Art Basel Miami Beach

For the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, James Cohan will present a selection of new and important work by Firelei Báez, Kathy Butterly, Simon Evans™, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Spencer Finch, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Federico Herrero, Josiah McElheny, Jesse Mockrin, Lee Mullican, Christopher Myers, Jordan Nassar, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Eamon Ore-Giron, Naudline Pierre, Matthew Ritchie, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Elias Sime, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Tomaselli and XU ZHEN®. The fair is open to the public from December 1 through December 3,  with preview days on November 29 and November 30 by invitation only.

View a selection of works from our booth ahead of the fair in our Viewing Room. 

In this work, Mockrin reimagines Francesco Furini’s 1632 painting, The Birth of Benjamin and the Death of Rachel. What first drew Mockrin to this biblical scene from the book of Genesis was a figure sewing up the fabric of Rachel’s dress, a futile and strikingly tender gesture just moments after her death.

Xu Zhen®’s Eternity sculptures fuse facsimiles of Hellenistic and Buddhist statuary into three-dimensional exquisite corpses, which become hybrids of transcontinental histories. Eternity - Standing Bodhisattva, Statue of Nike of Paionios, combines one of the most famous statues of Western antiquity with a Buddhist devotional sculpture, creating a visually arresting composite.

In Naudline Pierre’s And Ye Shall Be Consumed, a luminous figure powerfully engages with numerous winged creatures, whose faces emerge slowly out of the darkness. These angelic forces have human, pointedly feminine facial features, but do not possess earthly bodies. Their sense of ephemerality and movement is in stark contrast to the central protagonist, whose corporeal form in shades of yellow grounds the composition and seems to radiate strength and stillness in the midst of activity.

Pierre has noted that she imagines her winged figures to possess divine intelligence. Here, they are witness to the central figure’s engulfment in flames, a phenomenon Pierre is drawn to for its “sense of tension and danger, but also passion.” In Pierre’s iconography, which mines encounters between the earthly and the otherworldly, flames come to represent positive agents of change and transition, to which her figures submit themselves willingly.

Incorporating layers of collaged paper, text and found items including detritus from their own home, the new work by Simon Evans™, This American Dollhouse is Haunted, depicts a cross-section of the artists' house in Brooklyn NY transformed into a haunted home.

Revealing the clutter, humor, and madness contained within, while certain objects point to the artists specifically, the doll house represents a universal experience: the daily and habitual patterns of life and domesticity, and our fraught relationship with material belongings.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His projects are based on extensive research and community engagement, tapping into inherited histories and counter-memory. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. Fact and fiction are interwoven in poetic narratives that span time and place.

Light as Smoke, 2022, draws its composition from Calder’s Red Disc, 1947. Instead of balancing the mobile on a pedestal, it is balanced on a 203mm bombshell recovered in Quang Tri. A section of the bombshell is cut and welded onto the mobile to act as a counterweight. This creates an opening in the bombshell, allowing viewers to look inside the bomb. 

Acknowledging the reciprocal nature of migration as a non-linear course of movement, Firelei Báez seeks to underscore streams of influence that are often stifled by reductive, dominant understandings about migration that suggest a singular direction of transmission.

In Untitled (Carte de l'Isle de Saint Domingue), Báez conjures a swirling fire-walking figure whose acrobatic form stretches across a 1742 Atlas of Saint Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. The smoldering figure with limbs planted over several Caribbean nations, including modern day Cuba and Turks and Caicos, appears to be caught between a dance and a struggle, like those in Capoeira, which was developed as a veiled martial art for self-defense by enslaved peoples in Brazil. 

Engaging with concepts ranging from materiality and line to the history of the vessel, Kathy Butterly’s most recent works, Squaring, 2022 and Warming Glow, 2022 continue the artist’s use of traditional ceramic forms as her “canvas”, from which she creates contorted and misshapen objects that veer toward the iconoclastic.

Each sculpture, unique and detailed, is comprised of layer upon layer of glaze in colors and textures that are simultaneously seductive and jarring. Eschewing large-scale work, preferring instead to make concise, pithy compositions that express a wide variation of moods, Butterly’s strange forms–whether rising, collapsing, stalwart, or teetering–exude a defiant and passionate individuality. The distinct, faceted personalities of these sculptures provide the works with their own raison d’être, and often generates an uncanny awareness in the viewer, producing a visceral impact. 

In Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Sawdust and Glitter, the artist recasts the centuries-old convention of the reclining nude by emphasizing the female gaze. The work features a man sunbathing naked on the beach. He props himself up on his bronze forearms to smoke, the embers of his cigarette glowing brightly. Beside him, a six-pack of beer and the leaves of a pineapple peak out of a woven tote bag, indicating a tropical vacation. Like the adornments in Manet’s Olympia, the accessories here emphasize the figure’s otherwise nude body. His form is bare except for a crumpled white shirt used as a makeshift pillow, and a pair of dark sunglasses. His shades obscure the direction of his gaze, enabling the viewer to take in the beauty of his body without a reciprocal look.

The title of the work—Sawdust and Glitter—refers to an innovation in Taylor’s ongoing exploration of her medium of marquetry hybrid. Continuing to push the boundaries of her medium, Taylor has repurposed sawdust—a natural waste product of her process—to evoke the tone and texture of sand.

Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, (Winter) intermingles Hancock's personal history with the fantastical narrative of his Moundverse. Rearticulating the visual language Hancock first explored in his Good Vegan Progression collages, Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two, (Winter) is a seasonal variation of Color Flash for Chat and Chew, Paris Texas in Seventy-Two–a 10 by 24-foot hand-woven tapestry commissioned by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which is permanently installed in the Museum's Kinder Building.