MIAMI BEACH.- 17 young artists from 11 countries will be presented to a large international public for the first time in the special «Art Statements» sector of Art Basel Miami Beach, the International Art Show. The Selection Committee chose them from 115 applications. «Art Statements» offers young art a specially priced platform that exposes the artists and their galleries to an international audience of curators, collectors and media. Visitors are encouraged to make discoveries and experience exciting encounters with works by the youngest generation of artists. 16 one-person shows will be mounted at the International Art Show, which takes place for the second time from December 4 to 7, 2003, in Miami Beach, Florida.
In exporting the «Art Statements» platform to Miami Beach, Art Basel is consistently maintaining its long tradition of supporting current work in art. Since 1996, Art Basel has offered «Art Statements» to contemporary art galleries at advantageous rates for presenting their artists in one-person shows. Art Basel has over the years become an international yardstick for current positions and developments. Gallery owners and artists know very well that whoever obtains one of the coveted sponsored booths will enjoy the full attention of the trade public. News spreads like wildfire here when works are purchased for famous collections or exhibitions at well-known museums and galleries. Mariko Mori, Vanessa Beecroft, William Kentridge, Pierre Huyghe, Elisabeth Peyton, Gregor Schneider, Jorge Pardo, Ugo Rondinone, Kara Walker, Manfred Pernice, Ernesto Neto, Ghada Amer and many others made their first large international appearance here before they became art stars.
«UBS is delighted to serve as the main sponsor for the second annual Art Basel Miami Beach festival, and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the firm’s relationship with Art Basel,» said John Costas, Chairman and CEO of UBS Investment Bank. «UBS is committed to fostering the arts worldwide, and we are pleased to be a part of this special event that extends the prestigious Art Basel tradition to the Americas.»
UBS, one of the world’s flagship financial firms, is the world’s largest wealth manager, a premier investment banking and securities firm, a key global asset manager and the market leader in Swiss retail and commercial banking. UBS also has a longstanding commitment to the arts. In addition to Art Basel, other key UBS arts sponsorships include, the UBS Art Collection, one of the finest assemblages of contemporary art owned by a corporation in the world, the Tate Modern in London, and the UBS Art Gallery in New York, among others.
This year, the Selection Committee chose the 16 most exciting and promising projects from 115 applications. They are mainly by artists who are not yet well-known or who present positions that are hard to show. Three artists are from Britain, three from Mexico, two each from Switzerland and the USA and one each from Belgium, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Argentina, Cuba and Canada.
This year focuses primarily on multimedia installations that combine painting, photography, sculpting and video, but also on sculptures in a literal sense. In sociologically oriented works, several of the young artists treat the questioning of political, social, economic and personal realities. Current topics such as globalization and multicultural society are mixed with thoughts on modern art and architecture and the development of western civilization. Miami Beach will also provide a chance to study examples of post-modern painting and to consider where this genre stands at the beginning of the new millennium.
Yoshua Okon (gallery: Francesco Kaufmann, Milan), born 1970 in Mexico, has re-enacted Joseph Beuys’s 1974 video documentation «I like America and America likes me». At the time, Beuys lived with a coyote in a New York gallery for seven days. The artist himself plays the part of Beuys, while the coyote is «played» by a man. In Mexico, «coyote» is what they call a man who gets paid to obtain papers, official documents or passports illegally.
Ian Kiaer (Asprey Jacques, London) will show an installation dealing with the idea of an «endless» house developed by the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler in the first half of the 20th century. Kiaer puts Kiesler’s ideas in relation to two social building projects in London in the 19th century and the 1970s. The Argentinean Santiago Cucullu (Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston) is also interested in historical facts. Entitled «The illicit movements of Severino di Giovanni preceding his arrest by Edmundo de Amicci, 2003», this artist’s work deals with the violent political climate of 1920s Argentina in 15 aquarelles and five murals. Ruth Root (Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York) finds the themes for her colorful-geometric-abstract paintings in the façades of New York skyscrapers. Her paintings are made on irregularly-shaped metal plates, three of which will be shown in Miami Beach. The work of the Canadian Francesca Gabbiani (Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles) is also connected to painting. Gabbiani «paints» her pictures using colored paper. In Miami Beach she will show an outsize image of a burning forest.
