For the 2019 edition of Art Basel Lehmann Maupin will present recent work by McArthur Binion, Lee Bul, Liu Wei, Liza Lou, Lari Pittman, and Cecilia Vicuña. In the Unlimited sector, the gallery will present a major installation by Do Ho Suh. By featuring artists from China, Korea, and the Americas, the gallery—with locations in New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul—will highlight the international scope of its program. For Art Basel, Lehmann Maupin has selected paintings from each artist that emphasize the the innovative processes each has introduced to the medium.
Cecilia Vicuña will debut a new painting based upon one of her “lost paintings.” These works, created during the 1970s, were lost or destroyed during the military coup in Chile. McArthur Binion’s paintings also connect with his past. His grid paintings, which at first glance appear to be composed in typical minimalist style, are in fact densely layered multimedia works with extensive reference to the artist’s personal history.
Lee Bul and Liu Wei, both featured in the 58th Venice Biennale, are highly influential artists known for work that spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Lee Bul’s mixed media paintings combine her signature retro-futuristic imagery with organic materials, including mother-of-pearl, human hair, and dried flowers, as well as with acrylic shards and crystals. Lee Bul commonly works with these materials to broaden her reoccurring theme of the trappings of utopian ideology to include biological forms. Liu Wei’s abstract landscape paintings, comprised of layered and overlapping horizontal lines, project an artificial or digital perspective of landscape painting, highlighting the Chinese artist’s long standing critique of contemporary society and the transformative effect of urbanization.
A recent painting by Lari Pittman, a new artist to the gallery, is emblematic of his signature style in which he combines various methods of paint application, from stencils and a spray gun to intricate free-hand brush strokes, with figurative and decorative details. A recent work by fellow Los Angeles based artist Liza Lou demonstrates the breadth of her chosen medium of beads, and she has painted en plein air upon hand-beaded sheets, draped and arranged on a gridded canvas that conflates painting and sculpture.
Unlimited: Do Ho Suh
In Unlimited (U55), Lehmann Maupin in association with Victoria Miro, will present Do Ho Suh’s Hub, 260-7 Sungbook-Dong, Sungbook-Ku, Seoul, Korea (2017), from his iconic “Hub” series. Throughout his career, Suh has reflected on themes that evolve from his personal experiences and family history, most profoundly growing up in South Korea, immigrating to the United States, and later relocating to the United Kingdom. He has been particularly interested in questions surrounding the concepts of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Much of Suh’s work examines our understanding of space and how the body relates to, inhabits, and interacts with that space. The concept of home is something that Suh comes back to time and again. He is particularly interested in the way “home” can be articulated through an architectural space that has a specific location, form, and history. As a psychological space, Suh is interested in how a “home” holds memories, personal experiences, and a sense of security regardless of geographic location.