ABOUT ART BASEL MIAMI
In Art Basel American show, leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia show significant work from the masters of Modern and contemporary art, as well as the new generation of emerging stars.
ABOUT UNTITLED, ART
UNTITLED, ART is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. UNTITLED, ART innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue.
ABOUT NADA
NADA Miami is dedicated to showcasing new art and to celebrating the rising talents from around the globe. NADA holds a renowned art fair to vigorously pursue our goals of exploring new or underexposed art that is not typical of the “art establishment.” NADA Miami is the one of the only major American art fairs to be produced by a non-profit organization, and is recognized as a much needed alternative assembly of the world’s youngest and strongest art galleries dealing with contemporary art.
Discover our Collectors Guide here!
KENNETH BERGFELD
Project Native Informant (London) at Art Basel Miami Beach
Born in 1990 in Bergisch-Gladbach (Germany), lives and works in Cologne
Kenneth Bergfeld studied at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in Germany. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Max Mayer’s project space (Düsseldorf, Germany) and Kunstverein Leverkusen (Leverkusen, Germany), and his work has been featured in group shows at the Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, Germany), Kunstverein Duisburg (Duisburg, Germany), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark). In 2015, Bergfeld’s performance group “Seira’s” curated the Dan Graham Pavilion at K21 Ständehaus Düsseldorf and this summer, his work is included in an exhibition at Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, Germany). “Oozing retrofuturism, the figure in Bergfeld’s larger canvases ignores or retracts from the picture plane, while in the smaller busts they seem to nonchalantly lean into our personal space. Vibrant, uncomfortably unusual hues and shiny, plastic textures suspend the paintings in an animated space of non-reality. This mysterious figure, not so much confrontational as aloof, perpetuates an inner inaccessibility through a glossy exterior veneer. But why repeat this one figure? Besides painting, Bergfeld works in music and animation film, both disciplines that engage with activities of repetition. In an interview with Christina Irrgang, Bergfeld explains that “repetition creates ‘cracks’ in our everyday lives and is a form of change in itself”. Repetition constitutes a marker of change and progress, of time passing between identical actions. By repeating this single figure, Bergfeld tracks the change in himself as he moves through time” “(Antonia Marsh).
RAUL DE NIEVES
Company (New York) at Art Basel Miami Beach
Born in 1983 in Michoacán, Mexico and lives and works in New York.
Originally planning to enroll in art school in San Francisco, de Nieves ultimately changed his mind and decided to study on his own, taking cues from his friends who were enrolled in classes, but leaving himself the liberty to follow his own instincts and interests—and allowing him to work for several years on the same pieces. De Nieves makes intricate sculptures using plastic beads that require intensive manual labor. He has gained recognition in both the art and fashion worlds, and has often worked with discarded shoes, resulting in pieces that are more fantastical than practical (though still possible) to wear. The expansive faux stained glass window and beaded sculptures he presented at the 2017 Whitney Biennial were among the exhibition’s most acclaimed works.
De Nieves, who works in sculpture and performance, attributes his art practice to his childhood education in Mexico, where he was taught to sew and crochet.
Recent group shows include: Ford Foundation, New York (2019); New Orleans Museum of Art (2018); Whitney Biennial (2017); Documenta 14 (2017); MoMA PS1 (2017); The Watermill Center (2017), Secret Project Robot (2016); Issue Project Room (2016); ICA Philadelphia (2016); The Kitchen (2016); The Museum of Art and Design, New York (2014); Marfa Ballroom (2014); Artists Space (2013); Performa 13 (2013). His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.
AMALIA ULMAN
Barro (Buenos Aires) at Art Basel Miami Beach
Born in Buenos Aires in 1989, lives and works in Los Angeles and Gijon
Amalia Ulman is an Argentinian-born Spanish-raised (Los Angeles based) artist, whose practice includes performance, installation, video and net-art works. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1989 but was raised in the Spanish province of Asturias, after emigrating with her family. In 2009, she left Spain to study at Central Saint Martins in London, where she graduated in 2011. In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound bus accident that later informed her art practice.
Her work deals with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. Ulman is particularly interested in middlebrow aesthetics. Through a diverse mix of painting, sculpture, installations, smart phone apps, actions, and lectures, Amalia Ulman explores the links between consumerism and identity, class, gender, and taste. “Commodities and their arrangement define humans,” she once explained. “Staring at objects, trends, and aesthetics, I get to understand contemporary lifestyles more than by talking to people…” She is especially interested in what she calls a “bland” or “middlebrow” aesthetic, characterized by greeting cards, domestic items and ornamentation, plastic surgery, clothing, and other products that both shape notions and serve as the trappings of luxury, beauty, and the ideal lifestyle. In a sweeping installation titled Babyfootprints Crowsfeet (2014), for example, Ulman wryly commented on the idealization of motherhood and femininity, fatherhood and masculinity, and parent-child relationships by mashing up kitschy products and sentiments with darker texts and images about sex, anxiety, and inequality.
