Regen Projects is pleased to participate in OVR: Miami Beach with a curated selection of recent works by gallery artists. This digital showcase reflects the gallery’s in-person presentation for the 2021 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, which runs concurrent with the online fair.

Works by Kevin Beasley, Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, and Liz Larner are paradigmatic examples of how highly specialized and meticulous production techniques can bring spectacular works in sculpture to fruition. Employing skills honed over years of experience working with materials such as resin, latex, copper, stainless steel, and ceramic, these artists have developed sculptural languages that are uniquely their own.

Photographs by Catherine Opie and Wolfgang Tillmans take two classic genres—landscape and still life—and adapt them to the contemporary moment to create works that are at once expansive and intimate. Catherine Opie takes an ethnographic approach to American culture with her landscape photography, while Tillmans captures moments of subtle intimacy.

Alex Hubbard, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Marilyn Minter bring nuance and complexity to their unique and integrative approaches to painting, employing unconventional techniques and a variety of media to innovate and push what can be depicted and expressed through the medium.

Regen Projects will have works available by Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Kevin Beasley, Walead Beshty, John Bock, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Theaster Gates, Rachel Harrison, Alex Hubbard, Elliott Hundley, Sergej Jensen, Anish Kapoor, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Silke Otto-Knapp, Raymond Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Lari Pittman, Daniel Richter, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, James Welling, and Sue Williams at booth E10 at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021.

Capturing the communities, landscapes, cultures, and moments that define our present history, Catherine Opie has emerged as the quintessential American photographer. From ice fishermen, high-school football players, and the leather community to protests and presidential inaugurations, Opie is uniquely capable of presenting and documenting the specificities and eccentricities of American culture. Of her “Surfers” series, curator and writer Douglas Fogle writes: 

“Opie photographed Southern Californian surfers waiting for a swell. In conditions ranging from hazy to completely foggy, Opie’s camera reveals a floating, mobile, and constantly interchangeable crowd of individuals for whom the ocean is a place of communion but also community. This is a place of fluidity both physically and socially, of temporary and lifelong alliances and friendships on an ever-shifting surface.”

Pulling from and expanding on the history of automatic drawing, Elliott Hundley builds up the surfaces of his works with a technique that moves between gradual accumulation and spontaneous mark making. This large-scale 2013 oil painting on linen is composed from a chaotic excess of marks set upon a landscape-like horizon. The marks jump and skip across the canvas, seemingly suspended in animation. While such willfully freeform lines and impulsive swaths and smears recall forebears like Cy Twombly and Willem de Kooning, Hundley possesses a signature ability to weave a diversity of materials and influences into intricate compositions, crafting new meaning from both subtle and expressive gestures that are unmistakably his own.

Elliott Hundley’s monumental mural Balcony, 2021, is currently on view at the Newcombe Art Gallery in New Orleans as part of Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow.

Working across photography, sculpture, multichannel video, and immersive installation, Doug Aitken illuminates the effects of our media-saturated culture. Using the landscape as both subject and medium, he homes in on themes of industrial, urban, and environmental decline. Aitken often employs seemingly straightforward yet provocative words and symbols to invoke themes relating to existentialism, the American landscape, and contemporary life. Often he crafts these text and symbol-based sculptures with dazzling mirrored surfaces, allowing viewers to perceive themselves as if through a kaleidoscope—refracted as scattered light across the room.

Star (broken), 2021, takes the form of a mirrored, five-pointed star, calling to mind a series of associations: a naval symbol, the American Flag, movie stars, or a sign of merit. Each of the star’s points are counterchanged like a compass rose, only instead of alternating between dark and light, its reflective surface is by turns shattered and pristine—a formal juxtaposition that implicitly acknowledges the positive and negative associations such a seemingly innocuous symbol might inspire.

Jack Pierson’s multi-disciplinary artistic practice utilizes the visual languages of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture to examine themes of memory, desire, longing, absence, loss, and despair. Working with narratives that are both familiar and removed, Pierson constructs fiction to explore memory. 

Like many of Pierson’s word-based sculptures, Genius Madman Animal God, 2020, borrows from the world of cinema and the annals of queer history. The string of adjectives that compose the work appeared on a poster for the 1980 biopic Nijinsky, which depicted the dancer as a man driven to madness resulting from repressed homosexuality.  

Jack Pierson is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Ettore Fico in Turin, Italy. His recent career-spanning retrospective Less and more was presented at Regen Projects earlier this fall. Pierson and Catherine Opie will curate a selection of works from the collection of John Waters at the Baltimore Museum of Art, opening in the fall of 2022. 

Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman has developed a singular visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most important painters of his generation. His intricately constructed and multi-layered works draw on the history of painting with an emphasis on decoration and the applied arts. The open-ended narratives and opulent imagery of these paintings reflect the rich heterogeneity of our diverse and increasingly global society, the artist’s Colombian-American heritage, and the distorting effects of hyper-capitalism on everyday life.

