David Zwirner is pleased to participate in the twentieth anniversary edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Presentation highlights include new work by gallery artists Katherine Bernhardt, Huma Bhabha, Carol Bove, and Nate Lowman, alongside significant works by Ruth Asawa, Donald Judd, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, and Raymond Pettibon.
Featured at Art Basel Miami Beach will be an installation of new works by Nate Lowman presented across two adjacent walls of the gallery’s booth. Curated by the artist, this salon-style presentation features paintings and shaped canvases that present a range of forms and imagery from Lowman’s expansive visual lexicon. These include bullet holes, poppies, car freshener trees, meteorological hurricane renderings, maps of the United States, and advertising imagery of New York’s Chrysler Building at night, among other key motifs that are mined from art history, the news, and popular media. Lowman transforms visual signifiers from these distinct sources into a diverse body of work, staging encounters with commonplace, universally recognizable motifs, questioning and revisiting their intended meanings while creating new narratives in the process.
New sculptures by Huma Bhabha and Carol Bove will also feature at the booth. Bhabha’s Prime Traveler (2021) was first carved from cork and Styrofoam before being cast in bronze using the lost-wax process. Towering over seven feet high and painted with pale pink and bright white accents, the work furthers the artist’s long-term engagement with the reinvention of the figure and its expressive possibilities, as well as her inventive manipulation of material. Bove’s Gloomy Maneuverers (2022) is a part of the artist’s ongoing series of “collage sculptures,” begun in 2016. The colorful matte yellow surface of the work renders the steel effortlessly malleable, as if clay- or fabric-like, and the sculpture’s increasingly intricate folds and turns of steel likewise operate in tension with its perceived lightness, confounding perception. Carol Bove: Vase/Face, an exhibition of new work by the artist, is currently on view at the gallery’s Paris location through December 17, 2022.
Two new large-scale paintings by Katherine Bernhardt, Brain Freeze (2022) and A Shot in the Dark, (2022), will be presented at the fair. These new paintings include motifs culled from an irreverent American pop vernacular as well as her own life and the broader culture.
Raymond Pettibon’s No Title (Is some one…), (2013) is a large-scale work on paper that is part of an ongoing series of paintings, drawings, and prints that depict waves, which allude to the proto-abstract seascapes of J.M.W. Turner and reference West Coast surf culture. A selection of new and recent works on paper will also be presented. Intermixing image and text, Pettibon’s works engage the visual rhetorics of art history and popular culture.
The booth will also feature significant historic works by Ruth Asawa, Donald Judd, and Joan Mitchell. Asawa’s Untitled (S.395, Hanging Asymmetrical 23 Interlocking Bubbles) (c. 1955) comprises twenty-three distinct, interlocking spheres described by the artist as “bubbles,” a form among the most technically difficult shapes in her body of work to execute. This work is one of only three known examples of this form and is the most intricate of the group. Judd’s untitled (1994) is a “stack,” which comprises six horizontally oriented units comprised of Cor-ten steel that are set equally apart on a backing of black plexiglass. Mitchell’s Trees (1990-1991) is a diptych that was made in the last years of the artist’s life. Composed of bold, vertical strokes of color set against a white backdrop, the work loosely conjures a field of trees absent their leaves and branches. Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979–1985, which is currently on view at David Zwirner New York, focuses on this significant and deeply generative period within her decades-long career and is open through December 17, 2022. In Paris, The Fondation Louis Vuitton is currently presenting two major exhibitions showcasing Joan Mitchell, through February 27, 2023. Monet – Mitchell presents each artist’s response to their shared landscape, and Joan Mitchell: Retrospective, presents monumental works spanning Mitchell’s career, thirteen of which are in the collection of the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
The gallery will also present two historic works by Alice Neel at the booth, Night (1959) and Sunset, Riverside Drive (1957). The former is a depiction of a view from a room in Neel’s 21 East 108th Street apartment, where she lived from 1942 to 1962. The room held special meaning for the artist, as her mother had stayed in it during the last year of her life. The latter painting depicts the sunset over the Hudson River, as seen from the apartment of Neel’s friend John Rothschild on Riverside Drive, on New York’s Upper West Side. These two tranquil paintings explore shadow, light, and abstraction. Currently on view at The Centre Pompidou is Alice Neel: An Engaged Eye, the first solo show of the artist’s work in Paris, on view through January 16, 2023. The exhibition will travel to the Barbican Centre in London from February 16 to May 21, 2023.
Also on view at Art Basel Miami Beach will be new works by Lucas Arruda, Suzan Frecon, Shio Kusaka, Oscar Murillo, Thomas Ruff, Josh Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, Rose Wylie, and Lisa Yuskavage, alongside significant work by Josef Albers, Francis Alÿs, Cecily Brown, Noah Davis, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, and Neo Rauch.
