Art Basel Miami Beach

Past
Dec 8 – Dec 10, 2023
Miami Beach

Art Fair Details:

Art Basel Miami Beach
Miami Beach Convention Center
Booth D35
Dec 8 – 10, 2023

Press:

Connect:

(opens in a new window) Art Basel Miami Beach
(opens in a new window) @artbasel
(opens in a new window) @pacegallery

Above: Lynda Benglis, QT, 2023, Everdur bronze, 23" × 18" × 16" (58.4 cm × 45.7 cm × 40.6 cm) 107 lbs. (48.535 kg) © Lynda Benglis

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2023 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.

The gallery’s booth (#D35) will feature works by contemporary artists across its program—including Gideon Appah, Lynda Benglis, Mary Corse, Latifa Echakhch, Elmgreen & Dragset, Sam Gilliam, David Hockney, Loie Hollowell, Matthew Day Jackson, JR, Alicja Kwade, Lee Kun-Yong, Lee Ufan, Li Songsong, Robert Longo, Kylie Manning, Beatriz Milhazes, Richard Misrach, Maysha Mohamedi, William Monk, Yoshitomo Nara, Robert Nava, Thomas Nozkowski, Michal Rovner, Joel Shapiro, Arlene Shechet, Marina Perez Simão, Mika Tajima, Hank Willis Thomas, Lawrence Weiner, and Fred Wilson— alongside modern masterpieces by Alexander Calder, Kiki Kogelnik, Roberto Matta, Kenneth Noland, Richard Pousette-Dart, and John Wesley.

Among the highlights is Lynda Benglis’s new bronze sculpture QT (2023), which belongs to a lexicon of forms that the artist has been developing, refining, and reworking over the course of her career. These works began as small ceramic sculptures that Benglis refers to as “Elephant Necklaces.” The artist transposes her formal experimentations with clay into her undulating, luminous, and reflective bronze sculptures that register the presence and pressure of her fingers at the moment of contact with the original material. Domestically scaled, these bronze works evoke waves, eddies, and whorls frozen in time. During the run of the fair, the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville will present A Walk on the Wild Side: ‘70s New York in the Norman E. Fisher Collection, a group exhibition featuring work by Benglis.

Critter Diable (maquette), a 1974 sculpture by Alexander Calder, will also figure prominently on the booth. This idiosyncratic, red-painted metal maquette—which depicts an impish, devil-like creature with horns and a pointed tail—was produced by the artist in the final years of his life and never realized at a monumental scale.

Pace’s presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach will reflect the gallery’s ongoing and upcoming exhibitions around the world, including those coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach—the booth will include a blown glass “drip” sculpture by Fred Wilson, whose exhibition Dramatis Personae continues at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery through December 22; Little Thinker, a 2001 painting by Yoshitomo Nara, who is presenting a survey of his drawings at Pace in Geneva through February 29, 2024; a 1997 painting by John Wesley, who will be the subject of a solo exhibition opening at Pace’s New York gallery in January 2024; and new paintings by Mika Tajima, who will also mount a solo show with Pace in New York in January, and Marina Perez Simão, whose West Coast debut solo presentation opens at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery in January.

Major contemporary artworks on the gallery’s booth also include Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle) (2023), a large-scale charcoal drawing examining the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine; an otherworldly landscape painting created by Matthew Day Jackson using a combination of physical and digital techniques; a new abstract painting by Maysha Mohamedi; and The Verve of Calypso (2023), a retroreflective artwork—which reveals latent images depending on lighting and the perspective of the viewer—produced by Hank Willis Thomas this year.

In the way of contemporary sculpture, the booth will feature a new marble work by Elmgreen & Dragset, who are presenting their own work alongside pieces by 60 other international artists in READ, the duo’s first major exhibition in the Czech Republic, on view at the Kunsthalle Praha through April 22, 2024; a new abstract composition forged with glazed ceramic, painted and dyed hardwood, and steel by Arlene Shechet; and a totemic mixed media sculpture by Alicja Kwade, who joined the gallery’s program this year.

Featured Works

l'ordre des mondes (Totem) by Alicja Kwade — Alicja Kwade, *l'ordre des mondes (Totem)*, 2023, bronze patinated, Bianco Carrara, Wonder Grey, Azul Macaubas, Rosa Portogallo, Venato Nero, Red Breccia, 323.9 cm × 60.1 cm × 55.6 cm (10' 7-1/2" × 23-11/16" × 21-7/8")

