For Art Basel Miami Beach 2019, Lehmann Maupin (Booth G22) will feature works by Teresita Fernández and Cecilia Vicuña. Over the course of their respective practices, both artists, through different mediums and approaches, have produced bodies of work that challenge traditional narratives about place, identity, and land, particularly the history, natural resources, colonization, and subsequent legacy of the Americas. Concurrent with the fair, both artists have major museum exhibitions on view in Miami, with Fernández’s mid-career retrospective Teresita Fernández: Elemental at the Pérez Art Museum Miami through February 2020 and the final iteration of the traveling exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen opening at MOCA North Miami on December 5th. Additional work by McArthur Binion, Shirazeh Houshiary, Liza Lou, Angel Otero, Lari Pittman, and Nari Ward will also be presented.
The featured works by Teresita Fernández exemplify her ability to carefully merge the material and the conceptual. Her new work Twins (Mirror Image) (2019), depicts a reimagined map showing the interconnected geological, cultural and historical relationships between the nesting continental shapes of South America and Africa. Made of sculptural, raw charcoal, the work illustrates the artist's conceptual practice of “stacked landscapes” which attempts to reveal the often invisible, buried layers of historical violence embedded in the land.
Recently, Cecilia Vicuña, who is best known for her use of non-traditional materials such as raw wool to create ephemeral sculptures, has recently begun creating new versions of her paintings from the 1960s and 1970s that were lost, destroyed, or displaced due to the 1973 military coup in Chile. Two of these “lost paintings” will be on view for the first time at the fair, Llaverito (Blue) (2019, after the lost original 1979 work) and Nubes/Disappearing Jaguar (2018, after the lost original 1972 work), presenting powerful and evocative reclamations of both art and personal history.
New paintings by McArthur Binion will also be on view, including works from his DNA:Study, Hand:Work, and white:work series. The gallery will also present paintings by Lee Bul from her Perdu series depicting biomorphic forms inspired by studies for her Cyborg sculptures, as well as new works by Angel Otero done in the artist’s signature style of manipulating, splicing, and collaging layers of paintings. Recent works by Shirazeh Houshiary highlight the complexity of her intensely detailed and process-oriented paintings that attempt to expose the hidden natural orders of time, space, and chaos.
Several new works by Liza Lou represent the culmination of a new era in her practice. Lou, who initially studied as a painter prior to discovering the material possibility of beads, has created a new body of work that can be classified as both painting and sculpture. Applying oil paint directly onto beaded sheets and smashing and carving these sheets to sculpt the material, Lou arranges them compositionally to create complexly layered abstract paintings. Mixed media works by Nari Ward will also be presented, including a new edition of the artist’s signature shoelace pieces.