Nan Goldin tops ArtReview’s Power 100 list. https://ift.tt/EwfiAzv

Self-portrait in the mirror, Hotel Baur, Zürich, 1998
Nan Goldin
Fraenkel Gallery

Today ArtReview announced its Power100 list, the magazine’s annual roundup of the 100 most influential figures in the art world. The list is juried by a secret panel of 40 individuals spread across the globe.

This year, the number one spot goes to photographer and activist Nan Goldin (up from the 8th spot in 2022), reflecting the artist’s growing influence following the Oscar-nominated biographical documentary about her campaign around the opioid crisis. Goldin is currently the subject of a retrospective, “This Will Not End Well,” at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and a solo show, “Full Moon,” at Gagosian in Basel. Gagosian started representing the artist earlier this year, alongside Fraenkel Gallery.

Untitled 2022 (let the sun shine in, financial times, october 21, 2022), 2022
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Pilar Corrias Gallery

Goldin’s top spot reflects the large presence of artists across the list broadly: There are 34 artists and 4 collectives featured, including the entire top 10, which is as follows:

• Nan Goldin (up from 8 in 2022)
• Hito Steyerl (up from 4)
• Rirkrit Tiravanija (up from 86)
• Simone Leigh (up from 7)
• Isaac Julien (up from 52)
• Ibrahim Mahama (up from 47)
• Theaster Gates (up from 18)
• Steve McQueen (up from 27)
• Karrabing Film Collective (up from 21)
• Cao Fei (up from 12)

The strong presence of artists is particularly notable compared to earlier versions of the list: In 2016, for instance, only 23 artists made the cut.

The most influential gallerist or dealer in 2023, according to the Power 100, is Larry Gagosian, ranked 12 and up from 20 in 2022. He is followed by Iwan Wirth, Manuel Wirth, and Marc Payot of Hauser & Wirth (14; ranked 17 last year), David Zwirner (19; ranked 9 last year), and Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher (20; ranked 23 last year). Other notable gallerists on the list include the founders of Sprüth Magers, Thaddaeus Ropac, Mendes Wood DM, kurimanzutto, Kukje Gallery, Take Ninagawa, and Gallery 1957, among others.

With 16 gallerists featured this year, less than half the number of artists, the list suggests a power dynamic in the art world today that favors artists over gallerists. Curators and museum directors also outnumber gallery leaders on the list.

THE FUTURE IS PRESENT, 2019
Jeffrey Gibson
Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Several influential collectors and arts patrons are also named, including Maja Hoffman (28), Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (58) and Julia Stoschek (82), among others.

New entries on the list this year include writer and photographer Teju Cole (90), AI artist Refik Anadol (60), and Stefanie Hessler, curator at New York’s Swiss Institute (100).

Next year’s Venice Biennale has also already made an impact: John Akomfrah, who will represent the U.K., and Jeffrey Gibson, who will represent the U.S., are both featured (33 and 63, respectively), as is the main exhibition’s curator, Adriano Pedrosa (15).

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Marie Laurencin’s Queer, Feminine Utopias Are Gaining Renewed Recognition https://ift.tt/Wo70XYd

It’s a predicament that plagues women artists throughout history: to be known and named in relation to the male artists with whom you associate. There are hardly any versions of the Marie Laurencin story that don’t include Georges Braque, her classmate at the Académie Humbert in Paris; Francis Picabia, with whom she collaborated; or Pablo Picasso, who introduced her to her soon-to-be lover, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1907. In fact, Laurencin permanently committed herself to the company of Picasso and Apollinaire by painting a 1908 group portrait, Group of Artists, that asserted her presence within their artistic milieu. But Laurencin painted herself at a slight remove from the others, towering above them—hinting at her sense of disconnection, and her own burgeoning stature.

Group of Artists was created before Laurencin arrived at a signature style, and before the height of her commercial popularity in France in the 1920s. It predates her answer to the question of how to step out from the shadows cast by men: to invent a world without them. “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” a noteworthy new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, posits the artist’s hyper-feminine, ethereal paintings of women in cotton-candy pinks and blues as exercises in worldbuilding. In their soft domestic and pastoral settings, Laurencin’s subjects live in evident harmony with animals, and offer tender, queer-coded gestures of affection to one another. With the exception of two early portraits, men are nowhere to be found.

“The way she’s been traditionally taught in art history…she was seen as a more minor figure working alongside the major Cubist artists in Paris in the early 20th century,” said Simonetta Fraquelli, who co-curated the exhibition alongside Cindy Kang, during a curator talk at the foundation. The exhibition, she said, was an attempt to reexamine that reputation. “What we discovered, in fact, was that she created almost like an alternative reality—a dreamlike form of modernism which was totally unique to her, and which was populated by an aesthetic which was totally female.”

Despite Laurencin’s notoriety during her lifetime, her profile has receded since her death in 1956. This new reappraisal of the artist marks her first major institutional survey in the United States since 1989. But a handful of smaller recent presentations have hinted that a Laurencin revival was on its way. This fall, Nahmad Contemporary showed her work in a solo booth at Independent 20th Century in New York. In 2021, she figured prominently in “A Future We Begin to Feel,” a group show at New York’s Rosenberg & Co. organized to honor the 50th anniversary of Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” And in 2019, when the Museum of Modern Art reinstalled its permanent collection galleries, two of Laurencin’s self-portraits were given a high-profile spot alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—doing little to sever her discursive ties to the Spanish painter, but increasing her visibility nonetheless.

