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.
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”.
—Osman Can Yerebakan
