnier radically reinvented sculpture using non-traditional and industrial materials. Most notably, he is recognized for his innovative approach to artiﬁcial light, bestowing new form and meaning to the material. He began working with neon in 1968, and it soon became a deﬁning and integral element of his practice for nearly ﬁve decades.

A seminal work from Sonnier’s early career, Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI (1968) is a gestural and lyrical composition that explores the three-dimensional space between the wall and the ﬂoor. Neon tubes of yellow and orange loop and curl around three wall-mounted porcelain ﬁxtures that hold silver-coated incandescent bulbs while two loosely knotted blue lines twist and mingle with the spiraling stand of orange tubing. Sonnier created custom neons rather than using commercially available materials. He worked with fabricators in both Europe and North America who allowed him to sketch and materialize the concept for his sculptures. Manipulating copper tubing that he would shape and bend, Sonnier used the properties of this material as a guide for the fabrication of his neon gestures and lines. Illuminating the room and pigmenting the ﬂoor, Neon Wrapping Incandescent VI gives volume to the poetry and play of the immateriality of light.

Kiki Smith

Since the 1980s, Kiki Smith has been engaged in a multidisciplinary practice that explores themes of spirituality, mysticism, and the natural world. Smith is best known for her depictions of the human form and powerful meditations on the human condition. Rendered in anatomical fragments or represented in full ﬁgure, the human body is at the core of Smith’s art. Her earliest investigations of the body explored its literal and metaphorical dissection and fragmentation, while in the nineties, she adopted the life-size ﬁgure as her subject. In more recent work, she creates new mythologies expressing human and animal forms while engaging with nature, celestial bodies, and notions of rebirth and decay.

Rest Upon by Kiki Smith — Kiki Smith, *Rest Upon*, 2009 (fabricated 2016), bronze, 34" × 82" × 39" (86.4 cm × 208.3 cm × 99.1 cm), Cast 1 of 3, Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Arlene Shechet

Arlene Shechet’s expansive approach to sculpture has led her to experiment with materials as diverse as plaster, porcelain, clay, and cast paper. Since the mid-1980s, she has crafted a new visual lexicon of richly textured, chromatic, and visceral surfaces. In the last decade, Shechet worked extensively with ceramics, engaging in the delights of a chance-based process that allows her to robustly manipulate her materials—casting, painting, ﬁring, carving, and stacking clay with no predetermined end.

Imagined in an emerald, jewel-toned hue, Shechet’s Together: 1 p.m. (2020) was created at the artist’s home and studio in Woodstock, New York during the COVID-19 pandemic. The polymorphic form bursts with bold and effusive color that is saturated, chromatic, and textural. It evidences Shechet’s technically demanding glazing method that produces seductive, textured surfaces in wide chromatic variation. The velvet-like exterior of Together: 1 p.m provides a sensational visual contrast to the sculpture’s deep, hollowed cavities, which are painted in a glossed laurel green. Elusive, though reminiscent of cinder blocks melting into one another, Shechet harnesses the inherent hollow nature of ceramics to create an astonishing object that is at once architectural and ﬂuid.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have collaborated as the artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset since 1995. In their practice, they have developed various modes of making, spanning sculpture, architecture, performance, and installation to explore the politics of institutions and draw attention to the ways in which art is presented and perceived. Their work radically re-contextualizes objects and alters traditional modes of representation. Often playful and subversive, it pursues complex questions and themes relating to identity, sexuality, youth and aging, as well as issues addressing the organization and use of public space.

Couple, Fig. 19 (2019) belongs to an ongoing series of vertically paired diving boards. Removed from their expected setting and deprived of their elemental function, the significance of environment is called into question. Seemingly readymade, each element of the diving boards is crafted by hand and painted in a pale flesh-toned or muted apricot hue. Other works in the series range in shades from cyan blue to stark black and bubblegum pink and call to mind the Minimalist surfaces of John McCracken and Ann Truitt’s sculptures or Daniel Buren’s striped canvases. At the same time, the doubling effect and the series title also recall Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s pairings of everyday household objects as allegories for the union of same-sex couples but in Elmgreen & Dragset’s Couples, the diving boards always have slight differences.

Alexander Calder

Jean Dubuffet

Louise Nevelson

Lucas Samaras

Trevor Paglen

Robert Mangold

Adam Pendleton

Fred Wilson

Sonia Gomes

Lee Ufan

Irving Penn, Girl Behind Bottle, New York, 1949, platinum palladium print mounted to aluminum, 18-3/4" × 17-5/8" (47.6 cm × 44.8 cm), image; 23-3/4" × 20" (60.3 cm × 50.8 cm), paper and mount, Edition 22 of 33 (in this format), print made 1978