However, it’s only at the Barnes exhibition that queer themes in the work of Laurencin—who is known to have had relationships with both men and women—are fully foregrounded. The exhibition is chronologically bookended by two works that demonstrate the persistence of sapphic themes over the course of the artist’s career: Song of Bilitis (1904) and Poèmes de Sappho (1950). The former, a print completed while Laurencin was still in art school, takes its name and subject—an all-consuming kiss between two female figures—from a poetry collection, published in French in 1894, purportedly by an affiliate of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Though Bilitis and her work turned out to be the fictional invention of the French poet ​​Pierre Louÿs, the text nonetheless was highly influential in lesbian literary circles. It evidently captivated Laurencin, who made at least 20 versions of this print between 1904 and 1905. Nearly a half-century later, she returned to Sappho when she illustrated a new translation of her poems with loose, curvilinear line drawings.

Sappho, with her lyrical, first-person expressions of desire for women and her thiasos, the all-female community assembled under her tutelage, offered a model of feminine eroticism and companionship with which Laurencin identified. Even when not explicitly invoked, the poet’s spirit is felt in Laurencin’s paradisiacal, woman-centric visual world. The Elegant Ball, also known as The Country Dance (1913), an early example, shows two women dancing, one with her hand wrapped around the other’s waist, both gazing coquettishly at the viewer while a third woman plays a stringed instrument nearby. Stylistically, the painting reflects the artist’s early association with Cubism, with its angular, flattened shapes and thick black lines. But as Laurencin’s vision solidified, so did her physical forms: Over time, her women became rounder and more full-bodied, her paint more thickly applied—as if her alternate reality was steadily becoming more material.

Works like Song of Bilitis deploy what the art historian Rachel Silveri describes in the catalogue accompanying “Sapphic Paris” as “strategic queer classicism”—they use imagery that produces different meanings for different audiences. Where more mainstream viewers might see references to the past, members of the lesbian avant-garde in which Laurencin moved would have understood their context of contemporary queer intimacy. Women in the Forest (1920), too, wears historicism as a veil. The painting of four figures gallivanting in a lush green landscape may have been read as a reference to fêtes galantes, an 18th-century genre of painting featuring amorous, well-heeled subjects in outdoor settings. But no men were invited to this fête, and the presence of a pink curtain—a recurring motif in Laurencin’s work—suggests a realm that is secret or hidden away. The deer-like creatures with which the women mingle invoke a French double entendre: “une biche” could have been understood as either “a doe” or “a lesbian.”

Laurencin frequently used animals as symbols in her work. Birds came to signify her relationship with the fashion designer Nicole Groult, in reference to a poem that Groult wrote for her (“Your eyes are bluebirds / Your breasts are white birds…Your heart is a rare bird”). In Women with a Dove (1919), Goult is depicted resting her chin on Laurencin’s shoulder while a white bird perches in the crook of her arm. The tenderness of the moment is palpable, yet, to audiences at the time, the relationship between the pair may not have been obvious. Silveri emphasizes that, when this work was on view at the Musée du Luxembourg and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in subsequent decades, many viewers would have seen a platonic friendship.

Laurencin’s ability to hide in plain sight was a key factor in her success during the early 20th century—and may also have contributed to her dwindling popularity since then. In an essay for the 2021 Rosenberg & Co. exhibition, the writer Milo Wippermann framed this as a problem of femme invisibility, referring to the “misrecognition of feminine-presenting but queer-identifying people” in both heteronormative and queer contexts. Queer and feminist reappraisals of art history have often neglected Laurencin because her girly aesthetic does not scan as sufficiently serious or subversive—and, perhaps, because her popularity during her own lifetime made her seem less in need of retroactive redemption. But as years have passed without serious critical assessment of Laurencin’s work, that dynamic has become inverted. Now, nearly 70 years after her death, the pink curtain shrouding Laurencin’s world without men is lifted.

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How Miami Became an Art World Capital https://ift.tt/Y5KtMew

On the sun-soaked beaches of South Florida, Miami is among the western hemisphere’s leading nexuses of contemporary art. Since Art Basel’s inaugural U.S. fair in Miami Beach in 2002, the city has transformed from a regional art enclave into a global art stronghold. This transformation is particularly evident during Miami Art Week, which is set to attract more than 1,200 international galleries to its 20 art fairs. The two largest, Art Basel in Miami Beach and Untitled Art Fair, will feature 284 and 163 exhibitors, respectively.

Miami’s ascension as a global art capital can be attributed mainly to the growth of its close-knit community of artists and art enthusiasts that has coincided with the city’s rapid population upsurge. Between 2002 and 2022, the city’s population has increased by 22% from 362,470 to 441,889. This growth has also been highlighted by an expansion in the city’s cultural and artistic industries.

Amid this global recognition and what Forbes magazine has called a real estate “super-boom-growth,” there is a growing emphasis on protecting Miami’s rich artistic scene through various initiatives and programs. Among them is the debut of “Making Miami,” a public art exhibition, on view across four indoor gallery spaces connected by the Sculpture Garden in the Miami Design District, from December 6th through December 26th. The exhibition will present work from Miami-based artists, such as Daniel Arsham and Cristina Lei Rodriguez, who lived and worked in the city between 1996 and 2012.

“Histories need to be told, or otherwise, they will forever disappear,” said Vivek Jayaram, who founded the exhibition with his wife Carolina. “I’m hoping this [show] can raise awareness, certainly in Miami, but also in other cities that are experiencing a lot of extraordinary exponential, pandemic-fueled growth. To take a beat and understand and think for a moment about how we can build these cities while taking into account the creatives that really helped make it unique to begin with.”

