Casey Kaplan

:

Igshaan Adams
Die Son Bêre Sy Hitte Ondergronds (the sun stores its heat underground), 2022
Wooden, acrylic coated, plastic, glass, stone and bone beads, cowrie shells, mixed braid, polyester and nylon ropes, threading wire and cotton twine
99.5 x 88" / 252.73 x 223.52cm
IA2022-009

Igshaan Adams’ (b. 1982, Cape Town, South Africa) multi-disciplinary practice is an ongoing examination of hybrid identity that explores notions of race, religion, trauma, and tradition. Adams combines weaving, performance, and installation in an intersection of generational and personal histories.

For Art Basel Miami Beach, Adams presents Die Son Bêre Sy Hitte Ondergronds (the sun stores its heat underground) (2022), a new wall weaving within the artist’s latest series of tapestries currently in dialogue with his solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan titled Vastrapplek, translating from Afrikaans to “hold fast and stomp in place.” As in the exhibition, Adams here focuses on the unique dance routine of the Vastrappers, the adolescent dancers of the Rieldans, a version of the indigenous South African dance Igshaan Adams witnessed as a child in the Northern Cape region. Centered around the concept of migration (of individuals and communities), Adams adopts the language of dance as a connector of tribes, blood lines, and histories. His own narrative is embedded in this landscape—the earth holds the memories of his grandparent’s courtship dance, a symbolic precursor to the racial and religious complexities of his youth. By embracing the cultural vestiges of post-apartheid Cape Town, Adams overlaps a colonialist tradition with modern South African expression. As the dancers stomp the earth in an attempt to flatten it, they simultaneously kick up dust in an opposite action, leaving behind tracks in the dirt akin to a record of their current, lived experience.

Die Son Bêre Sy Hitte Ondergronds (the sun stores its heat underground), 2022 (Detail)

This ethereal terrain is Adams’ source material and the tracks in the dust are emboldened with a powder pigment and captured in print. Each image is then translated from an abstracted template into intricately woven tapestries in a collaboration with the artist’s studio community and made with locally sourced materials like wood, stone, and glass beads, nylon rope, and cotton twine purchased in Cape Town. Undulating waves of dirt and the sun’s position on the final footmarks accentuate the contours of the cut earth. Die Son Bêre Sy Hitte Ondergronds (the sun stores its heat underground) reveals a painterly approach—its vibrant blue hue and unearthly color markings speak to the artistic liberties taken by Adams that transcend a literal or figurative understanding of typography. Waves of deep navy and bright orange coruscate across the tapestry, reminiscent of brush strokes. Here Adams not only echoes the imprints of the dancers’ footprints and the vestiges of tradition, but also the histories of painting.

Vastrapplek, Igshaan Adams’ solo exhibition with the gallery, is on view at Casey Kaplan, New York through January 7, 2023.

Kevin Beasley
Cottonwood (From The Grove), 2022
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, dye sublimation t-shirts, altered t-shirts, confetti t-shirts, housedress, epoxy resin, carbon fiber, altered housedresses, durags, work gloves, shoelaces
74 x 250.75 x 2" / 187.96 x 635.63 x 5.8cm

Cottonwood (From The Grove) (2022), a monumental three-panel work by Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA), is comprised of raw cotton harvested near a century-old property in rural Virginia owned by the artist’s family, printed t-shirts, housedresses, durags, shoelaces and work gloves set in polyurethane resin. Three distinct compositions that draw from the millennia-old tradition of relief sculpture bridge overlapping narratives based in historical and contemporary ties to production and site within the landscape of the American South.

Cottonwood (From The Grove), 2022 (Detail)

An abstracted colorfield of cotton is buttressed between two contrasting slabs. Individual dye-sublimated t-shirts that traverse the work’s leftmost slab have been spliced together to reveal a larger image of a Cottonwood tree trunk the artist photographed in Maplesville, Alabama during a trip to acquire a cotton gin motor in 2012. The artist’s time spent in Maplesville to collect the motor, which powered the gins that separated cotton seeds from fiber from 1940 to 1973, ignited an ongoing and multifaceted meditation on history, land, race, and labor. The trunk, located within a grove of historical trees (some of the oldest trees in the state of Alabama), was torn down by a tornado years back. Here, imagery merges with the textures and colors of the supporting material, forming a space wherein history and the present overlap.

