Art Basel Miami Beach

Art Basel Miami Beach

December 1 – 4, 2016

Booth A7

 

P•P•O•W is pleased to present important works by Carlos Motta, Annabeth Rosen, Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong.

Carlos Motta (b. 1978) examines multicultural political histories of those oppressed for their sexuality and gender in projects that engage an array of media, including installation, video, photography, and sculpture. Our presentation of Inverted World, 2016, a new video work with sculptural and photographic components, will complement Carlos Motta: Histories of the Future (July 15, 2016 – January 15, 2017), a survey exhibition of recent works on view at the Perez Art Museum. Inverted World follows a performance wherein two men artfully tied the artist’s feet, elevated, and inverted him in the chapel at Tenuta Dello Scompiglio. Informed by BDSM practice, as well as Caravaggio’s and Guido Reni’s paintings of the crucifixion of St. Peter, this thirty-minute inversion ritual physicalizes the queer theological work of Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952-2009), who challenged sexual semiotics to reconsider Christian orthodoxies of decency and indecency. Inverted World is one third of a three-channel video installation, Réquiem, 2016, which was commissioned by the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). The installation investigates the tense dynamic between organized religion and dissident sexualities, proposing alternatives to the moralism sanctioned by Christian doctrine. Carlos Motta’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and MoMA/PS1, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota; Serralves Museum, Porto; the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Art Institute; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; and X Lyon Biennale; among others. Motta was awarded the Main Prize of the Future Generation Award, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2014) and nominated for a Guggenheim (2008). He has received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), and the Creative Capital Foundation (2012). He lives and works in New York City and is a professor at Parsons, The New School of Design. Motta’s first exhibition with P•P•O•W, Deviations, April 21 - May 21, 2016, was reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum.com and Bomb Magazine.

 

Annabeth Rosen (b.1957) is a distinguished sculptor in the community of West Coast ceramicists and has been the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis since 1997. Her work explores the fundamental properties of ceramics by directly confronting the aesthetic and chemical relationships between sculptural form and painterly surface. Rosen’s formally intuitive process is enabled by a complex understanding of historical conventions, composite materials, and chemical properties, placing her work in the tradition of experimental ceramicists including Robert Arneson, Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, and Ken Price. The sculptures on view are elaborate mounds of clay, glaze, and salt, fired using a ‘salt flux’ technique, which triggers a self-glazing reaction. A signature innovation to this centuries-old technique, through this process Rosen mixes surface chemistry into the body of her work, creating a solid mass whose glaze rises to the fore during the firing process. Rejecting historical standards that distinguish decorative arts as ‘perfect’, Rosen’s practice can be described as an effort to undermine established conventions about an object’s merit, resulting in an extensive body of work that embraces the challenges of a robust studio practice: precarious balance, fissured surfaces, and accumulated fragments. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Rosen received her BFA from NYS State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Rosen has taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art and Bennington College. Rosen has received multiple grants and awards, a Pew Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, several UC Davis Research Grants, and, most recently, a Joan Mitchell Award for Painting and Sculpture. Rosen’s work is in the collection of the LA County Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum of Art, The Denver Art Museum, and The Everson Museum, as well as public and private collections throughout the country. Rosen has been represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco for almost a decade. Her debut exhibition with P•P•O•W will open February 16, 2017. Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, Rosen’s first major survey chronicling 20 years of her work in ceramics and drawing, will open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in August of 2017.

Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) As one of the first artists to use her body in her work, Schneemann activated and took control over the formerly mute female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that includes painting, assemblage, performance, and film. By connecting the kinetic nature of her paintings and assemblages to her radical performances and films, Schneemann’s work has made a permanent mark on the history of art. On view will be a rare early painting from 1961 entitled J+C, which was created during the marriage of Schneemann and the avant-garde composer James Tenney. Balancing gestural brushwork with evocative text and mixed-media, J+C demonstrates the artist’s continued aim to push painting beyond the canvas. We will also feature Ices Strip 1972 a performance which was photographed by her then partner, artist Anthony McCall. The performance took place on a British Rail train traveling between London and Edinburgh. Ices Strip involved Schneemann undressing and redressing on a dining car table as she prepared to roller-skate the length of the train as it moved between the two cities. Schneemann then paired the photographic sequence of her actions to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which were sequenced to rail markers tracking the journey. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was A Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles, and Imaging Her Erotics–Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). A retrospective of her work opened at the Salzburg Museum in November of 2015, and will open at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany in May of 2017. A feature length film on Schneemann’s work and history entitled Breaking the Frame by Marielle Nitoslawska has been screened at the Telluride Film Festival, BFI/London Film Festival, ICA London and FNC Montreal. Currently on view is Schneemann’s joint exhibition, Further Evidence, at Galerie Lelong and P•P•O•W from October 21 – December 3, 2016.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) During the '70s, Wong was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene and was involved with the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived, as well as to create intimate portraits of the neighborhood, placing his work in line with the early American Realist painters like Reginald Marsh and George Bellows. Through his visual diary he built a landscape of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations, and hand signals. His narratives were populated by the neighborhood's denizens including firemen, boxers, the incarcerated, graffiti artists, and families. At Art Basel Miami Beach P•P•O•W will exhibit a series of Wong’s paintings depicting boxers including Mitosis 1985 in which Wong depicts the musculature of two boxers sparring in a city courtyard, with rapid and sensual strokes, allowing the paint to bleed and, drip exemplifying the effect of their actions.  Wong's works are charged with a multitude of levels that address the artist's personal, poetic, and social concerns, reflecting a sense of compassion and self-identification within his subjects that still resonates today. Wong’s work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016 and will open at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, California in the fall of 2017.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film, and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. On view will be Untitled (Buffalos) 1988-89 a work that has become an icon of the AIDS crisis. While at a cursory glance the image appears to be taken from life, it in fact depicts a diorama from the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. which illustrated a traditional Native American method for hunting. Wojnarowicz saw the falling buffalos as a metaphor for the impending extinction imminent in all cultures, whose structures are dictated by acceleration, collision, and the impossibility of escape. While Wojnarowicz never directly stated that the photograph was a political response to the AIDS crisis, the work was developed in the wake of his own diagnosis. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37. His artwork has been included in solo and group exhibitions around the world, at institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany. His works are in permanent collections of major museums internationally and the subject of significant scholarly studies. Highly influential to the current generation of artists, writers, and activists, his work continues to be the subject of important exhibitions. Wojnarowicz has had three retrospectives: at the galleries of the Illinois State University in 1990 curated by Barry Blinderman; at the New Museum in 1999 curated by Dan Cameron; and his forthcoming traveling retrospective will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin.