NEW YORK, NY.- Gagosian will present an extensive selection of modern and contemporary works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. Many of the included works offer fresh perspectives on portraiture and figure painting, reimagining these longstanding disciplines across a variety of mediums and contexts. Others propose new ways of understanding the unique qualities and complex interactions of diverse spaces and sites.
In Ethel Scull (1963), Andy Warhol portrays the eponymous socialite and collector, printing snapshots of her taken in a 42nd Street photo booth on a silver spray-painted canvas and transforming his influential sitter into a Hollywood starlet. In his painting Ascension VI (2024), Titus Kaphar uses brass nails to interpolate a partial reproduction of the subject of Rogier van der Weyden’s 1435 painting The Descent from the Cross into a silhouetted image of basketball legend Michael Jordan, paralleling the martyrdom of Christ with the sacrifices made by athletes in the public eye. In Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative marble sculpture Untitled (2011), human presence is reduced to one giant hand from which four fingers appear to have been lopped off, leaving the single remaining digit making an inadvertent gesture of contempt.
Richard Avedon’s indelible photograph Jacqueline Kennedy in inaugural gown, West Palm Beach, Florida, January 3, 1961, pictures the then First Lady in a dress by Oleg Cassini and was taken as part of a formal session with the family for Harper’s Bazaar. Andreas Gursky’s photograph V & R II (2022 [2009])—a reworking of his V & R from 2011—offers an abstracted perspective on a Parisian catwalk, presenting unidentified fashion models marching along a pale stripe that appears adrift in a featureless black void. In Airplane (1990), Roy Lichtenstein merely alludes to the presence of a pilot, rendering a craft in flight, guns blazing, in painted and patinated bronze. Employing bold graphic strategies familiar from his paintings and prints, the Pop art pioneer turns a cartoonlike image into a dynamic “drawing in space.”
Other works in Miami explore aspects of place and position in figurative, abstract, and conceptual ways, often combining aspects of all three. In his slyly ironic painting Plenty Big Hotel Room (Painting for the American Indian) (1985), Ed Ruscha juxtaposes a fluttering American flag with four black strips suggestive of redacted text. The work turns the complex nationalistic resonance of the ubiquitous banner onto itself, the word hotel in its title signifying the imposition of exclusive luxury in a land taken over from its indigenous people. In his painting Urban Nature (2024), Urs Fischer adopts a fragmented, collage-like perspective on his Los Angeles milieu, wielding intense color and abstracted imagery to reflect the city’s blend of the natural, the artificial, and the wholly imagined as if moving through it at speed. Albert Oehlen also juxtaposes and blends a wide range of painterly modes and marks in Untitled (2022), shifting between the planned and the improvised to undermine any expectation of consistent form, stable meaning, or identifiable locale, while Helen Frankenthaler layers a passage of softly radiant acrylic color over a dark ground in Spellbound (1991), translating her experience of landscape into allusive, ethereal shape.
More purely abstract are works such as Katharina Grosse’s canvas Untitled (2024), with its looping pathways of vibrantly colored spray paint that intersect with one another like a highway junction. Donald Judd’s wall-mounted box form from 1988, constructed of clear anodized aluminum with red and chartreuse plexiglass, interacts with its surroundings by emphasizing relationships between part and whole alongside the interplay of space, light, and color. Richard Serra’s drawing Diptych #8 (2018), too, focuses on the inherent qualities of materials. Applying paintstick, etching ink, and silica to two sheets of handmade paper in two dense, dark, conjoined planes, Serra investigates the idea and experience of weight and transforms the work of art into a destination in its own right.