Cottonwood (From The Grove), 2022 (Detail)

Cottonwood (From The Grove), 2022 (Detail)

On the right, culturally-inspired materials exist within fields of color and texture. Housedresses, sourced from a former Harlem dress shop that was frequented for decades by Beasley’s grandmother and great-grandmother, have been cut into strips and presented as a colorful confetti of geometric fragments. With transparent color fields of dyed resin, Beasley allows the viewer to see the space behind the work, through the work. This visual access to the preexisting environment brings a new element to Beasley’s established material formula of cotton, clothing, and resin. The inner workings of the slab are brought to the forefront, urging a new consideration of the viewer’s physicality within the site the work is viewed in. Beasley's own body is inscribed in each sculpture, as he works with the resin for as long as time allows before the polymer hardens, joining the absent bodies implied by the artwork’s very materials: those bodies who once wore or were intended to wear the clothing before said garments redirected to the studio.

Beasley is currently included in Start Talking: Fischer/Shull Collection of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The artist is scheduled to open his fourth solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan in 2023.

Cottonwood (From The Grove), 2022 (Alternate view)

Matthew Brannon
Since Yesterday, The Sum of Summits, The General Secretary and the Americans, 2022
Silkscreen with hand painted details
59.5 x 78" / 151.13 x 198.12cm
Framed: 64 x 82.5 x 2" / 162.6 x 209.6 x 5.08cm
MB2022-003

Matthew Brannon’s (b. 1971, St. Maries, ID) distinctive visual language, developed through his unique prints, is imbued with wit and historical expertise. With traditional silkscreen printing techniques as well as hand-painting, the artist layers hundreds of screens in an intricate network of overlapping and boldly colored objects. Image and language intersect in evocations of dual meanings and underlying narrative.

In recent years, Brannon has focused almost exclusively on the time period of the Vietnam/American War as a source of inspiration—conducting exhaustive research with this generation-defining trauma. Often focusing on interior scenes that depict, from a first-person perspective, the desks of past presidents or the vanities of first ladies, which make use of subtle environmental clues found in personally significant possessions, Brannon creates visual narratives that speak to the life and psyche of his implied or defined subjects.

Since Yesterday, The Sum of Summits, The General Secretary and the Americans, 2022 (Detail)

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Brannon presents an antiwar work informed by historical research ignited by the invasion of Ukraine. When former secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, passed in August 2022, the artist felt a shock. Surprised by the lack of American consciousness surrounding his death, despite Gorbachev’s omnipresence in Brannon’s youth, Brannon continued researching the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with a renewed vigor toward understanding “that piece of the puzzle,” in his words. However, when Vladimir Putin threatened nuclear war following the invasion, and Joseph Biden mentioned “Armageddon” at a fundraising event in New York, his antiwar tour de force Since Yesterday, The Sum of Summits, The General Secretary and the Americans (2022) was fully realized.

Two founding principles of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union flow from a central display of missiles; the text is printed in alternating burgundy and red serif over streaming banners of black. The descending word on the left translates to “glasnost” — a call for openness and transparency within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The descending word on the right translates to “perestroika” or “reconstruction” in English, and was a call for reforms within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The locations and dates along the borders of the work map the summits between Mikhail Gorbachev and US presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Brannon illustrates the site of the Reykjavik summit as a large house at the base of the composition. In this building, which is now a museum, Reagan and Gorbachev came closer than ever to banning all ballistic missiles. While strides would be made, Reagan’s unwillingness to forgo his “Star Wars” (Strategic Defense Initiative) prevented the signing in Reykjavik. However, in Reykjavik, Gorbachev had presented a motive to create a safer planet at a time when the arms race had spiraled to horrifying stockpiles on every side. On the right side of the work, the Nobel Peace Prize Gorbachev received in 1990 for his leading role in the peace process is represented, echoed in form by a round peace sign to its right.

Matthew Brannon’s work is included in Interior, an exhibition organized by Chief Curator and Executive Director Tim Peterson, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art through January 8, 2023.