KYLE DUNN
Galerie Maria Bernheim (Zurich) at Art Basel Miami Beach
Born in Livonia in 1990, lives and works in Queens, New York
Kyle Dunn’s work complicates this stance by embracing his subjects’ eroticism while interjecting romance, doubt, humor, solitude or melancholy. In crafting quizzical narrative compositions for his subjects, Dunn slows down the viewing of the erotic body, which is often consumed quickly and thoughtlessly. Dunn seeks to humanize the erotic while celebrating the sensual pleasure of the material world. The male figures in Dunn’s work, either lounging languidly or painfully contorted, often seem at odds with their surroundings. The setting of his relief paintings take cues from gay pulp illustration, interior design, and fashion photography, and framing devices from film to create lush environments that are rife with sexual tension. While inspired by 2-dimensional media, Dunn’s works are carved bas-relief sculpture which is then painted, giving tactility to his subjects and further exaggerating their anatomy with actual physical depth.
Kyle Dunn (b. 1990) lives and works in Queens, NY. He grew up in Michigan and received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He has had two solo exhibitions in New York at Sardine (2017) and Thierry Goldberg Gallery (2018) and has been included in group exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Galerie Maria Bernheim, Zurich; Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA; Nationale, Portland, OR; Part 2 Gallery; Oakland, CA; and Ground Floor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, among others.
COADY BROWN
1969 Gallery (New York) at UNTITLED, ART
Born in 1990 in Baltimore, lives and works in Baltimore.
Groups, couples, and solitary figures examine self-presentation in both private and public life. The scenes are nocturnal: fractured and reimagined by neon light. Figures become reflections of their environments, mirroring these heightened, surreal, frenetic, sexy, and sorrowful states. The figures in my work are based on my intimate friendships and relationships, however, they are not portraits. Instead, bodies are more dream-like, mutable, and distorted, allowing me to examine the figure more fluidly.
The boundaries between intimacy and control are pushed as figures fall into moments of seduction, dependence, or hesitation. Bodies act as unwitting barometers, shaped by the company they keep. In their contrasting flatness and opticality, forms resist a rigidity of perception and consumption. There is no nudity: bodies are specifically dressed. Proportions are exaggerated, and patterns are hand-painted in contrasting, high-chroma colors. Fashion acts as a fissure; a split that can expose and explore the illogical, confused, animated, gendered, and divided self. Coady Brown received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2012, and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Brown was a 2018-2019 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and in 2017, completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Brown had her first solo exhibition at 1969 Gallery (Super Natural) in 2019, and has also shown work in various group exhibitions at Koenig & Clinton, Mulherin Gallery, Abrons Art Center, and Tomorrow Gallery, all in New York, NY, as well as NAM Projects in Milan, Italy, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, MA, among others. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and New American Painting.
PHILIP MUELLER
Carbon 12 (Dubai) at NADA
Born in 1988 in Vienna (Austria) lives and works in Vienna.
With an education from the University of Applied Arts (Vienna), emerging artist Philip Mueller’s cacophonous large scale paintings fill the space with intense colour and form manipulation reveal narratives that perplex, entertain and entice with references too near to familiarity to ignore in his exhibitions within Austria, the UAE and several international art fairs. Mueller is one of the founding members behind “Wiener Achse” an association for Transnational and Intergenerational exchange of the Arts. With overflowing energy and impressive technique, Philip Mueller’s paintings are a wild ride: with subjects from pop culture icons to belles-de-nuits, Icelandic shamans, and the Adams Family, Mueller creates a symbolist universe where everything, anything, could and will happen. Dionysus meets Jesus, cannibal monkeys on LSD, the content is as radical as the style: painted with finger on linoleum floor, poured all-over-style, masterly brush technique combined with excessive speed. The canvas becomes a battlefield of chance and composition, assemblage and association. Like alchemy, Mueller’s paintings can be seen as ecstatic rituals, a dialogue with the spirits, and cathartic acts that unleash primary forces. He has had solo exhibitions at Carbon 12 in Dubai, Aram Haus in Vienna, and Galerie Austria in Vienna, among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as Dessous in Vienna, Künstlerhaus in Vienna, Q Contemporary in Beirut.
FIN SIMONETTI
Clima (Milan) at NADA
Born in Vancouver in 1985, lives and works in New York
Fin Simonetti is a Canadian artist and musician based in New York.
She taught herself to carve stone after the death of her father in early 2017—confronting her grief through creation of form. While addressing the loss of a male figure, she also turns her gaze towards a broader examination of the culture and performance of masculinity, and its inherently conjoined terror of fragility and violence.
Solo exhibitions include LIFEMORTS at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, 2017; Pastoral Emergency at SIGNAL, Brooklyn, 2018; and IS PATH WARM? at Good Weather, Arkansas. Additional exhibitions include Greenpoint Terminal, New York; and her series 4th.WAV at MoMA PS1, New York. Recent projects include a book with Rita Ackermann published by Innen/Nieves, and her debut album ICE PIX on Hausu Mountain, 2017.
