Art Basel OVR:Miami Beach

Günther Förg

Standomi 71, 2001

Watercolor on paper

14 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches
36 x 46 cm

« Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra… » is a verse from Petrarca that Günther Förg chose for the title of a series of watercolours with an identical format, produced in 2001 for an exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Paris. This title aptly encapsulates the artist’s attitude: he stands at the window and he observes. He paints what he sees: a field, a cloud, a fence, the horizon, a country road, a tree. He paints what he thinks of: lines, marks, abstract signs. He even paints the window itself. And always with the light touch, the suppleness and the grace for which he is renowned.

Today, seven years after the artist’s early demise, his work is the focus of great interest around the world. Two museum retrospectives, in Amsterdam and Dallas, recently left their mark, showcasing the richness and cohesion of his body of work.”

Samuel Levi Jones

Apparatus, 2019

Print portfolios on canvas

60 x 65 inches (152.4 x 165.1 cm)
GL12801

This work is from the first group of works Jones made with art print portfolios, an important series for the artist with significant changes in composition. These protective objects, once at the peripheries of the artworld, have been recontextualized into an artwork. Jones's continued interest in examining and disrupting established systems is explored with his broadened scope of unmaking and remaking objects to question their moral and ethical implications.

Zilia Sánchez
Mirar que pasa despues de todo [Look at what happens after everything], 2019
Titled, signed, and dated on reverse
Acrylic on stretched canvas
42 x 46 x 10 inches (106.7 x 116.8 x 25.4 cm)
(GL14176)

During a return trip to Cuba from her travels abroad in the 1950s, Sánchez witnessed a bedsheet that had been hung out to dry form a taut shape as the wind blew it against a pipe or tube. This passing scene effectively became the catalyst for a staggering six decades of work thereafter. Mirar que pasa despues de todo [Look at what happens after everything] is a recent work that continues to investigate this form. 

Tariku Shiferaw
Broken Clocks (SZA), 2020
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 60 inches (182.9 x 152.4 cm)
(GL14789)

Shiferaw is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. This new work comes from the artist's ongoing series “One of These Black Boys." 

Kiki Smith
Woman on Snake, 2010
Ink on Nepalese paper
71.26 x 59.45 inches (181 x 151 cm)
(GL14840)

Kiki Smith’s art is a symbiosis between a sensitivity to matter, a taste for texture, and a rich and vibrant dream world, taking its source both from the artist's intimate imaginary world and from the memory of the tales and mythologies which shaped her. Woman and Snake is a large recent drawing on Nepalese paper, a traditional handicraft support she has often used. The female figure is also characteristic: it is at once a self-portrait and a portrait of a woman per se. She is seen here taming a snake, evidently, a phallic one. A similar drawing can be found in the collections of the MNAM Centre Pompidou Museum. After having been shown in American museums, these last years, Kiki Smith’s protean body of work has been the object of seminal exhibitions across Europe: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2018), Monnaie de Paris (2019), Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2020).

Antoni Tàpies
Crochet, 1982
Mixed media and collage on fabric
76.77 x 66.93 inches (195 x 170 cm)
(GL14841)

Painter, sculptor, engraver, writer, Antoni Tapiès died in 2012, leaving behind him a colossal body of work the scope and depth of which have yet to be fathomed. Often reduced to its matterist character, the work of Tapiès is first and foremost poetic and spiritual. The object, often used in his compositions, as here, in this work, the embroidered material, is at once a trace of the real and a pictorial element. At the center of the canvas, the letter ‘J’ evokes the sign itself but also refers to the hook’s shape which gives the work its title. This dark sign, both curved and pointed, brings a dramatic intensity to this, as often, erotic composition.