Riding high from a blockbuster season, which included Picasso Ceramics, Alex Katz: People and Places and Manolo Valdés: Small Sculptures, Rosenbaum dives into the art fair season at Art Miami 2018 with selections by KAWS, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Jean Dubuffet, Roberto Matta, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Sam Francis, Fernando Botero, Karel Appel, Manolo Valdés and a host of other highly regarded internationally known Modern and Contemporary artists.
Of Rosenbaum’s highly anticipated Art Miami 2018 selections, a few token art pieces stand out: Untitled, 1967, by Karel Appel; La terre et ses oignons,1994, by Roberto Matta; and Effigie Incertaine X, 1975, by Jean Dubuffet.
Untitled by Karel Appel encapsulates, in full force, all that is Art Brut with a personnage over 10 feet tall in bold colors; representing a dynamic totem. The work was painted when the artist was 46 years old and had just moved to the Château de Molesmes, near Auxerre, southeast of Paris, and was propelled forward in his career, projected by his successes with the Venice Biennale, the UNESCO Prize and other major institutional affiliations.
In La terre et ses oignons, Roberto Matta delivers a magnificent and sizable oil on canvas painting that explodes off the pictorial plane, meeting the viewer in a quasi-intergalactic environment. Orbs of pulsating light flow from foreground to background while revolving around an undefined central entity. Complex dynamisms push and pull the compositional elements, never arriving at a static moment.
Effigie Incertaine X, by Jean Dubuffet, is a masterpiece that dives deep into questions of ground and materiality. The surfaces of his canvases are thick and clotted; their aesthetic is muddy and scatological. This ‘uncertain effigy’ walks the line of a childlike drawing versus a highly unschooled/deconstructive approach to linear drawing. Various skin color tones are speckled with a trifecta of dark blue spots. Dubuffet exaggerates the key facial signifiers and body appendages to almost comic appeal. However, on closer evaluation these over-embellishments create a melancholy undertone of sorts; a dubious attempt to gesture a fundamentally lugubrious and disentangled tendency of raw emotion, reflection, and a vocal dissension of societal norms.
Balancing an intense selection of artists at Art Miami 2018, Rosenbaum Contemporary also announces plans for their March 2019 opening of Two Generations, an influential selection of artworks by Surrealist master, Roberto Matta, coupled with the whimsically intricate artworks of his daughter, Federica Matta, in a specially culled exhibition showing the two-generational discourse that theoretically discusses the visual language and conceptual dialogue between a mentor and mentee, and more importantly, the intimate relationship of father and daughter.
For more information about Art Miami, visit http://www.artmiami.com.
