Art Basel Miami Beach

Stephen Friedman Gallery returns to Art Basel Miami Beach with a multigenerational group presentation that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art-making through innovative processes and unconventional materials. Artists featured include Tonico Lemos Auad, Leilah Babirye, Teresa Baker, Jonathan Baldock, Sarah Ball, Kenturah Davis, Andreas Eriksson, Denzil Forrester, Sky Glabush, Pam Glick, Wayne Gonzales, Holly Hendry, Kathia St. Hilaire, Jim Hodges, Ged Quinn, Deborah Roberts, Anne Rothenstein, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Kehinde Wiley, Clare Woods, and Luiz Zerbini.

This year’s presentation underscores the gallery’s commitment to showcasing artists who engage critically with themes of history, memory, and cultural narrative, challenging traditional conceptions of artistic form and content.

Central to the gallery’s presentation is a new painting by Deborah Roberts, whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explore themes of race, identity and gender politics. The work on view at the fair features three young Black children on the verge of adulthood. Combining a range of different facial features, skin tones, hairstyles and clothes, Roberts collages photography and painting, debunking in the process societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes in the age of social media. 

Also on view at the fair is a historical work by Denzil Forrester, presented in conjunction with his two-venue exhibition in New York, curated by Sheena Wagstaff at Stephen Friedman Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery. This marks Forrester’s first New York show since his 2016 debut at White Columns. Additionally, his work is featured in The Street, a group exhibition curated by artist Peter Doig at Gagosian, New York. Nearby, Dub (1985), one of Forrester’s seminal works, is on display as part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Also debuting at the fair is Secret Love (2024) a large-scale painting by Luiz Zerbini, featuring geometric forms juxtaposed with lush, tropical flora. A cacophony of colour, the works convey the immersive and seductive quality of Brazil’s natural environment. These forms merge with areas of abstract mark-making, demonstrating how the artist appropriates patterns found in nature and incorporates them into his own vernacular. Coinciding with the fair, Zerbini is featured in Afinidades III - Cochicho, the third edition of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum’s (MON) “Affinities” exhibition series.

Other highlights include: new works by Holly Hendry, whose solo exhibition Watermarks was recently on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA; a new multimedia work by Kathia St. Hilaire, whose solo exhibition is currently on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and is featured in Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 at El Museo del Barrio, New York; a new painting by Teresa Baker, whose work is included in Prospect New Orleans; and a hand-painted bronze sculpture by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, whose work was recently showcased at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and in Nigeria Imaginary, the official Nigerian Pavilion.

As part of the Kabinett sector, the gallery will present a selection of new works by Wayne Gonzales, whose painstakingly rendered paintings employ a rigorous formal structure to explore the relationship between photography and communal memory. Inspired by the documentation of major events from the twentieth century, Gonzales’ meticulously crosshatched paintings examine the American cultural landscape through the visual language of photography.