Since Yesterday, The Sum of Summits, The General Secretary and the Americans, 2022 (Detail)

Since Yesterday, The Sum of Summits, The General Secretary and the Americans, 2022 (Alternate view)

Nathan Carter
Parsnipitus Dracu-Fang Sphere-Francelle (The Bright Furnace), 2022
Steel, stainless steel wire, brass, acrylic enamel
85 x 60 x 1" / 215.9 x 152.4 x 2.5cm
NC2022-010

Nathan Carter’s (b. 1970, Dallas, TX) Parsnipitus Dracu-Fang Sphere-Francelle (The Bright Furnace) is suspended off the wall, reading as a drawing in space. Through an improvised and untethered hand, shapes are liberated. This fluid empowerment reorients the artist’s relationship to line, color, and form, celebrating the act of making. A constant flow of stimulation informs Carter’s practice, ranging from dystopian science-fiction, post-punk music, and constellations of fictional queer worlds. This kaleidoscope of references coupled with the artist’s studio practice subverts linear understandings of recent and past histories. Parsnipitus… is comprised of brass sheets cut into crescents, triangles, and teardrops of varying scales that are enmeshed within a rambunctious armor. Metal fragments are painted with a deep blue enamel resulting in an echo contained within a steel galaxy. In an homage to a mysterious cosmos, forms undulate through both the motion of the brass and the curved lines of the frame. Like the moon’s cyclical influences on tidal currents and the human form, there is a rhythmic movement contained in the spaces where brass and steel meet.

N. Dash
Untitled, 2022
earth, acrylic, silkscreen ink, wood stick, jute
21.5 x 60" / 54.6 x 152.4cm
ND2022-011

Untitled, 2022 (Detail)

N. Dash’s (b. 1980, Miami, FL) practice indexes the labor of human touch through a durational and corporeal engagement with material as a physical response to spatial architecture and the erosion of the environment within the industrialized world. The artist incorporates materials such as earth, paint, and found objects, into complex, often multi-panel paintings that draw from the languages and methods of sculpture, photography, and printmaking.

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, N. Dash presents a new work, in which a ground of earth is applied in graded surfaces, creating topological fields. This earthen ground serves as a base for layers of paint and silkscreen ink that conjure the sequential formation of planetary strata or fields of flora. Resting above the earthen panel is a painted wooden stick that serves as a protean horizon line.

Untitled, 2022 (Detail)

Judith Eisler
Britney, 2022
Oil on panel
12 x 9" / 30.48 x 22.86cm
Framed: 13.25 x 10.25" / 33.66 x 26.04cm
JE2022-004

Britney, 2022 (Detail)

Using the core principles of painting—line, color, and form—Judith Eisler (b. 1962, Newark, NJ) depicts animals, celebrities, and objects imbued with multifaceted tensions and roles. Britney (2022) is lifted from the popstar’s “I'm A Slave 4 U” music video. Produced at the height of Spears' career and seven years prior to the commencement of her conservatorship, the singer is caught gazing into the distance with an expression that teeters at the intersection of sexualization, innocence, and concern. Like much of Eisler’s work, Britney was not painted in its current vertical orientation. Instead, Eisler rotated the work throughout its fabrication so that she could best focus on the material truth of the image, as opposed to the figure herself. This commitment to the language of painting results in a work that reads as figurative from a distance and divulges into abstraction upon closer inspection.

Britney, 2022 (Alternate view)

Judith Eisler
Madonna, 2022
Oil on canvas
11.81 x 15.75" / 30 x 40cm
Framed: 12.36 x 16.36 x 1.88" / 31.3 x 41.5 x 4.8cm
JE2022-001

Eisler’s Madonna (2022) captures the world-renowned celebrity as the fictional character Sarah Jennings in the 1993 film “Dangerous Game” directed by Abel Ferrara. Madonna has occupied and transcended a plethora of categorizations throughout her decades in the limelight. Eisler’s depiction showcases the artist behind yellow-tinted glasses as she peers into the distance with her face resting on the knuckles of her palms. The flesh of the icon’s hands become ghostly—a testament to Eisler’s emphasis on the mobility of images as opposed to the structure of figuration.

Eisler’s New York City Metropolitan Opera Banner Commission Three Divas (2022) can be seen on the organization’s façade (through June 31, 2023).

Caroline Kent
When that which is not fully known, makes an insistence, 2022
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
103.5 x 81.5" / 262.89 x 207.01cm
CK2022-013

Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Sterling, IL) engages in a visual language of abstraction through an instinctive approach to color and form. Her multidisciplinary practice encourages a mutual exchange between maker and viewer by way of invented modes of communication. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, text, and performance, Kent stretches the limitations of language to create a meaningful space for both silence and sound, shape, and empty ground.

