Booth AM216
Zeit Contemporary Art is honored to participate in Art Miami 2021, our inaugural art fair in the United States. Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of our founding, this presentation features several lines of work developed during the first years of ZCA.
One section is concerned with the idea of joie de vivre, featuring artists that created works that exemplify the Elan Vital or vital impulse, a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson to denote the creative tendency of life. Works by Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Damien Hirst, and Oscar Murillo are included in relation to this positive attitude towards human existence. They are all united by a predominantly warm palette and with a subjective joyful bent. Amoako Boafo’s empathetic, richly textured portraits are a celebration of Black life and culture, while Alexander Calder translated the whimsy and equilibrium of his mobiles into his gouaches. In a different vein, Sam Francis and Sam Gilliam’s works are both revelatory of the artists’ delight in pure color in and of itself.
Another section of this presentation is dedicated to prints and drawings. Works by Pablo Picasso, Joaquin Torres-García, and Henri Matisse created during the interwar years in France illustrate the preeminence of works on paper in modern art. In L’aubade: Études de nus allongés (Dora Maar), Picasso reflects on the impact of World War II onto the body of his muse and model. Contemporaneous prints by Joaquin Torres-García and Henri Matisse provide a cohesive view into works created in Paris during this crucial period for 20th century art. In a similar way to Picasso, during the interwar years Matisse found inspiration in classical genres of Western art such as portraiture and reclining nudes while Torres-García sought to combine classicism with modernity through universal symbols. This section also brings to Art Miami examples from Zeit Contemporary Art’s current online viewing room Lilt, Joy and Clarity: The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly was a prolific printmaker and his works in this medium helped the artist to develop key concerns of his artistic practice, particularly his love of color and form.
An entire wall installation is devoted to major examples of Andy Warhol’s Ad paintings from the mid 1980s. In the last years of his life, Warhol developed a new interest in exploring the use of already made images obtained from American print-culture. The jewel-like canvases that constitute this series feature diagrams, maps, and advertisements from magazines and newspapers. While related to the innovations of his early career, Warhol imbued his artistic language with the atmosphere of the eighties and Cold War related anxieties, as well as his awareness of his own mortality. The visceral red of Valentine’s Heart Ad (Heart Fund) and the subject matter of Missiles (Positive) and Daily News (Gimbel’s Anniversary Sale/Artist Could Have Been Choked) are all related to these concerns.
The thematic and curatorial concentrations of this presentation are recurring interests and highlight our focus on modern, postwar, and contemporary art. They also feature artists whose works we are truly proud both to be in the presence of and to offer to the public here in Art Miami, special projects and private sales.