“Making Miami” emerges from the Jayaram family’s devotion to the city’s thriving art scene. Vivek moved to Miami 15 years ago and established a law firm specializing in uplifting creatives. Now, he and Carolina plan to funnel the city’s global attention back to the homegrown art communities. At the same time, Miami’s international standing draws positions it uniquely in the art world.

“Miami is a really fascinating market,” said Jeff Lawson, the founder of Untitled, which was established in 2012 and has since become the most diverse fair during Miami Art Week. “It’s the only market in the world that supports this type of ecosystem. At the same time, [Miami] still doesn’t have a tremendous amount of galleries. We’ve seen that grow…but it’s a really interesting market where people come from all over the world. With that said, we have definitely seen a consistent uptick in people who are focused on not only supporting the arts but also collecting [work by artists] that are based locally. We’ve seen [that] grow year over year.”

The growth of prominent art world events such as Art Basel and Untitled has been accompanied by increasing support for local art and artists. This encouragement is fueled not only by backing from the city but also by initiatives like the Knight Foundation’s grant program, which has infused more than $165 million into the art scene. This funding has created a fertile environment for the arts in Miami, supporting institutions such as The Bass Museum and Locust Projects.

From avant-garde spaces like Locust Projects in Little River to esteemed institutions like the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Miami) in the Design District, there is also a palpable commitment to nurturing and promoting new artistic talents within the city’s institutions.

“This is an extraordinary time for artists practicing in Miami,” said Alex Gartenfeld, the artistic director at ICA Miami. “There’s a lot of great Miami-based artists who live here, who have moved back here, who trace their roots here, and who are showing in Miami and around the world. We’ve been able to work alongside them to ensure that they’re represented in our collection.”

Miami’s gallery scene—though less populated than art capitals such as Paris or New York—also stands out for its deep commitment to reflecting the city’s diverse population. Serving as platforms for emerging and established talent, these galleries enrich the city throughout the year, creating a foundation to enhance the global appeal of major art events. Yet challenges loom as the city faces a soaring cost of living, now 21% above the national average, according to Payscale. This surge in living expenses has led to a decentralization of the city’s art scene, as inflated housing prices push artists and galleries beyond traditional centers.

“The price of living in Miami and Miami Beach has become unbelievably high, and as a result, there is no longer any dense, mobilized community of creatives,” Vivek said. “Artists have been priced out of housing and of studios. So, as a result, you don’t have this insane roster of people all working in close proximity to each other because it’s just not possible. The creative communities have suffered because it is becoming a lot harder to build and have a sustainable creative career here in Miami.”

Despite this, galleries like Nina Johnson, established in 2007, and Mindy Solomon, founded in 2009, remain stalwarts in Miami’s art scene. The galleries are a testament to the city’s resilience, adapting to market changes—many of which were onset by the pandemic—while maintaining a strong local focus. Nina Johnson skillfully balances showcasing ultra-contemporary artists, such as Gaby Collins-Fernández and Emmett Moore, with attracting international attention—a testament to its ability to evolve with the global art market.

This adaptability aligns with founder Nina Johnson’s observation: “What makes Miami an interesting place to work—particularly as it relates to the arts—is that we are more quickly encountering the problems of the 21st century, like climate change, income disparity, or political extremism, all of the things that are clearly going to be increasingly relevant across the United States over the next 50 years or 20 years.”

Untitled, 2023
Basil Kincaid
Mindy Solomon Gallery

Seafoam Brisoleil, 2023
Emmett Moore
Nina Johnson

Meanwhile, Allapattah, a neighborhood in Miami’s west side, is now witnessing a burgeoning art scene. Since the pandemic, several emerging galleries, such as Andrew Reed Gallery and KDR305, have popped up in the trendy neighborhood. Alongside these galleries, well-known collector John Marquez opened the experimental artist space Marquez Art Projects, and recently, the Museum of Sex announced a new location to join the growing roster of art spaces.

Mindy Solomon, the founder of her eponymously named gallery in Allapattah, observed that Miami’s experience during the pandemic was uniquely beneficial, encouraging introspection and a better connection to one’s environment. Additionally, the city is a byproduct of its many influences, particularly Caribbean and Latin American cultures, which constitute approximately 70% of the city’s population. Above all, she underscores how Miami’s welcoming nature is what allows the city’s global art presence to keep growing—fueled by a long-standing artistic undercurrent.

“What I love about Miami is that it’s very grassroots,” Solomon said. “If you build it, they will come. I feel like in Miami, there’s an opportunity to be involved meaningfully, and there isn’t this kind of hierarchical social structure that you have to somehow navigate.”

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Galleries Are Still Adapting to the New Normal, Post-Covid https://ift.tt/8ME5y4m

When the pandemic brought the world to a standstill, art galleries—like most businesses—found themselves at a crossroads. Since then, several of the repercussions from lockdowns have dissipated as the art market has returned to its in-person form. But there have also been lasting changes to collector behavior that have forced galleries to adapt.

One of these changes has been a significant move towards digital engagement in the art world. Artsy’s Collector Insights Report 2023 showed that 80% of respondents purchased art online in the past 12 months, up from 76% in 2022. On top of this increased digital engagement, galleries are actively learning how to approach their new customers, with 51% reporting that their online collectors are primarily new to their business, according to the Artsy’s Art Industry Trends Report 2023.

Local art markets are also facing headwinds that can impact any small business in uncertain economic times. Recent gallery closures in New York, such as Denny Gallery or JTT, highlight the challenges faced by galleries post-pandemic. And the broader landscape of engagement with art might be changing, too. Recent data from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) revealed that, in 2022, the number of Americans visiting museums and galleries is slowing down, decreasing from 24% in 2017 to 18% in 2022. Given these challenges, galleries have had to adapt in recent years to the changes in foot traffic to brick-and-mortar spaces.