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Kent presents When that which is not fully known, makes an insistence (2022). Magenta, violet and indigo forms interplay with golden accents. The shapes, originally conceived as cut paper in the artist’s studio—Kent’s process excludes sketching altogether—overlap one another the way words might in one’s mind while formulating a sentence. Solid abstractions that fleetingly recall recognizable motifs float in black space, punctuated by finer lines. These hieroglyphic-like marks call attention to, and perhaps describe in an unknowable language, the less immediately noticeable forms that seem to glide beneath the surface of the work due to their reduction in color. A deep, dark well of illegibility results; this depth is a chance for the viewer to sink into the black pit of the painting, chasing Kent’s shaded forms in pursuit of participating in one of the work’s multiple, indeterminate conversations.

When that which is not fully known, makes an insistence, 2022 (Detail)

When that which is not fully known, makes an insistence, 2022 (Alternate view)

Kent is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, on view through February 8, 2023. The artist’s site-specific installation organized by The Museum of Modern Art, The Modern Window, is on view in New York through October 2023.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Family Noir, 2022
Graphite and ink on pulp, pressed flowers, artist's hair, baltic birch
46.5 x 22.75 x 6"/ 118.11 x 57.78 x 15.24cm
CHK2022-017

Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, Korea) explores the anatomy of image and its creation alongside mnemonic ruptures and lineages. Her practice which includes painting, drawing, and sculpture is motivated by a poetic tension between what is remembered and forgotten, real and imagined. Family Noir (2022) is a drawing that includes three of Kim’s recurring characters, Mother, Father, and Child. The Child—with two signature pigtail braids—looks into a mirror and the reflection returned is that of Mother. The freestanding mirror casts the shadow of Father. Surrounding this scene are six replicas of clock drawing tests (CDT) completed by individuals with dementia that hover just inside a frame of dried and embedded flowers. These elements make acute the artist’s focus on time passages and genealogical evolutions. The easel on which the drawing rests is an acknowledgement of various instruments of support. In function, an easel provides temporary reinforcement for a canvas, which eventually parts ways with its supportive structure. Likening this transient state of dependence and separation to that of the relationship between child and parent, Kim explores the metaphorical and literal implications that result.

Kim’s first European solo exhibition Sand in the Hourglass is on view at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway. Her work can also be seen in Door to the Atmosphere at The Frye Museum of Art, Seattle, Washington. Both are on view through January 15, 2023.

Family Noir, 2022 (Detail)

Family Noir, 2022 (Detail)

Hannah Levy
Untitled, 2022
Nickel-plated steel, glass
48 x 38.5 x 54" / 121.92 x 97.79 x 137.16cm
HL2022-008

With spare gestures and skilled execution, Hannah Levy (b. 1991, New York City, USA) manipulates texturally incongruous materials to create tactile sculptures that provoke sensory experience. The artist appropriates and defamiliarizes commonplace objects and modernist design tropes by using unexpected materials and warping their formal properties. Stretched flesh-like silicone expanses are held taught or perched precariously on rigid metal armatures. Zoomorphic forms invite comparison to arthropod legs, household fixtures, clothing, and exercise equipment. Levy makes that which is familiar deeply strange and magnetic, creating objects that exist in a fleeting limbo of what the artist calls “design purgatory.”

Recently introducing slumped glass into her practice, a process in which glass is heated to a flaccid state, allowing the force of gravity to transform the material, Levy presents Untitled, 2022. Four nickel-plated steel insect-like legs cradle a drooping amber sac of slumped glass. The organic sag of the glass suspends the silicone’s elastic temperament in time and place. The cold sterility of the sleek metal armature is counterbalanced by a subtle eroticism emitted by the central bulbous bowl. Its finish simultaneously recalls midcentury home furnishings and dripping tree sap—highlighting the work’s positioning at the edges of manufactured and natural realities.

Levy is currently included in the 16th Biennale De Lyon, manifesto of fragility, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, on view through December 31, 2022, as well as 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through January 8, 2023. The artist is slated to present a solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan in March 2023.

