Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: Online Viewing Room

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach with a presentation of new works by Ghada Amer, Gina Beavers, Sanford Biggers, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Svenja Deininger, Jammie Holmes, Suzanne McClelland, Danielle Mckinney, Sarah Meyohas, Donald Moffett, Celeste Rapone, Frank Stella, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. The combination of works chosen for this year’s installation reveals the many relational threads across generations, geography, media, and conviction that define the gallery’s diverse program. 

A seminal figure in post war Italian art, Pier Paolo Calzolari grounds the gallery’s presentation with an ambitious new multi-panel piece that captures his long-standing fascination with alchemical materials. While Calzolari plays with earth’s natural elements themselves, Sarah Meyohas and Donald Moffett both look to the natural world as a point of departure. A new hologram from Sarah Meyohas’s groundbreaking Interference series uses light and etched glass to recreate vibrant color patterns found in plant matter. Donald Moffett’s new painting, from his ongoing “nature cult” series, implicates man’s destructive forces on the environment. By mutating the picture plane and pallette, Moffett distorts nature’s purest plant forms.

The booth’s narrative shifts to the human figure in the paintings by Jammie Holmes and Danielle Mckinney, who elevate quotidian moments into nuanced, evocative compositions. Both Celeste Rapone and Gina Beavers also make representational paintings, though these artists embed their narratives in distinctly fractured forms. Rapone’s sharp-edged, subtly layered compositions are populated with allusions pulled from art history, pop culture, and autobiographical sources that surround figures, often impossibly contorted into the confines created within the painting. By contrast, the subjects of Beavers’ high-relief acrylic paintings take anatomical details to absurd dimension, spilling beyond the margins of the canvases.

Svenja Deininger, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Suzanne McClelland explore traditional abstract painting in contrasting ways. Juxtaposing patterns, tones, shapes, and memories from a vast archive of art historical references, Deininger paints abstract compositions that disguise the presence of the artist's hand. Yearwood-Dan applies swirling strokes, vibrant palettes, and thick layers of paint, to cultivate lush scenes based on her observations of society and self. McClelland’s paintings grow out of deep research into linguistic and acoustic dimensions, abstracting text into pure visual language, capturing individual personalities as well as cultural and political concerns.

Frank Stella and Ghada Amer, both originally painters, take the exploration of color, material, and form into three dimensions.  While Stella is interested in the pure relationships between art and space, Amer invests a highly-political messaging system into all forms of her work.  Stella’s steel Star with square tubing pushes composition and abstraction beyond the picture plane, while Amer deploys steel to translate the line work of her iconic embroidery paintings and into delicately solid sculptures.

Finally, Sanford Biggers layers his explorations of materiality and space with personal, cultural, and historical references and questions. Working with antique quilts, Biggers’ new three- dimensional work fuses the historical and the contemporary, bringing his own perspective into dialogue with the formal and cultural legacies of these deeply meaningful textiles.

Individually, each work presented exemplifies the artist’s unique practice; together they reveal the complex concepts, materials, belief systems, and ways of making and being in the world that are foundational to the gallery’s program.