Art Basel Miami Beach

For this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, James Cohan will present a selection of new and important work by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Spencer Finch, Federico Herrero, Byron Kim, Christopher Myers, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Elias Sime, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Tomaselli, Grace Weaver and XU ZHEN®.

We are pleased to offer a preview from our booth below. 

First Family (2010) is a series of individual mirror-works, in which cut polygonal fragments of reverse-painted glass are arranged into kaleidoscopic compositions grounded on principles of Islamic geometry. Blending influence from Sufi architecture, Western minimalism, and classical Persian decoration, the series progresses through the multi-sided polygons in Euclidean geometry. Rigorous structure and repetition are the foundations of invention and limitless variation: each sculpture is anchored by a central linear shape (here, a Decagon), with outward-spanning spokes that extend towards a tessellation of form.

Christopher Myers is an artist and writer whose work across disciplines is rooted in storytelling. Myers’ new tapestries are part of I Dare Not Appear, an ongoing project of appliqué textile works inspired by a collection of historical letters written by Sarah Forbes Bonetta—a young Egbado girl who lived in Victorian England—that now belongs to the artist's family. These large-scale tapestries delve into this personally charged past to build visual narratives about the life of Forbes Bonetta.

In Serenity of her Noble Aspect, Myers has depicted Sarah Forbes Bonetta as she lays dying from tuberculosis on the island of Madeira at the age of 37. Tuberculosis, or consumption, held a certain fascination as an almost fashionable disease amongst the European upper class. As Charlotte Bronte wrote, “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady.” In her letters, Forbes Bonetta clearly struggled to fit within the ideals of her time, particularly within the stringent boundaries of class and gender. Ironically, in her death, she approaches some part of the Victorian ideal.

As a captain in the Royal Navy, Frederick E. Forbes was central to the story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta—in both his role as faux-rescuer and his role as chief witness to her origins. In 1850, he was bequeathed Forbes Bonnetta by King Ghezo of Dahomey, as an intended gift for Queen Victoria.

 His career in and of itself is a study of the British Empire’s wide reach, ranging from engagements with China after the First Opium War—in which he tried to cement unfettered access for British drugs being pushed in China—to his travels on the African continent. He was buried in the same seas upon which he plied his trade, along with the memories of bodies lost to the slave trade.

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.

In Elias Sime’s new body of work, the artist has affixed a three-dimensional megaphone to the surface of the picture, introducing a new element to Sime’s ongoing Tightrope series. Sime continues to reclaim and repurpose obsolete technology of the communications world (motherboards and wires from coaxial cable), addressing the balancing act we must play between technology and IRL encounters. The artist is wary of this precarious position, fearing that we are getting lost in our phones, tablets and laptops.

Each of the four sculptures in Yinka Shobibare CBE's series Earth Kids represents an elemental force: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. These classical elements were believed by the Ancient Greeks to illustrate the complexity of the natural world. Shonibare is interested in the generative possibilities of contradiction and ambiguity. Fire Kid (Boy) depicts a male child leaning against a scorched trunk of a tree. The work references the grim scene in Francisco Goya’s "The Disasters of War," Plate 36, in which dismembered body parts hang from a tree. The boy, clad in Victorian-era garments, is reading a book about forest fires. Above him emerges a branch of budding young leaves from the burnt trunk, alluding to the possibility of redemption and regeneration.