Art Basel Miami Beach

Ellen Cantor (1961-2013) is a respected feminist artist and curator who worked prolifically in drawing, video art, film, painting and sculpture, in addition to her writings. Her work consistently fuses autobiography and fiction, juxtaposing images appropriated from arthouse cinema with more chaste symbols from fairy tales and Hollywood musicals. Our Kabinett presentation will focus on little known paintings and works on paper from the early 1990s which expand on the language of her seminal films. Cantor lived and worked in London and New York City. She received a BA with honors in painting from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (1983), and attended Skowhegan School of Art, ME (1991). Exhibiting more widely in Europe than in her native United States, Cantor had major exhibitions and screenings in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Notable solo exhibitions include Ellen Cantor: Cinderella Syndrome, curated by Jamie Stevens and Fatima Hellberg at the Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart and CCA Wattis, CA; Within a Budding Grove, curated by Lia Gangitano at Participant, Inc, NY; Be My Baby at Delfina, London; and Remember the 14 Days and Nights at the Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria. Our presentation coincides with the publication of A history of the world as it has become known to me, edited by Lia Gangitano, Fatim Hellberg and Jamie Stevens.

Ramiro Gomez (b.1986) creates domestic scenes and landscapes populated by subjects whose labor goes unrecognized and underappreciated. We will present a mixed-media painting entitled Fragmentation (One night I saw a man picking through the trash/Forbes 400), 2018. Painted from memory, the titular figure is depicted reaching for a five-dollar bill that was discarded along with periodicals celebrating art and industry, specifically Forbes and Artforum. He is painted on cardboard, a vernacular material for Gomez symbolizing the necessity of that which is often overlooked. Gomez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Michigan, Institute for the Humanities and the West Hollywood Public Library, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. His work has been featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, with Rafa Esparza, and included in group exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; the Denver Art Museum, CO; Blanton Art Museum, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Domestic Scenes: The Work of Ramiro Gomez, a monograph by Lawrence Weschler, was published by Abrams in 2016. Gomez lives and works in West Hollywood, California.

Hew Locke (b.1959) explores the language of nationalism and how cultures fashion identities through representations of authority. Columbus, Central Park, 2018, is a photograph embellished with representations of pre-columbian culture, America’s colonial economy and artefacts displayed in encyclopedic museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art near where this statue stands, in Central Park. This work is from a series called Impossible Proposals, where Locke envisions opportunities for present day citizens to express their relationship to public sculptures of foundational American figures. Drawings from his recent series Song of the South, 2018, depict black minstrel history on real confederate share certificates. Locke was primarily raised in Guyana and returned to the UK to complete an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. His work has been included in the 54th and 55th Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013 and Prospect New Orleans Contemporary Art Biennial, New Orleans in 2014. In 2010, Locke's work, Sikandar, was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London. His work is represented in many collections including the Government Art Collection, UK; Tate Gallery, UK; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; the RISD Museum, RI; the British Museum, London, UK; and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK. In March 2019, the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England will present a comprehensive survey exhibition. In 2020, a new permanent public artwork by Locke will be installed at King Edward Memorial Park in London. 

  

Erin M. Riley (b.1985) is a fiber artist who renders erotic and psychologically raw imagery in hand-dyed wool tapestries. Her work is intensely personal, focusing on self-portraits, still lives chronicling intimate relationships, and documents of abuse and criminal justice. Since she began weaving in 2006, Riley has also consistently rendered fatal accidents. Sourced from the artist’s hometown newspaper, Four Dead, 2018 depicts an alcohol induced prom-night tragedy on Cape Cod. The stark image is informed by Warhol's Death and Disaster series and media fetishization of substance abuse, violence and sexuality. Used Tape, Riley’s debut exhibition at PˑPˑOˑW took place in May 2018. In her review for the New York Times, Jillian Steinhauer writes, “Ms. Riley successfully intertwines two strands of second-wave feminist art: the reclamation of so-called craft mediums and women’s use of their bodies. Into this she braids the distanced gaze of the still life. If the show has a thesis statement, it might be that for women, pain and pleasure remain perilously intertwined — a lesson that bears repeating in the time of #MeToo.” Riley received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2007) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (2009).

Carolee Schneemann (b.1939) is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, photography, performance, film, and installation in a career spanning six decades. Her 1963 painted construction Maximus at Gloucester is a large assemblage inspired by the poet Charles Olson’s influential 1940s volume The Maximus Poems. Created from objects collected during a fateful trip to the poet’s New Jersey residence, this important assemblage marks a shift in the artist’s practice from her training as a landscape painter to the iconic action installations for which she is best known. Maximus at Gloucester is pictured in Schneemann’s seminal photographic series Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions for Camera, wherein she activated her constructions with her nude body, shifting the course of Postmodern and feminist art. 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, NY; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid. The comprehensive retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Paintings recently traveled from Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015), to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017) and MoMA PS1, NY (2018). Her work is currently on view in Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

 

Betty Tompkins (b.1945) creates paintings and works on paper in response to pornographic and art historical representations of gender and sexuality. The Only Way, 2018, combines her signature anatomical airbrush paintings with an enduring cliché from her ongoing series of Women Words: “The only way you will make it in the art world is on your back”. This simple juxtaposition of text and image poses acerbic and disturbing questions about representations of women’s bodies and their experiences within a patriarchal culture. Tompkins lives and works in New York, NY, and Wayne County, PA. Recent solo exhibitions include rodolphe janssen, Belgium;  Ribordy Contemporary, Switzerland; Kunstraum Innsbrook, Austria; PˑPˑOˑW, NY; GAVLAK, FL and CA; and Flag Art Foundation, NY. Tompkins’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including The Shell (LANDSCAPES, PORTRAITS & SHAPES), Almine Rech Gallery, France; A Drawing Show, Matthew Marks Gallery, NY; CORPUS, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; A Chromatic Loss, Bortolami Gallery, NY; Sunset and Pussy, Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011). Will She Ever Shut Up?, Tompkins' second solo exhibition at PˑPˑOˑW, will be on view until December 22.

                             

Robin F. Williams (b.1984) utilizes a variety of techniques, including oil, airbrush, and the staining of raw canvas, to create lush, deeply textured paintings. Teenage Witch, 2018, depicts a nude, vaguely computer-generated female enthusiastically presenting her black cat, a symbol that historically correlates female sexuality with mysticism and social deviance. Referencing a popular 1970s photograph of Cher, this work continues Williams’ investigation of perceived status, internal desires, and a need for self-expression within the framework of pop-cultural femininity. In her review of Williams' 2017 exhibition Your Good Taste is Showing, Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote: "These painting are timely, but they are also enigmatic, off-putting and out there in rewarding ways.” Robin F. Williams was born in Ohio and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been included in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally. Williams has been honored as the Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellow at The MacDowell Colony. Williams and PˑPˑOˑW co-founder Wendy Olsoff will be participating in Art Basel’s Conversations program on Saturday, December 8.

 

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. Alongside a selection of his iconic photographic works, we will present a rarely seen mixed-media painting from 1985-87, Untitled, from his History Painting series. Constructed on a background of his chilling text Between C + D, 1985, this mixed-media painting poses complex social critiques and features hallmark symbols including torn maps, shooting targets, Greco-Roman sculpture, and a depiction of men having sex. Wojnarowicz’s work has been exhibited at 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. His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (1990) and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron (1999). A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition has been reviewed in Artforum, The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. The retrospective will travel to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019 and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City in November 2019. A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs will open at the KW Berlin in February 2019.