This year’s presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach marks Nina Johnson gallery’s eighteenth year. We are thrilled to showcase an eclectic group of works that extend an ongoing dialogue among several core artists in our program—one centered on abstraction and its possibilities. Who gets to participate and how? What cultural, gendered, and identity-based references are permitted? And through what materials and methods is this dialogue shaped?
Flanking the entrance to the booth are two topiaries by Katie Stout. Stout has helped lead a generation of genre-defying artists in challenging conventions of beauty and mediums. Her intricately detailed lamps distort the natural world—in this case employing literal burnouts of mushrooms, flowers, and sponges, collaged into a chaotic garden of earthly delights. Each object is individually unrecognizable yet collectively evokes a conversation about decay, beauty, aging, gender, opulence, and labor.
At the center of the booth is a monumental painting by Nathlie Provosty. Provosty’s lifelong fascination with perception makes her an alchemist who unsettles our accepted sense of reality. Our eyes play tricks on us—are we perceiving a flat surface or a portal? Is the wall moving, or are we? It is a visual game that has fascinated painters for centuries.
But who has been allowed to enter this conversation? Within the Western canon, the encyclopedia of references has been quite narrow. Patrick Dean Hubbell’s work infuses a rich, physical studio practice with deep ancestral knowledge and spiritual resonance. You Guided Our Prayers for Generations, We Will Continue to Persevere uses natural earth pigment, horsehair, buckskin, beads made from seeds, and commercially tanned deer hide. The result is an invitation into a universe, a textural landscape that fully envelops the viewer.
Vanishing Americans (1963) is a pastel work on paper by George Nelson Preston—a gestural rendition illustrating solidarity. Nelson Preston, a lifelong scholar of African art whose work continues to inform generations of artists, has himself been making work for over sixty years. The selection on view offers a careful glimpse into his early practice, revealing a young artist grappling with history and identity through mark-making and developing the visual language that continues to guide his work today. In What Happened to the Apache we see the horizon line that will become nearly ubiquitous in Nelson Preston’s work over the next several years. Figures, which work their way in and out of his practice with fluidity, appear as ghosts floating over the horizon line, implied through a single rough charcoal mark.
A recent review of Rochelle Feinstein’s exhibition at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany, noted that “the works make painfully clear that there is little left to do but persevere, look at everything again, work through it, and move on.” In her Static Prismatic series, Feinstein has frozen the rainbow. The seven hues which she has used—nearly exclusively since Donald Trump’s first presidential term—are here crucified to the wall with nails wrapped in rainbow-colored wool. The works have been pinned to their place, frozen by layers of resin into a gesture caught in time.
Anna Betbeze’s latest works push her exploration of texture and color fully into three dimensions. Stacked totems composed of wrapped objects—boxes, mirrors, plexiglass—are enveloped in dyed fabrics of varied textures and opacities including silk, fur, and wool. These forms are private by nature (a box, after all, is nothing but a marker of interiority), yet become exposed through display. What is a totem if not an object poised for gazing? Provisional and temporal, these works suggest the artist’s decisions might continue indefinitely, forming a daisy chain of consequence. Betbeze creates a tactile landscape that invites discovery and contemplation. Are we exploring the works—or somehow intruding upon them?
Dara Friedman’s Star People series presents the body as a reflective surface, a plane upon which to see ourselves mirrored and refracted—a kind of figural infinity that extends the artist’s decades-long interest in light, shadow, and the human form. What appears nearly flawless at first glance is, in fact, painstakingly hand-polished to a mirrored finish, a meditation on labor and transformation—the material returning, quite literally, dust to dust.
Abstracting functional forms in minimal yet playful ways has long been central to Emmett Moore’s practice. The works featured in this presentation juxtapose flat mechanical planes against cast natural shapes. A tongue-in-cheek reference to “cabin-core” furniture, the natural forms here create the support structure for the manmade I-beam backrests of Moore’s chairs. Collaged together, flattened by uniform materiality, we are left uncertain of what is “real.” Yet what object can ground us more presently than the very surface upon which we sit?