The work of the Mexican Pedro Reyes (Galeria Enrique Guerrero, Mexico) lies between architecture and sculpture. Entitled «Cuboctahedron Houses», his Statement consists of 2x2x2m-large sculptures of stainless steel covered with colored fabric. For Chris Sauter (Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio), civilization begins with agriculture. His complex installation with orchid roots and miniature radio antennas also refers to global communication.
Mark Hosking’s (Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna) functional machines are intended for third-world countries. They are made from waste products of our high-tech society, and offer users simple means for survival, e.g. to sleep, eat or drink. They can be used, for example, to produce mattresses or to heat tins with solar
energy.
Exhibiting consumer goods is the central topic of Gabriel Kuri’s work (Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York). The Mexican will turn his sponsored booth into a showroom for refrigerators with glass doors as they are commonly used in the catering business. The products shown therein include, amongst other things, cleaning agents, bags of charcoal and rubbish containers, and add up to a self-portrait of the artist. The title of the work, «Gabriel Kuri, November 20, 1970», refers to the artist’s date of birth.
«I see my work free of irony and functioning as an eclectic hybrid of the new and the old, bringing together a range of sources from Bernini to Helmut Newton, and Rodin to Robert Crumb», is how the British Rebecca Warren (Maureen Paley Interim Art London) characterizes her white clay sculptures. These half-abstract, half-realistic works deal with iconoclasm, magic and sex. In her installation «States», the Brazilian artist Lara Vinci (Nara Roesler, Sao Paulo) pursues her obsession with the cold (words frozen in ice), short-lived heat (steam) and energy (electrically charged copper wires) which she combines with «permanent» materials such as sand and marble.
Nostalgia and transience are themes treated by the Cuban Carlos Garaicoa (Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York). In his statement, he presents a photo series of deteriorating façades of cinemas in Havana. The second part of his installation is the model of a fictitious movie theater of the 30s or 40s showing films that were forbidden by censorship at the time. The beauty and luxury of this cinema hall is contrasted with the shabbiness of the façades pictured.
The Swiss artist couple Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg (Nicola Krupp, Basel) also produces fictitious images, computer-generated ones. They placed an imaginary livecam on a mountain in the Swiss Alps showing the current weather situation. Every ten minutes, a new 360° panorama image of the changing time of day and temperature is posted. The viewer uses a mouse to select any day between the year 0 and the year 3000.
There will also be a performance by the Italian Piero Golia (Cosmic Galerie, Paris), a video work by the Belgium David Claerbout (Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerpen), and a new installation by the Japanese Taro Shinoda (Side 2, Tokyo).
Art Basel Miami Beach shows international contemporary art not only in the «Art Statements» sector, but also on its «Art Positions» platform, where 20 galleries can present their avant-garde program in shipping containers refurbished as exhibition rooms. Art Basel Miami Beach also created a new sector – «Art Nova» – this year, which is dedicated entirely to works produced over the last two years. Moreover, most galleries at the Miami Beach Convention Center have new art at their booths.
The Selection Committee consists of the following gallery owners: Jane Corkin (Jane Corkin Gallery, Toronto); Dr. Ursula Krinzinger (Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna); Lawrence Luhring (Luhring Augustine, New York); Mary-Anne Martin (Mary-Anne Fine Art, New York); Lucy Mitchell-Innes (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York); Tim Neuger (neugerriemschneider, Berlin); Shaun Caley Regen (Regen Projects, Los Angeles); Angel Samblancat (Prats/Polígrafa, Barcelona); Frederic Snitzer (Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami); Luisa Strina (Galería Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo).