Portrait of a Textile (Glazed Chintz), 2018, is part of a larger series by Pittman that adopts the look of repeating textile patterns, snapping the artist’s signature maximalism into tessellated configurations. Each painting is named after a particular type of textile and is composed of a dominant pattern which it conceives as a kind of portrait of an imaginary sitter. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel writes of the work: 

“We usually assume that portraits are for people and that textiles are decorative, a matter of pattern and pleasantness as well as background enhancement. Pittman scrambles such ‘either/or’ exclusivity by painting portraits of each. Stars and supporting casts switch positions. Power shifts from artist to viewer, from making to looking, from story to interpretation.”

Lari Pittman will present a mid-career retrospective at the Museo Jumex, Mexico City, opening in November 2022.

Silke Otto-Knapp employs her signature monochromatic watercolor painting technique to create evocative tableaux reminiscent of a stage where dancers’ bodies collapse into one another. In an interview with curator Solveig Øvstebø she described her technique as follows:

“By working with accumulation and removal of pigment at the same time, I try to keep figure and ground in an active relationship to each other. I start with a primed white surface and paint the motif using black watercolor. The painting process involves a repetitive adding of pigment and its subsequent removal by spraying a fine film of water onto the painted surface. Every positive mark is made with a view to what it’s going to look like when I remove it….I have always found it productive to work with restrictions and to concentrate on a few elements only.” (Silke Otto-Knapp: In the Waiting Room, The Renaissance Society, 2021) 

Works by Silke Otto-Knapp are currently on view in the 34th Sao Paulo Bienal. 

Recalling the impromptu building techniques common in Mexico, Abraham Cruzvillegas’s poetic arrangements of found materials combine vernacular architecture, bold colors, and unconventional, sometimes even perishable, materials. The artist’s frequent use of green and pink are a nod to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and the colors of the Mangueira samba school, where Oiticica developed his famous parangolés, objects that act at once as costume, sculpture, and performance component. 

Autokonßtrukschön #11, 2018, was constructed on-site at the Kunsthaus Zürich as part of the artist’s 2018 exhibition. In a 2018 interview with the museum’s curator Mirjam Varadinis, Cruzvillegas described the conceptual framework for this exhibition: 

“According to the laws of physics, matter and energy are in permanent transformation. Nothing dies, nothing is fixed in a permanent state; like water, we are in a constant, never-ending flow. I like the Duchampian motto of making definitively unfinished works, and not necessarily an artwork. This is the real knot of my work with identity: transformation, change, contradiction, and instability, both physical and conceptual.” (Autorreconstrucción: Social Tissue, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, 2018)

Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographs put the tender, exquisite, everyday, transient, and fortuitous into dialogue as he engages with the material and conceptual possibilities of the medium. His wide-ranging subjects and genres collectively showcase the artist’s unique perspective and his ability to use the many languages of photography to enunciate his trajectory through the world. Tillmans distills our fragmented, image-saturated moment into a subjective experience—capturing the political, personal, and aesthetic at once. 

Tillmans has long engaged with still life as a genre, often capturing chance arrangements of objects tenderly placed upon a table or windowsill. His interest in the residual fragments of everyday life speaks to not only the fleeting moments of intimacy that can be captured and preserved, but also to the ways these objects are traces of his passage through the world. 

Wolfgang Tillmans will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York beginning September 2022. His exhibition Concrete Column is currently open at Regen Projects through December 23, 2021. 

In her “Spiritual Family” series of photographs, Gillian Wearing adopts the appearance of artists with whom she feels a degree of correspondence or admiration, Claude Cahun, Meret Oppenheim, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Georgia O’Keeffe among them. In this portrait she appears as Post-Minimal sculptor Eva Hesse. Peering out from behind a rope net—recalling the organic sculptural forms Hesse became known for in the late 1960s—Wearing adopts the role of both author and sitter. Uniquely positioned to critique the presumption of authorship, Wearing’s jarringly modern portrait calls attention to the constructed nature of both representation and history.

Gillian Wearing is currently the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, which runs until April 2022. 

Marilyn Minter’s paintings and photographs draw inspiration from—while also challenging—the imagery of Hollywood, fashion, pornography, and art historical tropes. Throughout her career, Minter has appropriated the aesthetic of commercial advertising, deploying it to expose misogynist cultural mores, explore female sexuality, and question the relationship between beauty and constructed image. 

Minter’s monumental Public Eye, 2013, pushes photorealist painting to its limits as it transforms its source material into a billboard-like composition that draws viewers through a complex experience of surface and depth. Seen through a hazy screen of broken glass, a heavily made-up eye peers out at the viewer, further obscured by a layer of graffiti scrawled across the surface. The interplay between these two modes of painting—one hyper detailed and another appearing flat and impulsive—raises questions about the ways that painting can replicate human vision and its ability to represent the body.