1 - 4 December 2016
Miami Beach
A presentation exploring themes of geometric abstraction, repetition, mirroring and reflection.
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Booth M9
Doug Aitken
Idris Khan
Yayoi Kusama
Conrad Shawcross
Do Ho Suh
Adriana Varejão
The latest infinity mirror room by Yayoi Kusama will form the centerpiece of the presentation. Where the Lights in My Heart Go, 2016, is a work of two distinct characters. While its mirrored exterior both reflects and appears to merge with its surroundings, punctured with small holes it becomes, on the inside, a fathomless space filled by dots of light. It is the first mirror room by Kusama which relies solely on ambient light to create an experience of entering a subtle, yet expansive, cosmos. Victoria Miro will also present a new large mirror-polished bronze pumpkin by Kusama. The varying forms and dot-patterns across the surface of the work integrate many key aspects of Kusama's practice: the reflectivity of the mirror, the repeating pattern of dots, a juxtaposition of light and dark, connotations of growth and fertility and the almost mythical status of the pumpkin in her art. Two Infinity Net paintings will also be on display. The ‘all-over’ quality of these seminal works encapsulates the fundamental tenets of Kusama’s art and her lifelong exploration of infinity, illusion, self-obliteration and repetition.
Composed of clear and coloured mirror, resin and concrete, Doug Aitken's sculptural text work END (mirror), 2014, takes a single word and through the actions of light and reflectivity across its surface turns a quick read into a more complex consideration of word, image and object, perception and meaning. Aitken has described his iconic text pieces possess a 'toughness' akin to the commercial landscape of signage. At the same time, these works move beyond language, breaking down into abstraction.
Language becomes overlaid, abstracted and obscured in works by Idris Khan. In Autonomy, 2016, a work on glass, lines of texts are repeatedly stamped to create a radial form. Derived from a series of oil stick paintings created through an intensive process of overlaying lines of text on to a minimal ground, large-scale photographs such as To Disappear, 2016, capture the process of making at every stage and collect details of each line from every angle to document the journey of the paintings while obscuring any single viewpoint and eradicating a definite reading.
Adriana Varejão evokes traditions of minimalism and monochrome painting while creating an expanded sense of time. The cracked tile has been a recurring motif in Varejão's work since early in her career and in visceral monochromatic works such as White Mimbres V, 2016, she draws particularly on the history of Portuguese Azulejo tilework and the legacy of Brazil's colonial past to suggest the passage of time as well as a sense of instability.
Suggestions of time and movement are encapsulated in sculptures by Conrad Shawcross such as Paradigm Chamfer (Structural), 2015, part of the artist's ongoing explorations of the four-sided tetrahedron as a tessellating form, and The Dappled Light of the Sun (study), 2016, a branching, cloud-like form made up of steel tetrahedrons. While Shawcross' work possesses an appearance a machine-like authority, tending towards the sublime, it questions what we take for granted and encourages us to see beyond the physical.
Meticulously replicating the architecture of the places in which he has lived, such as his childhood home and Western apartments, Do Ho Suh's translucent fabric structures give form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities. Delicately precise, weightless impressions of household objects such as a bathtub, a thermostat or a door hinge seem to exist between imagination and reality, inviting reflection on notions of home, physical space, displacement, identity and memory.