Tavares Strachan at Marian Goodman Gallery was another highlight from Art Basel 2020 online viewing rooms.
Cutting through art, politics, and science, Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan's practice reintroduces marginalised objects and peoples into the cultural canon, inspiring a curiosity of the world in the process.
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018–ongoing) is an ongoing project that weaves through the artist's initiatives, containing over 15,000 entries—from B-movies to mythological creatures and historical figures. It is the backbone to his current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, In Plain Sight (8 September–24 October 2020), an immersive presentation of sculptures, explosive paintings, and other elements that bring figures swept from collective memory to the fore.
In Before the Fire (2020), a labyrinth of references includes a photograph of American novelist, poet, and activist James Baldwin taken in 1963—the year his non-fiction work The Fire Next Time was published—in the foreground.
PPOW Gallery are showing this wonderful Ramiro Gomez painting in their Art Basel 2020 online viewing room.
West Hollywood artist Ramiro Gomez's paintings on cardboard powerfully evoke the predicament of America's Latinx workers, many of whom continue to work in the jobs other Americans don't want to do.
Only in his early thirties, the artist's practice usually involves being out and about, shopping, going to restaurants and bars, and visiting art museums, but, he says, 'always with an eye toward those maintaining everything.'
Gomez himself was a nanny for a Los Angeles family, while his father is a truck driver for Costco and his mother works as a janitor. The keenness of Gomez's social observation has been acknowledged in articles by publications including The New York Times Magazine, and through his addition to the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
We highlighted the Erika Verzutti solo booth at Alison Jacques Gallery for Art Basel's 2020 online viewing rooms.
Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti's biomorphic sculptures lay bare the process of their making, emphasising the tactile qualities of her materials.
This relief, entitled Naked, features her recurring egg motif set within a concave, shell-like form. Shapes taken from nature are transformed through their rendering in bronze and clay, together with a playful arrangement that imbues the work with a surrealist quality.
Verzutti's sculptures seem to come alive through ambiguous allusions to body parts, teasing us with sexual innuendo.
