Fair Well: Miami 101 (Part 4)

Pulse and Ink

Previous Miami posts
Is Anybody Happy?
C'est What?

Miami 101 (Part 1): Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Miami, Aqua Art 

Miami 101 (Part 2): Untitled and Miami Project 

Miami 101 (Part 3): NADA

At Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York City: Sigalit Landau sculpture made of shoes crystalized from suspension in Dead Sea water

Pulse
One of the highlights for me during the fairs is the Pulse press breakfast. It’s not the free food but the chance to sit outdoors at a little table with my chocolate croissant and coffee and see people I haven’t seen all year. Then, fortified with breakfast (OK, I had two croissants, but they were the bite-size variety), I’m predisposed to liking much of what I see at the fair.

The grounds at Pulse. This image, from the Pulse flickr page, shows the grounds last year, but nothing much had changed, including the sunny weather

Pulse is located in a soundstage known at the Ice Palace, set within a compound enclosed by tall hedges. There are hammocks slung between the trees, a lovely environment to linger when it’s not 80 degrees and 80 percent humidity at 10:00 am.  The airy grounds are the polar opposite of the building, in which a dark ceiling looms over a warren of small booths.  

This year things were a little off. Many of the Pulse stalwarts had migrated elsewhere —Thatcher Projects, Pavel Zoubok, Morgan Lehman to Miami Projects; Luis de Jesus to Untitled; Schroeder Romero to an online presence. It also seemed smaller. But there was still much to recommend it.

Drips constituted a mini theme here. There was plenty of good painting, a lot of it made with stuff in addition to paint, and some strong materially oriented work. And then there were those crystalline platform shoes, which were in a category by themselves. 

At Eduardo Secci Contemporary, Florence, Italy: Dripping figures by Francesco Sena

(Yes, my encaustic friends, they're made of wax)

At Rick Wester Fine Art, New York City: Alyse Rosner painting on Yupo

At Tomlinson Kong Contemporary: Johannes Giradoni wood and wax sculpture

Detail below

At James Harris Gallery, Seattle: Alexander Kroll oil on canvas

At Von Lintel Gallery, New York City

Above: Rosemary Fiore  work on paper made with colored-smoke fireworks

Below: Catherine Howe painting with oil, pumice, acrylic and marble dust

At Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco: Anoka Faruqee painting

At Otto Zoo, Milano: Maria Morganti small color fields

Below: Closeup of the surface of one of Morganti's paintings, which the dealer described as "pongo on panel." Some type of modeling clay, maybe? (A Google search was fruitless)

At Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami: Molly Zuckerman-Hartung paintings

Detail below 

At Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich: Matthias Meyer oil on canvas

At Taubert Contemporary, Berlin: Adrian Esparza thread-and nail sculpture

At Shoshana Wayne, Santa Monica: Jeffrey Gibson multipanel geometry in painted elk hide over birch

Detail below

At Mixed Greens, New York City: Katie Bell sculptures of wood, foam, plaster, carpet, acrylic and other materials

At Pablo's Birthday, New York City: Eckart Hahn charred and gilded wood

Detail below 

. . . . . . . .

Ink

Like Pulse, Ink has seen some of its longtime participants decamp for the larger fairs. But Ink, a print fair located in rooms off a shaded courtyard at the Dorchester Hotel on the beach side, has an intimacy and camaraderie that no other fair seems to have—not even Aqua, which I love. Many of the same dealers have been participating in the same fair, in this same place, for a number of years.  It’s free to enter, and you can see the whole thing in 30 minutes, a bit longer if you stop to talk to the dealers—which is easy, because they are a very friendly bunch.

While Ink is billed as a print fair, the fact is that there's a variety of work on paper: unique collage and drawings;  books, some unique and some editioned; even paintings. If you go to Miami for the fairs, I urge you to make a point of visiting.

From a reportorial point of view the problem with Ink is that because most of what’s on display are prints and works on paper, and most of them are glazed (but not with museum glass), it’s damn near impossible to shoot the work. I liked a lot of what I saw. Here’s what I was able to photograph without glare.

At Dolan Maxwell, Philadelphia: Rachel Selekman collages

Closer view of one work below

At Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati: Ann Hamilton assemblage of paperback book chunks. Looks like a tapestry in this view . . .

 . . . Angled view below shows the chunks

A Hamilton print below

More from Dolan Maxwell

Above: Sarah Lutz Print

Below: Judy Pfaff framed drawing and David Shapiro prints

Above and below: Details of Pfaff's work, which consists of 19th Century chemists' invoices on which she has drawn and painted

At Stoney Road Press, Dublin: a large sectional woodblock print by Richard Gorman

Above: the first section

Below: the second added to the first

Below: A second two-section woodblock print by Richard Gorman

Next up: Design Miami and an evening tour of sculpture on the grounds of the Bass Museum


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