Art Basel Miami Beach: Online Viewing Room

“Contrary to what one might expect,” writes Susan Cross in the monograph for the artist’s 2007 solo exhibition What Time Is It On the Sun? at MASS MoCA, “Finch's efforts toward accuracy—the precise measurements he takes under different conditions and at different times of day—resist, in the end, a definitive result or single empirical truth about his subject. Instead, his dogged method reinforces the fleeting, temporal nature of the observed world, illustrating his own version of a theory of relativity.”

In Ore-Giron’s ongoing series of paintings, Infinite Regress, the artist’s totemic visual language is subject to an unending process of reformulation. In philosophy, infinite regress is a sequence of reasoning which can never come to an end, that disproves the concept of fixed knowledge. In connecting one element to another, a third one is always interpolated and continued endlessly. Ore-Giron’s palette and forms recall religious iconography, sacred landscapes, and celestial bodies in cyclical, non-linear passages of time. Consisting of simple forms shifting in and out of graphic fields of gold, the paintings in this series are each a variation on the one that came before, a trajectory into future possible iterations. 

"I found my way back into making these resin works where I incorporate text ... It’s the buzz of the outer world intruding on this world of beauty and the cosmic. There’s this smashing together of these two realities. The wonderousness of nature and the wonderousness of life, the kind of cosmic quality of the essential mysteries of life, and this other thing – this calamity that that is going on that is cultural and man-made and media driven. I wanted to see if I could address that reality, because that is the reality I'm now living in."

 

- Fred Tomaselli

Federico Herrero sees paintings everywhere, from street curbs and traffic signs to the painted trees and stones which proliferate in his native San José, Costa Rica. It is this examination of how color, shapes and signs define the urban environment that is vital to his practice as a painter. 

Herrero is best known for working on an operatic scale, regularly exhibiting immersive, site-specific wall paintings, monumental canvases, and cast concrete sculptures. In striking contrast, these intimately scaled canvases and monotypes create a rich, distilled vocabulary that explores the sensory and pictorial properties of Herrero’s painting and image making.

Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, (Winter) is a seasonal variation of the monumental tapestry Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the newly opened Kinder Building. The work intermingles Hancock's personal history with the fantastical narrative of his Moundverse. 

The woven trees are modeled on the deciduous oaks that grew in a wooded area outside Hancock’s childhood home in Paris, Texas where he often played as a child. For Hancock, this woodland space is a place of becoming and discovery, full of an almost fairytale-like potential for the realization of the impossible and improbable. The forest also holds special significance within Hancock’s invented Moundverse: it is the home of Mound #1, the Legend, a half-human, half-tree mutant. The oldest of the Mounds, he is the center of the artist’s painted universe and exudes an air of hope, representing long-standing ideals. He lives in the forest and his skeleton is shaped like a tree. A color flash is the way that a Mound dreams. Thus, viewers of the work are both seeing a Mound dream, and seeing the world through the eyes of a Mound.

Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes, “Sime’s work, while culturally specific, has always been universalist. And although never without critical thrust — no one knows better the horrors visited on Africa by shipments of toxic Western e-waste — it is utopian.”

Rachel Kent, Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, explains that Shonibare engages with “history and its legacy for future generations, of how we live in the present, and of cycles or patterns that repeat across time despite their often destructive consequences. In this way he pricks the consciences of those who encounter his art, using beauty and seduction instead of words as his chosen weapons.”  

"Going slow is a statement. My process is a reaction against the culture of mass production. Each is hand-carved and must be perfect. I want my work to feel like it has every right to exist, and the only way to achieve that is through labor and time."

 

- Kathy Butterly