Exploring Painting’s Latest Renaissance as Art Basel Miami Beach Returns After a Rocky Year

Art Basel Miami Beach returned after a rocky year to re-establish an attitude of serenity and calm. Whether it’s a temporary lull after last year’s political storm or the alleged goosing of the “Trump Bump,” the atmosphere at the 286 galleries and their 4,000-plus artists was downright giddy and star-studded. Yet safety and stability appeared to be major themes, with a dogged reliance on secondary markets and known quantities (Alex Katz and George Condo, anyone?). The NOVA section of the grand pavilion, however, provided a few up-and-coming outliers. Meaning that painting, specifically figuration, is having yet another renaissance. In this case, it is figuration that extends the idea of the figure through all manner of fourth walls, as a younger generation of artists extend the painterly into unexplored iterations. It could be that our academies are churning out ever increasingly sophisticated and academically minded young painters, or that the general level of visual culture in our screen saturated era is producing art that rises to the level of our more daunting and complex visual world. Whatever the case, the results are interesting, when they aren’t too clever by half. Given the enormity of it all, a thorough survey is impossible. Among some of the young and mid-career standouts, Danica Lundy, part of White Cube’s booth this year, offers “Nobody deserves you the way that I do.” Danica Lundy. ‘Nobody deserves you the way that I do,’ 2024, oil on canvas, 60″ x 60″. Courtesy Suzanne LevesqueFraught is an adjective that serves much of her work in general and this one in particular, featuring a woman having a reflective moment, or a breakdown, sitting on the floor of a bathroom. She specializes in bizarre visual distortions where elements, in this case the toilet, are seen from both the inside and out, while the figure of the woman is doubled, cinematically, in two psychological states. Ms. Lundy paints her figures and objects from several angled perspectives at once, giving rise to a world where forms are semi-transparent and elastic, distorted with emotion. The virtuosity is impressive but lacking perhaps in its own truly visceral painterly integrity. It is a direction she is heading in, however. The same with Sixten Sandra Osterberg, a Swedish painter represented by Company Gallery at New York, who delves into the classical fleshiness with heavy metal queer fervor. Her two central figures in “The Sleepers,” a couple engaged in a passionate kiss, create an almost pastoral love scene until you realize that the bed cover, painted very sparsely, is not a garden but a coverlet. Sixten Sandra Österberg, ‘Sleepers,’ 2024, oil on canvas, 82 3/4″ x 130″. Courtesy Company GalleryBehind them, in an equal nod to photo realistic trompe-l’oeil, is a cheap printed blanket featuring bucks in a forested clearing. It’s either a send up of young ecstatic love or a testament to the powers of erotic imagination: in youth even your tawdry bedsit becomes a Paphian bower. Special care is given to the fleshiness of the two figures, mighty thighs worthy of Rubens or Lucian Freud, ending in Doc Martens. As such Ms. Osterberg represents the painting’s recent nod to representation combined with unsettling, deconstructed elements, a direction we have seen since Covid. The direction is not entirely forward looking, however. Joshua Hagler encompasses a more ancient ethos and timeless methods and techniques with his astonishing paintings on burlap, much of it adorned with patterned glass beads. His semi abstractions radiate an almost shamanistic energy, achieved through his judicious use of saturated color and a combination of different mediums. Joshua Hagler ‘𝘐𝘹𝘰𝘺𝘦 (Dog Is a Fish),’ 2024, mixed media with glass beads on burlap and canvas, 76″ x 66″. Courtesy Suzanne LevesqueMr. Hagler’s contribution at Nicodim’s booth, “Ixoye (Dog is a Fish)” bristles with totemic energy, as if its mythological animal hybrid were fighting its way out of the spiritual confines of the canvas. It’s an echo of the metaphysical expressionism of Boston artist Hyman Bloom, with its emphasis on transcendental themes melded with brute corporeality. Mr. Hagler’s colors, however, are filtered through the more serene desert palette of his native New Mexico. It’s a strong resurgence of painting from the region we haven’t seen since Georgia O’Keefe. From the knotty ‘painterly’ painters, Kaifan Wang is among the more serene formalists grabbing critical attention. Mr. Wang, who is represented by Blum Los Angeles, has captured many fairgoers with his elegant calligraphic swirls on gold backgrounds. Gold, of course, is a metal with a long and overarching history in China’s dynastic history and among Chinese living abroad. That this identity meta-narrative is read into his painting is more the work of the conversation surrounding it. However, there is something compelling and Mandarin in the formalist balance of Mr. Wang’s elegant swirls, like cirrus clouds floating across a golden sky. “Scene De Naufrage,” his painting this year, strikes a balance between elegance and brushed intensity, could augur a future shift towards more painterly intensity. A similar knack for formalist beauty is Emily Kraus’ work at Luhring Augustine’s booth. Ms. Kraus has found a partially mechanical method for painting that nonetheless delivers strong analog results. Stitching her canvases around rotating rollers, she creates a conveyor belt painting surface. The result resembles visual echoes or doppler shifts. Painting has been concerned with the staggered progression of motifs through time for well over a century, starting with Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.”However, Ms. Kraus’s canvases have a minimalist elegance that explores this concept with almost scientific rigor. The moving canvas still allows her to make painterly decisions, resulting in a hybrid mechanical human form of painting that is nonetheless visually compelling, as in her standout painting “Cirrus” from this year. There is also a continuation of a melding between the graphic, the illustrative and fine art. There is no better example of this exploration than in the forty-foot-long mural provided by Antonis Donef, represented by Kalfayan Galleries from Greece. The result of four years of labor, it’s a lyrical marvel of collage, printed material and mixed media that resembles a map of some fantastical imaginary territory. Who knows where he is taking us, but we want to go there. This return to serene, highly refined mixed media recalls the similar sensibility of Joseph Cornell but flattened in two dimensions. is yet another indication that as the art market grows so does the incorporation of previous visual languages and stylistic excursions, delegated in novel ways. While these artists represent only a drop in the bucket of visual offerings present at this year’s Art Basel, their work suggests that strong painting is not a thing of the past, and figuration’s revival continues to develop in unexpected ways. Perhaps Artificial Intelligence doesn’t have the stranglehold we think it might, and the human hand and eye trumps the machine once again.

Exploring Painting’s Latest Renaissance as Art Basel Miami Beach Returns After a Rocky Year

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