Art Basel’s Unlimited has long been a favourite at the fair’s Swiss edition and organisers are hoping to replicate some of that magic here in Miami with the launch of Meridians, a new section devoted to performance and large-scale works. We caught up with the project’s curator Magalí Arriola, the director of Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo and the curator of Mexico’s presentation at the latest Venice Biennale, who pointed out a few highlights on our whistle-stop tour.
Alexis Smith, Fool’s Gold (1982), Garth Greenan Gallery: Vultures ominously circle overhead as a weary gold miner, pickaxe slung over his shoulder, leads a bikini-clad woman on a donkey through a desert landscape in this large, mixed-media mural by Alexis Smith. The scene is framed by the words: “Sometimes men went crazy from the heat.” “Much of her work has to do with revisiting pulp fiction,” Arriola says of the US artist, who last exhibited this piece nearly 30 years ago at her retrospective in 1991 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. “She often looks at how pulp fiction manipulates the clichés of what a woman should be.”
– Emily Sharpe
theartnewspaper.com