Art Miami 2021

In December 2021, Zeit Contemporary Art marked its inaugural art fair in the United States at Art Miami, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the gallery's founding. The presentation surveyed several lines of work developed across ZCA's first years, moving from a celebration of vitality and human affirmation toward the historical weight of Warhol's Cold War era Ad paintings.

One line of work centered on joie de vivre, gathering Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Damien Hirst, and Oscar Murillo around Henri Bergson's idea of the élan vital, or vital impulse. These were works united by warm color and a sense of human affirmation, from Boafo's textured celebrations of Black life and culture to Calder's playful gouaches and the chromatic freedom of Francis and Gilliam. A second line turned to prints and drawings made during the interwar years in France, led by Pablo Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García, and Henri Matisse. A wartime Paris drawing of the reclining nude by Picasso registered the impact of the war years through the body of his muse and model. Matisse revisited classical genres such as portraiture and the reclining nude, and Torres-García joined classicism and modernity through a language of universal symbols.

The presentation closed with a wall devoted to major examples from Warhol's Ad paintings of the mid-1980s. Here, the artist returned to found images from American print culture (diagrams, maps, advertisements, newspaper fragments), transforming them into radiant canvases shaped by the atmosphere of the decade. The series recalled his early Pop innovations, but it also carried late Cold War anxieties and Warhol's own awareness of mortality. The red intensity of a Valentine-themed Ad painting made for a heart-health charity appeal, together with the subjects of Missiles (Positive) and Daily News (Gimbel's Anniversary Sale/Artist Could Have Been Choked), gave this group historical and emotional force.