Luigi Mazzoleni of Italy’s Mazzoleni noted that in the last decade, he’s witnessed his gallery’s weekly attendance fall. Most collectors, he noted, prefer to attend art fairs over individual gallery spaces. In response, Mazzoleni has focused not just on participating in fairs, but also on collaborative and international projects—most recently, the gallery hosted a dual exhibition with Kukje Gallery, featuring the works of Agostino Bonalumi and Lee Seung Jio.

“High-quality curatorial projects that invite visitors to discover more about the artists presented are still essential to our gallery program,” Mazzoleni affirmed. “Looking to the future, we see collaborations, beyond the fairs, as a central point of focus and development.” This strategy goes beyond merely maintaining visitor numbers; it’s about enriching the visitor experience and reinforcing the gallery’s reputation for curatorial excellence.

Meanwhile, for Miami-based gallerist Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque of The Art Design Project, a physical location has become altogether unnecessary. In 2018, well before the pandemic, the gallerist embraced the digital revolution, shifting his Miami gallery to an entirely online presence. “The internet is a massive revolution,” Arcila-Duque said. “These artists that nobody knows appear next to the big ones and in a random order…It’s divine. That is, for me, magical—to give visibility to the artists.”

For Arcila-Duque, transitioning to fully online sales gives him the freedom to invest in new or emerging artists remotely. By moving online, his gallery adapted to a surge in artists who took their art online without gallery representation following the lockdowns worldwide. This strategic shift not only allowed for greater flexibility in showcasing diverse talents, but also positioned the gallery at the forefront of the evolving digital art market.

However, steadfast brick-and-mortar galleries across the globe learned to adapt to changing scenes. In Los Angeles, where foot traffic is perennially top-of-mind, Meghan Gordon, director of OCHI, spoke to the challenges of attracting visitors in a city as vast and culturally rich as Los Angeles. Still, she emphasized that the years since the pandemic are nothing short of ordinary.

“Foot traffic in L.A. is a constant conversation,” said Gordon, “We prefer not to advertise it, but it’s a challenge for most galleries. The energy shifts from one part of the city to another so quickly. I’ve been here for 12 years. The changes have been seismic.”

Over the last decade, Gordon noted that the cultural center of Los Angeles has moved several times—especially as more major galleries, such as David Zwiner or Hauser & Wirth, have opened locations in Melrose Hill and West Hollywood, respectively.

Still, strengthening gallery attendance in Los Angeles is increasingly difficult as local media outlets have cut their arts coverage, such as L.A. Weekly or the radio station KCRW. One major solution is direct community engagement. Gordon works on the board of the Los Angeles–based arts magazine X-TRA to help drive the local relationships between galleries and the press. This grassroots approach is particularly practical in Los Angeles, where personal connections and the gallery’s relevance to the local community are crucial factors in its success.

“When we receive editorial coverage for a show, the gallery traffic goes up,” Gordon said. “There’s a relationship between press and gallery traffic… and there is still a serious lack of coverage in the incredible programming that’s happening in Los Angeles.”

Above all, community is essential to ensuring a gallery’s visitorship. After four major closures in downtown New York, Almine Rech opened its new location in Tribeca. Last month’s inauguration of the new gallery marked an exciting milestone for the team, as they hit a record in opening attendance.

“We have found that there is a renewed interest from our clients in attending our openings and visiting our exhibitions in person,” said Ethan Buchsbaum, senior director at Almine Rech New York. “The art business is a relationships business, and Covid closures created a very real desire to resume the types of traditional interactions that many collectors not only enjoy, but require, in order to make informed decisions.”

Other galleries across art hubs, including Bradley Ertaskiran in Montréal and Nunu Fine Art in New York, reported that in-person attendance has returned to robust pre-pandemic levels. However, since the initial 2020 lockdowns, such galleries have continued to incorporate innovative strategies, such as social outreach or tight-knit community building, amid a changing scene.

Jenny Mushkin Goldman, director of Nunu Fine Art New York, speaking on behalf of Nunu Hung, highlighted the significant differences in gallery culture from one city to another. She noted that cities like Taipei do not share the same gallery-hopping culture prevalent in places like New York City.

Bradley Ertaskiran, which opened just months before the pandemic lockdowns, swiftly recognized the potential for online platforms to complement their physical presence. Antoine Ertaskiran, the founder, saw the value in enhancing community engagement, too. He played a key role in initiating Gallery Weekend Canada, organized by the Association for Contemporary Galleries in Canada, to boost local foot traffic and build community.

“There is definitely a lot more focus on social media and how it helps our business,” Ertaskiran said. “We are definitely in the school of thought where people need to see art [in person].... We were promoting the gallery through a lot of video documentation and stills from international fairs. That’s really how we kept growing and how we kept interest high.”

The art world’s evolution post-pandemic has led galleries to develop new methods of fostering community and collector engagement. Above all, these adaptations underscore galleries’ resilience amid an ever-changing new normal.

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Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz will show their art collection at the Brooklyn Museum. https://ift.tt/EOBdvpk

Singer Alicia Keys and her husband, producer Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean)—both Grammy Award winners—will exhibit their private art collection at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition, titled “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” will feature works by nearly 40 prominent Black artists, such as Gordon Parks and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The show is scheduled to run from February 10 to July 7, 2024.

“Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys have been among the most vocal advocates for Black creatives to support Black artists through their collecting, advocacy, and partnerships. In the process, they have created one of the most important collections of contemporary art,” said Anne Pasternak, the museum’s director.

