Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to return to Art Basel Miami Beach this year with works by established gallery artists and newer additions to the programme, as well as a curated selection of masterworks. Alongside the work of April Bey, Winston Branch, Angela Bulloch, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Dexter Dalwood, Rachel Howard, Alex Hubbard, Valentina Liernur, Josephine Meckseper, Mai-Thu Perret, Georg Karl Pfahler, Josephine Pryde, Jim Shaw, Erin Shirreff, Chibuike Uzoma, Clare Woods and Toby Ziegler, the booth will feature paintings courtesy of the estates of Olivier Debre and Paul Georges, and masterworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ellsworth Kelly.
Debuting two new works from his ongoing duct tape paintings series, Serge Attukwei Clottey continues to explore the relationship between his Ghanaian identity and material culture. These paintings, for which the artist combines varied found materials, seek to consider the West African nation’s vernacular economic systems of trade and reuse. Chibuike Uzoma, whose inaugural exhibition with the gallery will take place in January 2023, will also present new work. Continuing his KINDER PAINTINGS series initiated in 2019, the works on view aim to avoid linear narratives, with their suggestive titles and disparate compositions open to the viewer’s interpretation. By means of explaining the ambiguous nature of these works, Uzoma shares a proverb circulated by elders: ‘wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.’
Additional highlights include works courtesy of the estates of Olivier Debre and Paul Georges, both newly represented by the gallery. A seminal figure within European lyrical abstraction, Olivier Debre came to describe his work as ‘fervent abstraction’; his vivid colour fields painted to express emotions inspired by natural phenomena and the outside world. Painting outdoors to fully immerse himself in the landscape, over the course of six decades Debre worked to dissolve divisions between one’s multi-sensory experience of the natural world and its expression on canvas. In his later years, New York School painter Paul Georges was similarly concerned with the representation of nature. The gallery’s booth will feature a landscape painting, Point Conception from the 1980s, a period during which Georges divided his time between downtown Manhattan and a farmhouse in Normandy. Whilst the New York paintings are more political in nature, the Normandy works see Georges exploit his advanced knowledge of colour and abstraction to the fullest in refined studies of the Northern French landscape.
The presentation also features paintings by Winston Branch and Josephine Meckseper, who have concurrent exhibitions at the gallery’s London and Hong Kong spaces, alongside late works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and renowned American minimalist Ellsworth Kelly. Created months before his death in 2015, Kelly’s White Form on Black reflects his decades-long dedication to form, composition and seriality. By contrast, Basquiat’s later works on paper attest to the wide range of subject matter and modes of expression explored by the artist over the course of his short but prolific career.