Alicje Kwade

b. 1979, Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Alicja Kwade’s monumental sculpture L’ordre des mondes (Totem) (2023), French for “the order of worlds,” composed of solid stone spheres supported by a scaffolding of cast bronze chairs, references Italian artist Piero Manzoni’s seminal sculpture Socle du Monde (1961), or “base of the world.” The text on Manzoni’s work appears inverted, suggesting that the pedestal is the foundation for the earth it rests on. In their essay “A User's Guide to Entropy” (1996), art historians Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss point to Socle du Monde as a metaphor for a world that has been turned upside- down, describing the conceptual experience of encountering such an upended world: “We would lose our marbles there: signs themselves would become empty, flat; there would be smoke without fire...For the world to lose its meaning, it is enough to turn it inside-out like a glove, to invert the full and the empty.” [1] Kwade’s marble-like stone orbs are a symbolic reordering of Manzoni’s toppled world. L’ordre des mondes (Totem) reorients worlds stacked atop one another on chairs, evoking metaphorical seats of power. Distinguished by their varying sizes and materials—the present stones were sourced from quarries across the globe, including Rosa Portogallo from the Estremoz region of Portugal, and Azul Macaubas sourced from Brazil— Kwade’s spheres conjure the planets in a solar system using stones quarried from Earth. This kind of material illusion is present across her oeuvre, consistently challenging the frameworks through which we understand the universe and humankind’s place within the cosmos.

1. Yve Alain-Bois and Rosalind Kraus, “ (opens in a new window) A User's Guide to Entropy,” in October, Vol. 78, Autumn 1966, 45.

Fred Wilson

b. 1954, Bronx, New York

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Maysha Mohamedi

b. 1980, Los Angeles

Hank Willis Thomas

b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey

Greek poet Homer’s the Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE) chronicles the ten-year saga of Odysseus, the mythological king of Ithaca, on his journey home from the Trojan War. Homer’s epic tells of a shipwreck that marooned Odysseus on the sea nymph Calypso’s island, where she would entrap him for seven years. American artist Romare Bearden recast the tale with Black characters in his “Odysseus Series” (1977), a project of 20 collages and watercolors that challenges the historical centering of white narratives. Nearly five decades later, Hank Willis Thomas’s The Verve of Calypso (2023) expands upon Bearden’s project, borrowing the compositional structure of Bearden’s collage The Sea Nymph (1977). The Verve of Calypso is composed of overlapping, fragmented historical photographs—including one showing the sold-out crowd at the opening night of the Negro Theater Project’s enormously successful production of Macbeth at the Lafayette Theater, Harlem, 1936, featuring an all-Black cast and a retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy in 19th century Haiti; and another taken September 17, 1963, of unidentified mourners following the funeral service of 14-year-old Carol Robertson, one of four young African Americans killed in a bomb blast the previous Sunday—that together speak to varied experiences of Blackness in the United States. Rendered in retroflective vinyl, the images are only visible from certain angles.

“All of my work is about framing and contexts,” says the artist. “Depending on where you’re standing, it really shapes your perspective of the truth, of reality, and of what’s important.” [1] Thomas enlivens the cool palette of Bearden’s collage with vivid organic shapes reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s iconic forms, like the plantlike shapes in his lithograph cover illustration for the inaugural issue of the art periodical Verve (1937), from which Thomas draws part of the playful title for the present work. The title also references the artist’s interest in Afro-Caribbean Calypso music, a genre known for its energetic rhythms and often socially or politically charged lyrics, mirrored in the vivacity of Thomas’s The Verve of Calypso.

1. “ (opens in a new window) Hank Willis Thomas in ‘Bodies of Knowledge,’” Art21, Video, 1:18.

Kylie Manning

b. 1983, Juneau, Alaska

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York, New York

Longo, RobertUntitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle), 2023 — Robert Longo, *Untitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle)*, 2023, charcoal on mounted paper, 96" x 144" (243.8 cm x 365.8 cm) 101 7/8" x 149 7/8" x 4 3/8" (258.8 cm x 380.7 cm x 11.1 cm), framed

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

Robert Longo’s Untitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle) (2023) belongs to his series A History of the Present (2020–ongoing), a body of charcoal drawings informed by the Coronavirus pandemic, political upheaval in the United States, and global conflicts. The drawing depicts an aerial view of a tank battle that is scarring the landscape, felling trees and causing untold losses. The present work spans 12 feet across and eight feet tall, characteristic of Longo’s oeuvre of large-scale drawings revealing remarkable precision and perceptiveness, enlarging images to a scale not otherwise visible to the human eye. Untitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle) is in the lineage of his earlier Destroyer Cycle, which explores violence and power in such works as Untitled (Robert E. Lee Monument Graffiti for George Floyd; Richmond, Virginia, 2020) (2022), a charcoal rendering of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia preceding its removal after months of protests. Other drawings, such as Untitled (Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a photograph by Mark Peterson) (2021) and Untitled (Ferguson Police August 13, 2014) (2014)—depicting hazy, faceless officers during protests against police violence following the murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police August 9, 2014—speak to Longo’s unrelenting call for justice through these poignant works. Untitled (Ukrainian and Russian Tank Battle) demonstrates his continuous engagement with social and political unrest, violence, and oppression through charcoal. “I’m making artworks out of dust,” the artist has said. [1]

1. Robert Longo quoted in Joe Lloyd, “ (opens in a new window) Robert Longo: ‘I’m making artworks out of dust’” in Studio International, 22 September 2017.