MIAMI, FL.- «Art Kabinett» will give 14 participating galleries from six countries the opportunity to present small curated exhibitions. The projects, chosen by the Selection Committee, will be shown in a separate room of the exhibitor’s booth. The exhibition concepts for «Art Kabinett» are diverse, representing everything from thematic group exhibitions and one-person shows to installations and tributes. The spectrum ranges from modern masters to established artists and the youngest generation. A special section of the catalog presents the projects in detail. «Art Kabinett» is an additional attraction for visitors and enables galleries to complement the arrangement of their booths with a curated exhibition. In undertaking this initiative, Art Basel intensifies its efforts to achieve a meaningful combination of commercial and cultural exhibition activity.

The «Art Kabinett» presented by Kicken Berlin (Berlin) brings togetherphotos, photocollages, and typophotos by Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. The exhibition is a tribute to an artist who was among the most influential modernist theorists and teachers in Europe and the USA.

The relief was a key medium for both German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters and American artist Louise Nevelson. Both became masters of the genre. Galerie Gmurzynska (Zurich, Zug, St. Moritz) will be showing a carefully considered juxtaposition of works selected to illustrate the differences in the two artists’ approach.

Peter Doig (Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin) often uses film stills and photos to develop paintings in which the urban and natural world collide. In the early 1980s, when Peter Doig came to London from Canada as a young art student, his fascination for the metropolis immediately became apparent in his works, as did the influence of a trip to the United States in 1982. The works shown at Art Kabinett represent this earliest period of Doig’s oeuvre.

Galeria Luisa Strina (São Paulo) will be presenting 14 drawings by the late Brazilian artist Leonilson (1957-1993) in its Kabinett. Representing what are critically considered Leonilson’s most mature and, regrettably, final years of practice (1989-1993), this selection of drawings clearly demonstrates the delicate, yet vigorous, nature of his complex, political work.

Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud began making his signature food paintings in the early 1960s. The iconic use of food, often desserts served Automat-style, evokes a feeling of familiarity and comfort. Yet beneath the American-style optimism lies a sentiment of isolation and melancholy. For Art Basel Miami Beach, the Allan Stone Gallery (New York) has assembled four food paintings ranging across more than three decades of his work.

The one-person show mounted by Galerie Krinzinger (Vienna) is devoted to the Austrian photographer and artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who died in 1969 at the untimely age of 29. Schwarzkogler was one of the Viennese Actionists whose extreme body performances shocked the general public in early 1960s Vienna.

The joint Art Kabinett staged by Adler & Conkright (New York) and Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art (New York) takes up the thread of the exhibition put on by the two galleries last year. «North- South/East-West: Part II: Vibrations» features works by artists from various countries and generations whose pieces are connected by an interest in kinetic and optic elements (Yaacov Agam, Getulio Alviani, Martha Boto, Pol Bury, Alexander Calder, Sergio Camargo, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Siegfried Cremer, Marcel Duchamp, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Eduardo MacEntyre, Piero Manzoni, László Moholy-Nagy, Rogelio Polesello, Omar Rayo, José de Rivera, George Rickey, Bridget Riley, Nicolas Schoeffer, Jesus Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker, Victor Vasarely).

Sperone Westwater (New York) will be presenting a concise survey covering 35 years of work by the American artist William Wegmann: drawings, photographs, altered postcards, paintings. In the past ten years Wegmann, who became famous for his humorous photos of dogs, has devoted himself primarily to painting, using vintage postcards to generate large painted landscapes.

Martha Rosler (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York) brings «Art Kabinett» her well-known series of photomontages about the Vietnam War: «Bringing the War Home», created in 1967-1972. These photographs inserted images of the war into pictures of American home interiors, making «the war abroad, the war at home» concrete in a particularly gripping way.

European abstract-geometric art exercised a strong influence on Brazil’s local art scene in the 1960s. Under the title «Complexity and Contradiction – Square», the Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (São Paulo) brings this era to life again, juxtaposing works by Brazilian artists Hercules Barsott, Waltercio Calda, and Arthur Luiz Piza with pieces by Switzerland’s Max Bill.

Puerto Rican artist Federico Herrero (Jacob Karpio Gallería, San José) made his name with abstract paintings and interventions in public space. The 4-by-4-meter «Art Kabinett», which the painter will cover on site with a 360° mural, will present itself as a painterly environment all in yellow.

«Negative Space» is the title American artist Mungo Thomson (Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles) gives his series of photographs of outer space. Thomson shows us negative images of the universe. The stars are black or grey, space is white. In these new works the artist pursues one of his persistent leitmotifs: his interest in nothingness, in emptiness.

Working in contrasting mediums, paint and photography, Alice Neel and Diane Arbus (Robert Miller Gallery, New York) were both interested in the psychology of the subject as revealed by the act of making a portrait. In the paintings and photographs brought together for Art Basel Miami Beach, because the subjects have presented themselves to the artist, they offer themselves to the viewer’s gaze.

For «Art Kabinett», Yvon Lambert (New York) presents a new installation by Richard Jackson entitled «Ducks in the Men’s Room». An admitted art anarchist, Jackson has been exploring and challenging the conceptual and physical boundaries of painting and the artist for the last 40 years. Assaulting visitors with humor and vulgarity, «Ducks in the Men’s Room» features four cartoon ducks engaged in the act of abstract painting Straddling the line between performance and installation, the work is a relic of a brief performance action, as all of the ducks evacuate paint across the installation and each other.