TOP OF / 5 – ART BASEL MIAMI 2020

Cindy Sherman Sprueth Magers

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #602, 2019, Sprüth Magers

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) is a pivotal figure in the history of appropriation art and one of the world’s best-known contemporary artists. Since the late 1970s, she has been photographing herself in roles inspired by mass-media stereotypes, but also real people and art-historical imagery. Her unique quasi-theatrical approach reveals the degree to which these stereotypes are entrenched in the cultural imagination. Sherman’s influential, complex oeuvre draws upon cinema, realism and the grotesque, and it is embedded in a number of postmodern and feminist theories. The New York-based artist has been associated with the gallery since 1987.

Sherman moved to New York in 1977 and soon began working on a series of black-and-white photographs whose conceptual foundations continue to inform her work to this day. Though her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80)—a now-iconic series showing Sherman herself in various cinema-inspired guises and settings—seemed familiar, they eluded simple explanation. They were not based on specific films or well-known actresses; cracks in the facades of these self-dramatizations revealed their artificiality, and yet these photos still looked like copies. They amounted to an almost encyclopedic list of female roles in Hollywood films, B-movies, film noir and European auteur cinema of the 1950s and 60s. They represented a challenging commentary on the stereotypical, cinema-derived notions of femininity in viewers’ minds.

Her work since then—created in series that amount to self-contained ensembles—has repeatedly highlighted the degree to which the viewer’s gaze is conditioned by various media. Her skillful, often ingenious evocation of such clichés goes hand-in-hand with their undermining. Sherman’s 1981 Centerfolds series features uncomfortable parodies of the centerfolds in erotic men’s magazines. With Headshots (2000–02), she captured the contradictory, often desperate self-presentation of an older generation of women who wage contemporary society’s fixation on youth and beauty as a war on their own bodies. The Society Portraits (2008) series finds Sherman portraying stereotypical upper-class women against opulent digital backgrounds, their makeup and silicone implants betraying an anxious knowledge that they might have lost the battle with images of status, youth, and beauty.

Sarah Ball Stephen Friedman Gallery

Sarah Ball, Elliot, 2020, Stephen Friedman Gallery

Sarah Ball uses source material such as newspaper cuttings, archival photographs and social media to inform her portraits. Often depicting people who celebrate self-expression and contest traditional binary norms, Ball highlights physiognomy, hairstyles, clothes, jewellery and make-up that reveal the idiosyncrasies of her anonymous, often unknowing sitters. Set against flat planes of colour and confined within closely cropped compositions, the artist lends the people within her work a surreal, timeless quality by denying the viewer any form of narrative about their identity.

Sarah Ball’s meticulously rendered portraits explore themes of gender and identity. Demonstrating an acute sensitivity to the psyche of her subjects, she emphasises physical characteristics that define how we outwardly portray ourselves to the world.

Sarah Ball was born in Yorkshire, UK in 1965. She currently lives and works in Cornwall, UK. Ball studied at Newport Art College in the early 1980s and completed an MFA at Bath Spa University in 2005. She has exhibited widely including at The Royal Academy of ARTS, London; Victoria Miro, London; Somerset House, London; Half Gallery, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Anima Mundi, St Ives, Cornwall. Ball’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Kistefos Museum, Norway; British Museum, London and Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.

OPAVIVARÁ! A Gentil Carioca

Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro becomes A Gentil Carioca‘s temporary exhibition space. In todo poder à praia! (all power to the beach!) art interconnects with the city and the sea, through a special selection of works by Aleta Valente, Arjan Martins, Cabelo, Jarbas Lopes, João Modé, José Bento, Laura Lima, Marcela Cantuária, Maria Laet, Maria Nepomuceno, OPAVIVARÁ!, Rodrigo Torres and Vivian Caccuri

In this exhibition, art overflows the desire of occupy the public space, camouflaging itself in the sonority of marine waters, in the joy of kiosks and sidewalks, in the taste of fruit popsicles, in the cool breeze that touches our skin. The beach is a democratic place where all people can move freely and contemplate the same infinite horizon – a blue immensity that protects the plurality of stories, beliefs, miracles and mysteries.