In 2018, Dean told Cultured magazine that he started collecting work from Black artists because not enough people of color were collecting work from artists of color. Since then, the couple’s art collection has grown to include several legendary artists.

One section of the exhibition, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” will pay tribute to influential elders like Esther Mahlangu and Kwame Brathwaite. Their works, ranging from abstract paintings to street photography, have paved the way for future generations. Other sections will include “Giant Conversations,” featuring artists whose work offers social commentary, and “Giant Presence,” dedicated to monumental contemporary works such as Nina Chanel Abney’s Catfish (2017).

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William Anastasi, a prominent Conceptual artist, has died at 90. https://ift.tt/WPydpCH

William Anastasi, a prominent artist within the New York art scene and a key figure in the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s, passed away at the age of 90. His death was confirmed by the Cologne-based Thomas Rehbein Gallery, which represented him.

Born in Philadelphia in 1933, Anastasi was known for his innovative and rule-defying works, including his famous “blind drawings.” Starting in 1963, the artist created these drawings under unique conditions, such as on the subway with closed eyes, reflecting the role of chance in his art practice. His works, spanning media from drawing to video installation and text, resonated with many influential contemporaries, including the experimental composer John Cage.

Subway Drawing, 2013
William Anastasi
Galerie Hubert Winter

Anastasi first received attention after his shows at the Virginia Dwan Gallery in the 1960s. Among his notable exhibitions was “Sound Objects,” in which he presented a series of readymades along with audio recordings of noises associated with the objects. Despite the recognition he garnered from his peers and critics, Anastasi remained underappreciated compared to his Conceptual art contemporaries.

Anastasi’s works are featured in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Sarah Harrelson’s Artists to Watch during Miami Art Week https://ift.tt/LhxvXaJ

Between art fairs, galleries, and pop-up exhibitions, Miami Art Week brings together countless artists’ works—so it’s helpful to have a tastemaker point you in the right direction.

Ahead of the major American art world moment, Artsy caught up with Sarah Harrelson, the founder and editor-in-chief of Cultured Magazine, to hear about the artists she’s most eager to see in Miami this year. Here, we share her picks, whose works can be found from the aisles of Art Basel and NADA to a highly anticipated solo show at ICA Miami.

Sasha Gordon

Works on view at ICA Miami

I’ve followed Sasha Gordon’s hyper-personal, Surrealist-tinged work since her 2021 solo show at Matthew Brown in Los Angeles. We included her in Cultured’s annual Young Artists list last year, and her star has only risen since then. Her practice mines the tradition of expressionist, figurative painting with special attention to the spectrum of emotions her experience as a young, queer Asian American woman engenders. Her first solo museum exhibition opens at the ICA Miami at the top of Art Week and will be a must-see for any lover of painting. In the presentation, she’s playing with the figure of the avatar as it relates to her hybrid identities.

Theresa Chromati

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Jessica Silverman, booth B1

A Life to be Lived within this Deep Breath ( I am with You as We Take This Step forward ), 2023
Theresa Chromati
Jessica Silverman

I’ve kept tabs on the Baltimore-born and -based Theresa Chromati’s work since she burst onto the painting scene in the late 2010s, and we included her in this year’s Young Artists list. Trained as a graphic designer, Theresa’s practice centers around totemic figures that guide her and her viewer through the multilayered universe of her canvases. In recent shows at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and VETA in Madrid, she’s experimented with expanding her visual taxonomy of otherworldly beings into the sculptural realm. She’ll have a few new pieces on view at Jessica Silverman’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth this year, and also has a solo show at Dallas’s Tureen gallery until December 16th.

Oscar yi Hou

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with James Fuentes, booth D28

Also included on our Young Artists list this year, Oscar yi Hou is a prolific painter and poet. Born in Liverpool, U.K., and based in Brooklyn, he opened “Oscar yi Hou: East of sun, west of moon” last year at the Brooklyn Museum at age 24, making him one of the youngest artists ever to have a solo presentation in a major New York institution. That exhibition closed in September, but he’ll have works on view at James Fuentes’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth during Art Week and is currently preparing his next New York solo show with the gallery. His practice centers the “subterranean semiotics” of immigrant communities and unpacks and explodes our understandings of Asian American identities.

Jo Messer

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Morán Morán, booth B49

I discovered Jo Messer’s work at 56 Henry a few years ago. A bold (and humorous!) painter of the chaos and complexities attached to the female body, her delightful practice was showcased at one of my favorite places to see art in Miami—the Rubell Museum—until last month. If you missed that opportunity, she’ll have a work in Morán Morán’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth, and is preparing a solo show at the gallery’s Mexico City location next April. I’m thrilled to include her in this year’s Young Artists list; she’s definitely one of the most exciting young voices in painting today.

Violet Dennison

Works on view at NADA Miami with Tara Downs, booth B-211

I first encountered Violet Dennison’s work at the 2018 New Museum Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage.” For the exhibition, she installed bundles of Floridian seagrass onto the institution’s walls. Five years later, the New York–based artist is still making forceful work, although she’s turned her focus to the canvas. Violet’s recent pieces have explored Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers; at Jan Kaps this past summer, she showed several multipaneled paintings that filled the white cube with ecstatic bursts of color. She’s one of the 27 makers in our Young Artists list this year, and you can find her latest work in Miami at Tara Downs’s NADA booth.

Willa Nasatir

Works on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach with Chapter NY, booth C46

On the heels of her eponymous third solo exhibition with Chapter NY, Willa Nasatir will show several new works at the gallery’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth during Art Week. A 2023 Cultured Young Artist, the painter and photographer had a solo show in 2017 at the Whitney Museum (only five years out of Cooper Union!) and has continued to unspool realms of consciousness in her practice ever since. Her almost collage-like deconstructions and compositions across both mediums have kept her on my radar throughout the years.