Mateo López
Monica, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-001.1

Mateo López’s (b. 1978, Bogotá, Colombia) practice, which spans drawing, sculpture, choreography and performance is bound together with dualities — a temperament of levity is balanced by the weight of art historical lineages, all in keeping with a continued analysis of space. Originally trained as an architect, the artist recently relocated from New York City’s dense metropolis to his home city of Bogotá. During his time in New York, López accumulated everyday objects that collide in his studio, transforming in unpredictable manners and teetering on the edge of both equilibrium and collapse. These sculptures or “People” as termed by the artist acquire an unexpectedly animated and humorous quality. For Art Basel Miami Beach, López presents a series of prints that capture these personified objects. The work echoes Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Equilibres (A Quiet Afternoon) (1984–86), a series of photographs that document precarious constructs of everyday items. The duo, much like López, playfully arrange items on hand, balancing together for example a chainsaw with an old glass bottle. In López’s work a faucet may pierces the belly of a plastic container or an artificial tangerines may dangle from a mannequin hand. The playful and inventive spirit of López haphazard arrangements inspire animated wonder and humor while conveying the movement of a city habitat. López renders sculptural constellations slightly off kilter, aptly reflecting the absurdity of everyday life.

Monica, 2022 (Detail)

Mateo López
Jose, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-002.1

Mateo López
Meghan, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-003.1

Mateo López
Alexander, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-004.1

Mateo López
Paula, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-005.1

Left: Mateo López
Bree, 2022
Giclée on cotton
9.13 x 11.75” / 23.2 x 29.85cm
Framed: 12.5 x 9.88" / 30.48 x 25.1cm
Edition 1 of 1 + 2 AP
ML2022-006.1
Right: Bree, 2022 (Alternate view)

Jonathan Monk
This Painting (Polke Lawler), 2022
Acrylic and screen print on canvas
63 x 47.25" / 160 x 120cm
JM2022-014

Self-reference and appropriation echo throughout Jonathan Monk’s (b. 1969, Leicester, UK) practice, whose works can often be seen and experienced as a reaction to and in interaction with the art of peers he is most interested in. Monk never considers a work entirely concluded, preferring his output to exist as a limitless continuation of earlier projects, reinventing and reusing ideas of his own and more than occasionally the ideas of others. To Monk, the relationships between gallery and artist, collector and artist, as well as artist and artist, are as much materials to be experimented with as paint or a screen-printing press. Relationships and mediums are recontextualized and reinterpreted throughout Monk’s oeuvre, which traverses sculpture, photography, film, painting, and more, in a compounding number of ways.

This Painting (Polke Lawler), 2022, presented for Art Basel Miami Beach, is part of a new body of work and is in dialogue with paintings concurrently on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan. Each painting in the series is emblazoned with screen-printed text that differs from one to the next, always beginning with the phrase “This painting should ideally be hung…”. As such, each sets up an imagined reality by dictating a supposed “ideal” placement on the wall, offering an unexpected conversation with iconic artists—in this case, Sigmar Polke and Louise Lawler—who exist in the zeitgeist of the public’s and art market’s eye. The electrifying orange canvas was first a part of Monk’s 2011 exhibition It’s a circus! at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Along with the other boldly painted but otherwise bare canvases, it was returned to Monk’s studio, to be reinvented a decade later. The artist then embellished the vibrant ground with a geometric band of rectangles in white paint below the screen-printed, titular instructions that inform how the resulting work should (ideally) be installed. With a playful directive, Monk reconsiders the context in which his work is placed—an art fair, collector’s home, or museum—and the possibility that it could be hung next to one of the artists that he would himself like to own.

These Paintings Should, Jonathan Monk’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery, is on view at Casey Kaplan in New York through January 7, 2023.

Matthew Ronay
Hephaestus, 2022
Basswood, dye, plastic, steel, steel wool, shellac-based primer, primer
51.5” x 20.5” x 12.5” /130.81 x 52.07 x 31.75cm
MR2022-008

Matthew Ronay’s (b. 1976, Louisville, KY) practice is the embodiment of a masterful handling of materials through a fetishistic pursuit of form. Working primarily with basswood, his sculptures are all made by hand; each component carved, whittled, sanded, pierced, dyed, and jointed together into colorful configurations that visually defy their wooden medium and conjure traditions of non-western art making and American folk art.

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, the artist presents Hephaestus, 2022. Titled after the ancient mythological god of craftsmen, the anthropomorphic sculpture celebrates the artist’s own craft—the work challenges gravity as its spindly bottom appendages support a heavy top end. The remarkably balanced structure lurches forward in three separate dyed basswood projections at its helm. Hephaestus, as well as being the mythological blacksmith to the gods, was also said to be disabled by birth defect or injury, depending on the telling of the tale. Many myths describe his limp, caused by a twisted leg, which is echoed in the lumbering shape of Ronay’s sculpture.