OPAVIVARÁ! Espreguiçadeira multi (Multi sun lounger), 2019, A Gentil Carioca

For Art Basel OVR Miami Beach 2020, At the Brazilian beaches, it is customary to bathe in the sea to renew emotions, a ritual that attracts good luck to the new cycles that are beginning. Iemanjá – patron saint of fishermen – is the one who decides the fate of all those who enter the sea. In the New Year’s Eve, under the syncretic influence of Afro-Brazilian traditions, it is quite common to present her (as well as other entities and orixás), as a sign of gratitude for the promises kept.

Above all, this is not the first Gentil action on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. In the summer of 2010, the ALALAÔ project emerged in Ipanema beach, an artistic-political-affective mobilization to carry out a series of actions on Arpoador beach, idealized by Marcio Botner, Ernesto Neto and Marcos Wagner. This project inaugurated A gentil Carioca’s activities on the beach sands of the seaside town, with the aim of integrating art into public spaces.

Thousands of kilometers separate Rio de Janeiro from Miami Beach, but the traces of coastal culture allow A Gentil Carioca’s artists to create a converging imaginary, whether due to the tropical climate, the seaside architecture, the typical clothing, behaviors and traditions they share. Art will collect in the infinite horizon, elements that reduce distances and bring us closer by the poetics.

OPAVIVARÁ! Espreguiçadeira multi (Multi sun lounger), 2019, A Gentil Carioca

We vote for OPAVIVARA! with Espreguiçadeira multi (Multi sun lounger). A collective furniture to make imperative a collectivity in any democratic space. The “multi sun lounger” is made of aluminum, nylon and people. OPAVIVARA! propose a collective empowerment, an embodied moment of relaxation, contemplation and tanning, be at the beach, the museum, at home or at a department store.

Philippe Parreno Esther Schipper

Philippe Parreno (born 1964 in Oran, Algeria) is a French artist who lives and works in Paris, France. Parreno focuses on expanding ideas of time and duration through his artworks and distinctive conception of exhibitions as a medium. Preferring projects to objects, he began examining unique approaches to narration and representation in the 1990s and has been exhibiting internationally ever since.

Philippe Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work that spans a diversity of media, including film, sculpture, drawing, and text.

Parreno conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. He seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and the sensory experience of the visitor who is guided through the space by the orchestration of sound and image.  For the artist, the exhibition is less a total work of art than a necessary interdependence that offers an on-going series of open possibilities.

Parreno radically redefined the exhibition experience by taking it as a medium, placing its construction at the heart of his process. Exploring the possibilities of the exhibition as a coherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works, it becomes a veritable open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear.

Paolo Salvador Peres Projects

Paolo Salvador, El demonio del sur, 2020, Peres Projects

Paolo Salvador (b. 1990, Lima, Peru) expresses the imaginary related to his identity as a Peruvian with a Western education and influence. He finds a division in being unable to look at his culture in a way that is ingrained or expresses its cosmovision. His practice has a strong relation with the materials. How they change from one state to another and how they can evoke sensations and feelings through a tactile and infinitesimal interaction. Paolo has extensively exhibited in Latin America, and recently completed the TFAC residency in London. He is currenlty attending the MFA in painting at Slade. 

Paolo Salvador’s paintings assemble a distinct cosmovision. Drawing on mythic imagery, his works lend contemporary reflection to ancient subjects. With loose brush strokes, and saturated colors, Salvador’s practice is evocative of biography, both personal and national. Educated in the west, his paintings offer a proximate view of his Peruvian identity, but from a distance.

Salvador’s methodology involves a careful engagement with his materials, as he builds layers and details of paint across the canvas. These different planes of the painting trespass and bleed into one another, both revealing and covering, simultaneously creating and flattening out the depth in the landscapes. Salvador recently had a solo exhibition at Open Forum, Berlin. In 2014 he earned his BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and in 2019 he earned an MFA at Slade School of Fine Art in London.

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