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Oscar yi Hou, Gisela McDaniel, and Kapp Kapp named in Forbes’s 30 Under 30. https://ift.tt/GBq9tUN

Forbes announced the 13th edition of its 30 Under 30 list, continuing its annual tradition of recognizing young trailblazers in their respective industries. In this year’s Art & Style 30 Under 30 North America, Forbes spotlights seven visual artists, in addition to other art world personalities.

Highlights among the visual artists include Oscar yi Hou, who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2022, shows with James Fuentes, and recently closed a year-long solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; and Gisela McDaniel, a Chamorro artist who is represented by London-based Pilar Corrias Gallery, and has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Other featured artists include Akea Brionne, Ludovic Nkoth, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, LaRissa Rogers, and Kathia St. Hilaire.

Art world figures are also included in the 30 Under 30 list, including Kendra Walker, the founder of Atlanta Art Week, and brothers Daniel and Sam Kapp, the founders of tastemaking New York gallery KAPP KAPP.

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Photographer Larry Fink, known for his commentary on American society, has died at 82. https://ift.tt/AiTlOCy

Larry Fink, an American photographer renowned for capturing class divisions through his lens of New York’s high society, has passed away at 82 in Pennsylvania. The news of his death was shared by New York’s Robert Mann Gallery, which represented him.

Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Fink used photography as a medium to champion an honest depiction of American racial and socioeconomic disparities. His six-decade career was influenced by the Marxist views of his mother, Sylvia Caplan Fink which shaped both his politics and aesthetics. Under the guidance of Lisette Model, the Austrian-American street photographer, Fink honed his skills at the New School in New York.

Initially rising to prominence in the late 1970s with “Social Graces,” a series juxtaposing the lives of a rural Pennsylvania family with New York’s elite. The collection, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, showcased his powerful perspective on societal contrast.

By 1976, Fink earned his first of two Guggenheim Fellowships as he further developed his signature high contrast, flash photography style. Since then, Fink has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Rising Artist Emily Yong Beck’s Ceramics Tackle the Power of Cuteness https://ift.tt/pBEONU6

Sailor & Miku Onggi, 2023
Emily Yong Beck
Gaa Gallery

We’ve had “girl dinner” and “girl math.” Is it time for “girl ceramics”? Emily Yong Beck’s stoneware adorned with Sailor Moon and Sanrio characters is emblematic of the current zeitgeist of women in their twenties embracing their inner child with frilly bows and self-aware giggles. In some ways, it’s never been a better time to be a girl again. But Yong Beck’s works offer a more complicated picture of this trend of “girlification” by suggesting that there may be something rotten beneath the veneer of cute.

Deliberately cartoonish and imperfect, Yong Beck’s vessels evoke a contemporary gloopy ceramics aesthetic that’s indebted to the pioneering work of Sally Saul and duo Magdalena Suarez Frimkess and Michael Frimkess. The popularity of this style was especially apparent in the group exhibition “Clay Pop”—previously on view at Jeffrey Deitch in New York in 2021 and at the gallery’s Los Angeles location earlier this year—which included the likes of Ruby Neri, Alake Shilling, Woody De Othello, and Diana Yesenia Alvarado. Like her predecessors and peers, Yong Beck prioritizes rough surfaces and organic forms, rejecting the pristinely glazed uniformity refined by automation and instead making the artist’s hand apparent.

Currently exhibiting in solo shows on both the East and West Coasts—“Same As It Ever Was” at New York’s Gaa Gallery through December 9th, and “Soft Power” at The Pit in Los Angeles through December 16th—Yong Beck recreates a cast of familiar Japanese cartoon and anime characters, which appear lumpy and lopsided on ceramics shaped after traditional Korean pottery. In Sailor Moon Bottle Vessel (all works 2023), uncanny images of Sailor Moon, Sailor Mars, and Luna wrap around a joobyeong vase. Meanwhile, Pokémon in grass vase is modeled after a maebyeong vessel. In Yong Beck’s hands, the veil of nostalgia crumbles to reveal a wider legacy. Behind the cult of cute is Japan’s history as a major imperial power that colonized countries such as Korea, where Yong Beck was born.

In her ceramics, which are reminiscent of Takashi Murakami’s early works, Chicago-based Yong Beck uses kawaii imagery to contend with the “cute-washing” that has subdued Japan’s once-feared global image. The nation’s cultural exports—Tamagotchi, Kirby, and Sonic the Hedgehog, to name a few—encapsulate the effectiveness of soft power in transforming national identity and international perception.

Hello Kitty Onggi, 2023
Emily Yong Beck
Gaa Gallery

Clusterfuck Moon Jar, 2023
Emily Yong Beck
Gaa Gallery

Yong Beck transmutes pop culture in a way that parallels the function of the traditional Korean vessels that inform her work. In Hello Kitty Onggi, several versions of the namesake character with her signature bow appear on a pot typically used for fermentation, the biochemical process that breaks down sugar. Indeed, this metabolic reaction is an apt metaphor for Yong Beck’s work where saccharine subject matter is turned into something crude yet illuminating.

Not far from Hello Kitty Onggi in the Tribeca show, in neighboring SoHo, young women flock to the store Baggu (“bag” in Japanese) for the brand’s collaborations with Sanrio and bow-obsessed fashion designer Sandy Liang. After all, the girls that get it, get it.

