The 60th Venice Biennale ended on 24 November, but fairgoers in Miami are feeling its influence this week. Stands at Art Basel Miami Beach feature numerous artists who either participated in Adriano Pedrosa’s central exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, showed in a national pavilion or one of the many satellite shows around Venice.
The Indigenous Brazilian artist movement MAHKU is showing new paintings with Carmo Johnson Projects in the Positions sector following their façade installation on the Giardini building inspired by the chants in Huni Kuin culture. The Japanese Brazilian painter Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015), whose blue-washed wavy abstraction from 1978 was a part of the salon-style hang in the Giardini, is represented on Nara Roesler gallery’s stand with a pink-hued painting from 2004. Three energetic mixed-media cityscape paintings by the Filipina American artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004) from the mid 1990s were featured at the Arsenale; in Miami, Tina Kim Gallery is showing one of Abad’s glitter-heavy dreamscape compositions, from 1986.
Kapwani Kiwanga, who represented Canada in Venice with an installation of seven million colourful glass beads, is showing mixed-media ceramic paintings on Goodman Gallery’s stand. The US painter and sculptor Jim Dine, who exhibited recent large-scale works in a 14th-century palazzo as part of the Biennale’s collateral programming, is present at the main fair with a bronze sculpture, Three Graces (2008), on Templon’s stand. Acaye Kerunen—who was featured in the inaugural Ugandan Pavilion in Venice in 2022, then curated the same pavilion this year —is showing a new wall hanging of clay with dyed and woven fabric on Pace gallery’s stand.
The swift feedback loop between the world’s most prestigious biennial and the biggest art fair in the Americas is hardly surprising, according to Art Basel’s global director of fairs and exhibition platforms, Vincenzo de Bellis, who says the “premises between a biennial and a fair have become much more similar since the inception of both systems”. But, he also thinks the two-year cycle of biennials is too slow, given the rapid spread of information in the art world. “Biennials and fairs complement each other,” with the former operating retrospectively while the latter showcase artists’ newest production.
MAHKU’s solo stand in the fair’s Positions section echoes De Bellis’s point, featuring the group’s most recent paintings interpreting Huni Meka chants in vibrant colours. “We are not painting what we physically see in the forest, but what we see in our minds and feel in our bodies,” a MAHKU member tells The Art Newspaper. They hope sales at the fair will provide them the means to buy land in the Amazon forest and eventually open the MAHKU Institute of the Forest, where they dream of establishing programming that “honours the respect we have for our ancestral knowledge”.
The Venice Biennale has brought renewed attention to Abad’s work. “Her itinerant biography and cross-cultural approach to art-making positioned her work outside traditional contexts and narratives, which contributed to her relative obscurity,” says Tina Kim, adding that the posthumous exposure has sparked “growing interest from collectors across Southeast Asia”.
The Bienniale can also accelerate career growth and commercial success for living artists working in geographies outside conventional market networks, as Kerunen experienced. “Being selected to curate Uganda’s pavilion further highlights her extraordinary vision and the strong community she has cultivated,” says Georgina Rees, a director at Pace. For Kiwanga, representing Canada in Venice “broadened awareness of her work to an international audience and we have experienced broader institutional and client engagement with her practice”, says Goodman Gallery’s senior director Jo Stella-Sawicka.
South American artists on top
The strong showing by artists from South America in this year’s Venice Biennale resonates with Art Basel’s Miami Beach edition, where 70% of the exhibitors in the Positions sector are from Latin America. “South America has always been the core of our Miami show,” says De Bellis, noting a “trajectory in which some of the most important artists of the biennial receive ‘market legitimisation’”.
The case of Ohtake proves De Bellis’s point. Ohtake’s inclusion in the Bienniale this year not only reaffirmed the timeless allure of her compositions, but also “confirmed for a lot of collectors and scholars who were already interested in her work that they were on the right track”, says Daniel Roesler, Nara Roesler’s partner and senior director.
A prominent showing in Venice can also place an established artist’s career in a new context, broadening interest in their work. Dine saw in his collateral show an opportunity to prove there is “no hierarchy between his masterful skills in sculpture and painting”, says Templon’s executive director Anne-Claudie Coric, who adds that the gallery has seen rising demand for Dine’s outdoor sculptures.
“We did not necessarily plan to overlap with the biennial,” De Bellis says, adding that “we are all learning through decolonisation and inclusion which happens through institutions first and then becomes absorbed by the market”.
