See the Highlights of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Newest Section, Dedicated to Art That’s Just Too Awesome For an Art Fair

Ahead of today’s VIP opening of Art Basel Miami Beach, the fair unveiled
its highly anticipated Meridians sector, featuring 34
large-scale artworks in the convention center’s second floor
ballroom. Curated by Magalí Arriola, the director of Mexico City’s
Museo Tamayo, Meridians gives galleries the
chance to showcase works that might overwhelm a typical fair booth,
including a number of historical pieces, some of which haven’t been
shown in years.

With that in mind, dealers almost certainly have their sights
set on institutional buyers, who are the most likely to have the
space to accommodate such ambitious works. Steve Wilson, collector
and founder of the 21c Museum Hotels
chain, for instance, snapped up Portia Munson’s The Garden (1996), a
room-sized installation chock full of artificial flowers and other
colorful manufactured objects, for $225,000 from New York’s PPOW
Gallery.

“It’s very exciting,” said the artist of the sale to Artnet
News. “It’s going to live on in a really good way.” Munson noted
that she was thrilled that the complex work would no longer
languish in storage.

When deciding what to display at the new sector, Munson’s piece
was the obvious choice for gallery co-founder Wendy Olsoff. “For
Meridians, you have to have a piece that’s a whole installation,”
she explained. “This work is about the intersection of sexism and
consumerism, and we just thought that with the climate crisis here,
its environmental message would resonate.”

Similar in concept to the crowd-pleasing Unlimited sector in Art
Basel in Switzerland, albeit smaller in scale, Meridians is being
introduced one year after the fair phased out Art Basel Public. The
free outdoor exhibition of large-scale sculpture had been held in
Collins Park outside the Bass Museum since 2011. (This year, the
park is home to the group show “Art Basel Cities: Buenos
Aires.”)

At Meridians, the 60,000-square-foot exhibition space is
sprawling, but manageable, compared to the labyrinthine layout of
the main show. Completed last year after three years of convention
center renovations, the ballroom staged a performance art piece by
Abraham Cruzvillegas during the 2018 fair.

Overall, the presentation is heavy on wall-based works. The
historical offerings included Allan McCollum’s Constructed
Paintings (1971–73) from Petzel, New York, and Alexis
Smith’s Fool’s Gold (1982)—not seen since 1990
retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York—from New York’s Garth Greenan. New work also made the cut,
including John M. Armleder’s pour painting Stetson
(2019), from Almine Rech, also in New York.

Sculptural works abound as well, such as Oscar Tuazon’s
Quonset Tent (2016) from Chantal Crousel, Paris. The
architectural work was inspired by the efficient prefabricated
Quonset huts made from corrugated galvanized steel and used for
various purposes including temporary housing and military
encampments. And Los Angeles’s Anat Ebgi is restaging Tina
Girouard’s Pinwheel (1977), a performance only seen
at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Each of the work’s four
performers uses the objects in their quadrant of their installation
to enact a ritual.

But the sector’s biggest showstopper just might be Tom
Friedman’s Cocktail Party (2015), which debuted in 2015 at
Frieze London with Stephen Friedman, London. There, the artist’s
life-size sculptures filled the entire booth, to the point where
you couldn’t even step inside. At Basel, where the work is on offer
for $1.2 million, the Styrofoam men and women, clad in found
clothing the artist has painted, all have space to breathe.

New York’s Luhring Augustine is co-presenting the piece,
and partner Lauren Whittels said the work made sense for the
Meridians format. “There are 26 figures, and everybody has
something about them that is distinctive,” she told Artnet News. “I
think this is going to get a lot of buzz.”

See photos of the exhibition below.

The post See the Highlights of Art Basel Miami Beach’s
Newest Section, Dedicated to Art That’s Just Too Awesome For an Art
Fair appeared first on artnet News.