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HAIRandNAILS Is the Minneapolis Gallery For Artists, By Artists https://ift.tt/iP6Rrwn

From their roots in DIY art spaces, Ryan Fontaine and Kristin Van Loon, the duo behind HAIRandNAILS, champion an artist-first ethos in their gallery. Together, they melded their backgrounds—Fontaine’s in punk rock and experimental music, and Van Loon’s in choreography and performance—into an inclusive gallery experience. In a growing Minneapolis art scene, HAIRandNAILS has developed into a vital addition to its community.

Fontaine and Van Loon first crossed paths in 2013, when Fontaine attended Van Loon’s performance at the Walker Art Center. At that time, Fontaine was hosting pop-up galleries across the city, such as The Temporary Autonomous Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. This predated his later venture, Oval Hedley, a semi-permanent gallery in Portland, Oregon, which he ran with his brother.

Over the years, this partnership between Fontaine and Van Loon blossomed into a shared vision that took a concrete shape with the purchase of a property in south Minneapolis. Comprising a commercial storefront and residential space, the gallery offered an ideal setting as a base for their artist community. This step marked the beginning of HAIRandNAILS seven years ago, initially as an artist-run enterprise that evolved into a commercial space, driven by their curiosity about how more traditional gallery businesses operated. Still, the intention to create a space for their community remained central.

“We just wanted a place to show our own work and our friends’ work,” Fontaine said. “[HAIRandNAILS] started very much as an artist-run space, but we found that we were really curious how a more traditional gallery space operated.…We approach it from the perspective of an artist and probably always will.”

Inspired to cultivate a local and communal artist hub, HAIRandNAILS primarily focuses its scope within the Midwest, with 10 out of the gallery’s 14 represented artists scattered across Minneapolis and the Rust Belt. This regional concentration reflects the gallery’s commitment to nurturing local talent. In many ways, Fontaine and Van Loon are using the traditional commercial gallery business model to uplift their artistic communities, bringing local artists to fairs and selling their works via online platforms.

The gallery consistently engages local artists in dialogue with one another. “Chimera,” on view from November 18th through December 31st, features new works from Minneapolis-based painters Emma Beatrez, Rachel Collier, and Julia Garcia, and Los Angeles–based Christina Ballantyne. This grouping of four artists on the gallery’s roster—who have had or will present solo exhibitions there—bolsters artistic conversation and champions the voices of emerging talent.

“I love how HAIRandNAILS is driven by human relationships,” Van Loon said. “As artists ourselves, we can support the artists we present with a knowledge base from our own practices. The fact that we both come from performing arts backgrounds brings a special flavor to our project. Some of my favorite shows have been ones that merge artistic disciplines and when visual artists and time-based artists collaborate.”

Minneapolis, with renowned institutions like the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Weisman Art Museum, has always been a cultural hotspot. Yet HAIRandNAILS adds an unconventional destination for artists to share their work, bridging the gap between these major institutions and other DIY or artist-run spaces that are spread across the city.

Like many Midwestern cities, Minneapolis is brimming with talented artists, and Fontaine and Van Loon intend to fuel the local art scene while providing a pathway for artists to enter the international conversation.

“There’s a lot of artists, small artist-run spaces, and unconventional locations that are showing incredible work; incredible curation in living rooms, garages, studio spaces,” Fontaine said. “We’re hoping that a lot of these artist-run spaces will [grow into] a bigger footprint.”

On the side, Fontaine and Van Loon maintain their personal art practices. Fontaine recently teased a large-scale resin installation at the Rochester Art Center, where, later in the year, Van Loon, as part of her dance duo HIJACK, will participate in another installation.

Despite these personal endeavors, they continue to ambitiously expand the gallery’s art fair footprint, from Art Basel in Miami Beach to NADA in New York. Most of the gallery’s major exhibitions for 2024 are already planned. The founders both attribute their motivation to balance the responsibilities of a commercial gallery with their own artistic pursuits to their deep-rooted passion for the artists on their roster.

In the end, HAIRandNAILS is at the forefront of an artistic stronghold in the Midwest. “Where our gallery is coming is from is very much an advocacy for artists,” Fontaine said. “We’re very close with the artists; in fact, we feel more like artistic peers in some ways because we’re both still active artists.”

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Mendes Wood DM Creates Success through Friendship, from São Paulo to Paris https://ift.tt/PBLK4D8

To run any business requires structure and strategy. But in the art world, there isn’t an accepted playbook of how to build and run a gallery. That said, the founders of Mendes Wood DM, Pedro Mendes, Matthew Wood, and Felipe Dmab, never intended to open a gallery. The trio—who describe themselves respectively as “visionary,” “spiritual advisor,” and “mastermind”—met as idealistic young men, energized by the philosophy of art and the poetry of life. The basis for the gallery was really a friendship circle, or a “thread of affection,” as they call it. “We’ve done like a superhuman amount of hosting,” explained Wood.

In Paris during the early 2000s, Mendes and Wood were studying the philosophy of art and hanging around the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the duo were inspired by relational aesthetics and the performance of life. When Mendes’s sister introduced them to the Brazilian artist Sônia Gomes, an idea sparked. “She said, ‘You live in Paris, you need to sell some of this,’” recalled Mendes of the artist’s fabric wearable sculptures. At the time, the Fondation Cartier was holding an exhibition, “The Brazil Popular-Brazil Neoconcrete.”

While Gomes’s work may not have been included in the exhibition, Mendes continued to wear or bring Gomes’s work to parties and people’s homes around the city, eventually beginning to sell pieces to top Parisian collectors. But it would still be a few years until the commercial operation became fully fledged.

