Previews: Wednesday, December 6—Thursday, December 7, 2023

Public Days: Friday, December 8—Sunday, December 10, 2023

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce details of its 22nd presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach with an exhibition that poetically merges painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Presentation highlights include new works by Loriel Beltrán, Lee Bul, Mandy El-Sayegh, Teresita Fernández, Todd Gray, Chantal Joffe, Tammy Nguyen, Do Ho Suh, Nari Ward, and Erwin Wurm, which each resist traditional categorization in favor of storytelling. As part of the fair’s Kabinett sector, OSGEMEOS will present an immersive, wallpapered installation including both painting and sculpture. Concurrent to the fair, Miami-based artist Hernan Bas—whom Lehmann Maupin has represented since 2009—will have a solo exhibition at The Bass Museum of Art, opening on December 4th.  

Debuting at the fair is a new wall-based work from Teresita Fernández’s Dark Earth series. In this body of work, the artist transforms thousands of delicate slivers of raw charcoal into meticulously assembled relief images that suggest an expansive idea of place—from the ancient and subterranean to the futuristic and cosmic. Imagined as vertical cross-sections that span from underground geologic layers to heavenly realms, the works reveal bodies of subterranean water—typically invisible to the eye—embedded into the stratified earth. In the summer of 2024, Fernández will be the subject of a major two-artist museum exhibition alongside Robert Smithson at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico.

Concurrent to Nari Ward’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom—on view now at Lehmann Maupin London—the gallery’s presentation at the fair includes a new installation work by the acclaimed multidisciplinary artist. In His soul’s marching on! (2023)—which references a late 18th century marching song about abolitionist John Brown—Ward constructs the eponymous phrase from shoelaces inserted into the wall. The work reflects the artist’s interest in collective expression and experience of language, particularly protest and public decrees. Ward bridges the devotional and activist elements of the song to shed light on what unites us—in this case, a powerful sense of endurance and persistence. In 2024, the artist will have a major exhibition at a prominent European institution, to be announced in the coming weeks.

Two new paintings by Tammy Nguyen will also debut at the fair. Nguyen is known for paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, and zines that explore the intersections between geopolitics, ecology, and lesser-known histories. Nguyen’s newest body of work considers the ways that language and narrative construct areas of moral ambiguity or ethical confusion using Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as a visual paradigm. In the paintings on view, which take inspiration from the Purgatorio book in Dante’s three-part masterpiece, the artist weaves a fictional narrative that merges Dante’s storytelling with geopolitical theater concerning Cold War conflicts and projects in Southeastern Asia through many layers of dense imagery, pattern, and material. Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition is on view now at the ICA Boston through January 28, 2024.

As part of the fair's Kabinett sector—curated presentations situated within gallery booths across the fair—we will present an installation of new works by Brazilian artist duo OSGEMEOS, including new paintings and several sculptural works set against an immersive wallpaper. In their new works, the artists materialize their vivid inner landscapes, collapsing distinctions between body, architecture, and landscape to create a universe where the self converges with the wider world. OSGEMEOS combines traditional, folkloric, and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture with graffiti, hip-hop, music, dreamscapes, and international youth culture—their signature long limbed, yellow characters dance and play music against vibrant colors and elaborate patterns, constructing a symbolic visual language that is often charged with personal significance.

Other highlights at the booth include: new Perdu work by Korean artist Lee Bul; two new photo-based works by Todd Gray, who joined the gallery roster in October; new works by Miami-based artist, Loriel Beltrán, whose work is on view in the solo exhibition Total Collapse at Lehmann Maupin Seoul; a new painting by Mandy El-Sayegh, whose first monograph The Makeshift Body was released in October; an intimate portrait by Chantal Joffe, several new works from acclaimed artist Do Ho Suh’s ScaledBehaviour series; and a recent sculptural work entitled Mid-century dream (2023) by Erwin Wurm, whose solo exhibition Trap of the Truth is currently on view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Concurrent to the fair, Miami-based painter Hernan Bas will have a solo exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art, titled The Conceptualists. The exhibition features 35 paintings—including several works that debuted in the exhibition The Conceptualists: Vol. II at Lehmann Maupin New York last spring—and includes the artist’s largest canvas to date, measuring some 9 x 21 feet. In The Conceptualists, Bas marries his personal appreciation of conceptual artists with his ongoing exploration of eccentricity. Whereas a number of prior works by the artist depict figures known as “enthusiasts” engaged in esoteric habits, this body of work reimagines absurdity and obsession as foundations of artistic practice.

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