Matthew Ronay is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX, titled Matthew Ronay: The Crack, the Swell, an Earth, an Ode. The exhibition is on view through January 2023 and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

Left: Johanna Unzueta
Two of Us II, 2019
Wood, indigo dye, pastel pencil, gold watercolor, industrial wheels, nails and linen thread
52 × 36 × 19" / 132.1 × 91.4 × 48.3cm
JU2019-001
Right: Two of Us II, 2019 (Verso)

Johanna Unzueta’s (b. 1974, Santiago, CL) interdisciplinary practice pays homage to her Chilean upbringing through an engagement with the surrounding communities, landscapes, and histories of Latin America. Spanning installation, sculpture, mural-making, and drawing, Unzueta uses common materials such as cotton, recycled wood, paper, thread, felt, and natural pigments to describe a landscape impacted by the hierarchy of people and resources. The history of how things are grown and circulated is central to Unzueta’s evolving narrative.

Two of Us II, 2019 (Detail)

Unzueta’s intimate and ornate oeuvre is manifested with intuitive expression. For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Unzueta presents Two of Us II, a geometric work made of wood and dominated by a hand-drawn, circular shape against a navy background with copper and turquoise oblongs that hover above and below the central axis. The pastel pattern is laid atop a background of rich-hued blue dye from the Guatemalan indigo plant, a material learned and cultivated from her apprenticeship with indigenous Mapuche women in rural Chile and a staple in the artist’s practice. Nails penetrate the forms at the top and bottom of the composition and are threaded with linen to create a third dimensional plane. The wrapping of the thread deepens the depth of the field and the vertical orientation of the wood allows the viewer to encounter the drawing more intimately and from both sides. The format of the work itself serves as an architectural intervention akin to Unzueta’s pastel and threaded wall murals. The wood balances on wheels that offer mobility and create a physical manifestation of a contemporary room divider—offering the observer differing perspectives while maintaining its relationship to the body.

Two of Us II, 2019 (Alternate view)

Ella Walker
Three Figures, 2022
Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil, on stretched canvas
82.68 x 39.37 x 1.4“ / 210 x 100 x 3.6cm
EW2022-017

Enthralled by medieval manuscripts, Renaissance paintings, and Italian tragic-comedies, Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK) transforms art historical iconography into invented scenes of love, drama, and mystery. Walker combines painting and drawing (using a vast array of mediums including tempura, gesso, pastel, and ink) to create shallow, stage-like depths of field and interspersing planes of color that usurp holistic understandings of structure and composition.

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Walker presents Three Figures, a new painting that explores the tension between vibrancy and decay. Lifting from the 14th century manuscript “The Three Living and the Three Dead,” Walker renders three characters in the foreground. Hallow bodies and intersecting limbs coalesce in a disorienting fashion that mandate further investigation into where figure and ground meet. The grey figure in the background bearing their chest personifies Wrath from The Seven Vices as seen in Giotto’s 1305 allegorical fresco sequence at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. The presence of this vice is linked to the artist’s recent solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan Theatre of Virtues and Vices, and is emblematic of Walker’s ongoing preoccupation with the binaries of right and wrong, good and evil. Bulbous and tentacled flora emerge from the earth and seem to fall from the sky. This natural element infuses another dimension into Walker’s world wherein magical realism holds ground for threaded narratives and dream-like scenes.

Three Figures, 2022 (Detail)

Garth Weiser
Untitled, 2022
Acrylic on panel
18 x 14" / 45.7 x 35.6cm
GW2022-003

The texture and materiality of Garth Weiser’s (b. 1979, Helena, MT) abstract paintings amplify the artist’s unique process wherein divergent media and techniques are imposed on and excavated from a single panel or canvas. The resulting image is a fossilized painting that concurrently withholds and reveals Weiser's multi-layered approach to compositional construction. For Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, Weiser presents a new work that expands upon the artist’s evolving relationship to paint processes. The panel, rich in texture through gesso and impasto, is superimposed and indented with netting that geometrically constricts the painting. This Modernist impact creates a visual rhythm that physically transforms the work, revealing a labyrinth of depth and dimensionality. Weiser’s mark-marking is webbed. It oscillates between excavation and layering, resulting in a fractal-like painting that distorts perspectives and challenges objective constructs.

Untitled, 2022 (Alternate view)

Untitled, 2022 (Detail)