5 Acordes (sinfonia branca series) | 5 Acordes (série sinfonia branca), 2021
Sônia Gomes
Mendes Wood DM

Untitled (meu amarelo é ouro series) #4, 2023
Sônia Gomes
Mendes Wood DM

Wood grew up in a commune in New Hampshire, but a peripatetic impulse led him to Europe well before he was awarded a high school diploma. Mendes, meanwhile, hails from Minas Gerais, Brazil’s agricultural and industrial county seat. After their studies in Paris, Mendes lured Wood back to Brazil where the two decided to open a residency in Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais. “It was on a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere,” explained Mendes. It also happened to be the location where most of the artists that the gallery works with today hail from.

Ja.Ca, as the artists’ residency is called (and still exists today, operated by Francisca Caporali), opened as a research center and haven for Brazilian conceptual artists in 2010, around the time that Bernardo Paz opened the iconic sculpture park Inhotim in Minas Gerais. Mendes fundraised from Brazilian industrial companies to distribute as grants, and the project pulled in Paolo Nazareth and Lucas Arruda, who, like Gomes, are the linchpins in the formation of the gallery and its continued success today. “There [are] three people that we started representing before we started having a gallery,” explained Wood, citing Gomes, Nazareth, and Arruda as the foundation of their gallery concept.

The gallery’s operation begins with its artists. It has come to shepherd the careers of names such as Rubem Valentim and Solange Pessoa, as well as playing a key role in introducing the art world to the likes of Alvaro Barrington, Vojtěch Kovařík, and Antonio Obá. “All of our artists come from us,” said Wood.

Dois Mineiros Preto y um Capitao do Mato dos Dragoes Reais, 2019
Paulo Nazareth
Mendes Wood DM

That materialized into the first gallery space—debuting with an Arruda solo show—in 2009 in São Paulo, which, as Mendes explained, served as “an Athenian square where people gathered, in the backyard of this house, where people just spent the day there, talking about things.” The gallery freewheeled through its first year or so, for as Mendes explained: “There was never a business plan. There was never any other plan than just to pay our rent. It was 100% intuitive, it was instinctual. In Portuguese, we say, ‘We sold our socks to buy our shoes.’”

This curatorial forum, lushly gardened by botanist Wood, also happened to be next-door to a fledgling gallery concept run by Felipe Dmab, and the fate of Mendes Wood changed. The trio had a natural rapport, and Dmab had more experience in the art world than simply knocking on doors. Thus an alliance was born, and the “master strategist,” as Wood says of Dmab, was folded into the gallery. “Immediately in a way that no one else has understood the vision and the scope of things, Pedro, Felipe, and I came into harmony, I think when we established that there was a real brotherhood between us,” said Wood.

Domingas, 2023
Solange Pessoa
Mendes Wood DM

That’s when the three knew that their operation was ready for the big leagues. For them, that meant applying and exhibiting in international fairs like Art Basel and Frieze. “In the beginning when we did a beastly amount of art fairs, it was really out of necessity, because there was no way to put Brazil out there. It’s far away,” said Wood.

Looking back at works sold during that period from 2009 to 2012, Wood said that, with Dmab and Mendes, the power of their relationships had a lasting impact: “Even then, when a work [by Gomes or Arruda] was like a $2,000 thing, you put it in a collection that still has it on the wall, and loans it out [to institutions] and hasn’t sold it.” Many of those $2,000 works are now worth six figures.

But there remained one small issue, as Mendes recalled: “We needed an embassy elsewhere. We had so many people and visitors who are outside of Brazil.” Part-joke, part-acknowledgment, Mendes Wood DM frames their own operation as a diplomatic enterprise: “Our first spaces were consulates and then they became embassies, and now they’re entities,” said Wood. The gallery has always been deeply Brazilian—convivial, fun, diverse—but what’s often glossed over in understanding a Brazilian context is its diverse, international DNA. Brazil, like the United States, is a melting pot of cultures—Indigenous, African, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian—where roots are strong both at home and abroad. More than 50% of Brazil is of African descent, and though never publicized, Mendes Wood DM was the first gallery to represent living Afro-Brazilian artists. (Similarly, the gallery’s appointment of Renato Silva to partner, himself Afro-Brazilian, was a first.)

In 2017, the gallery launched internationally by committing to a space in Brussels, a signal of “this desire to show Brazilian art in other places, bring them to these places, and bring international artists to Brazil,” Mendes explained. The gallery brought in Carolyn Drake Kandiyoti as the founding European partner to help anchor it in the region. In 2022, the gallery opened in Tribeca, New York, with a survey of Nazareth, and followed it with ambitious shows by the likes of Pessoa. New York is where the largest community of the gallery’s collectors reside.

Now, this fall, Mendes Wood DM reunited with the city of its youth with its first Parisian gallery, housed in a unique space on the 17th-century Place de Vosges. “Sometimes you complete a cycle where you began and the last note is the first note,” said Wood, who recounted recently speaking to his “kid” sister who spent time in Paris with Wood and Mendes in the early 2000s: “She was like, ‘When you were, like, 18, you always said you would have an art space in Paris. Remember?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t remember that?’”

Dmab added: “I feel that Paris is a melting pot for the exchange of ideas and a very inspiring ground for business.”

The trio behind the gallery sees it as fate, but also a testament to how they’ve run their operation with the people in for the ride along the way. “We’ve managed to keep a community,” Wood said. “I’m a great believer in the idea that you can actually do business while being nice while being peripatetic while being poetic.”

With four spaces and nearly 50 represented artists, how is the gallery doing today? “We’ve never been bad at that. It’s never been a problem,” Wood quipped.

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