December 3, 2014
Afros, Abstraction, and Photographic Experimentation at Untitled
By Scott Indrisek
MIAMI BEACH — Untitled pitches its tent on the South Beach sand from December 3 through 7, bringing a roster of galleries that, while admittedly a bit heavy on New York representation, also includes venues from Helsinki, Mexico City, Bogota, and beyond. Despite lacking the flash and big-dollar bluster of Art Basel Miami Beach — one of Untitled’s advertising partners during Tuesday morning’s preview hours was Sabra hummus, which is adorable — sales seemed to be fairly brisk following the opening night vernissage on December 2. (Johannes Vogt Gallery, for instance, sold out a solo booth of playfully refined oilstick-on-satin paintings by Larissa Lockshin.)
The expanded field of photography is especially prevalent at this year’s fair. That includes one of the standout booths: Kansas’s solo presentation of sculptural-photographic works by Ethan Greenbaum capturing the common markings and surfaces of the urban environment. (They’re direct-to-substrate prints on vacuum-formed PETG, if you want to get technical about it.) Over at the booth of Chicago’s Threewalls, Windy City artist (and 2014 Whitney Biennial participant) Carol Jackson has a series of sculptures that incorporate degraded surveillance images in assemblages of paper mache and epoxy. They jut out from the wall like lumpy, bodily appendages, their surfaces ornately inscribed, using leatherworking tools, with imagery drawn from 19th-century sheet music, among other sources. Dittrich & Schlechtriem of Berlin have also brought slightly skewed photography to the fair, from Asger Carlsen’s grotesque, anatomical Photoshop monstrosities to Julian Charriere’s “Future Fossil Spaces,” 2014, an arrangement of abstract photos whose framing and hanging is as important as its content.