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• Issue #176
• Article

Art Miami, Miami's longest running contemporary art fair, will once again open its doors from December 1-5. As the anchor art fair to the city of Miami, the fair will return with a compelling array of modern and contemporary artwork from over 100 international galleries and prominent art institutions. Art Miami will be held in a state-of-the-art 100,000 sq. ft. pavilion in Midtown Miami's burgeoning Wynwood Arts District. The fair is adding a third tented area, increasing its overall size by nearly a third this year. Photography will be a major component of Art Miami, with many top photography and art dealers displaying key photo-based work at the exhibition. As I said in the last newsletter, it would not surprise me to see well over a quarter of the work on the walls be photographs or photo-based art.

Now in its 21st year, Art Miami will kick off Art Week with its opening night on Tuesday, November 30th. Art Miami's highly anticipated Opening Night VIP Preview will benefit the Lotus House Women's Shelter, a quiet enclave in downtown Miami that offers a sanctuary for homeless women and infants in need. The exclusive evening is the first opportunity for VIP collectors to acquire some of the finest pieces of modern and contemporary art from the 20th and 21st centuries while also raising money for an important cause. Last year, Art Miami's Opening Night Preview attracted over 6,500 international collectors, philanthropists, museum professionals, curators and journalists. Last year over 35,000 attendees made Art Miami the best attended art fair in Miami itself.

With over 100 prestigious international galleries participating, Art Miami is a "can't miss" event for serious collectors, museum professionals, curators and art enthusiasts. For more information visit: http://www.art-miami.com .

Some of the other familiar photography-oriented galleries and dealers who will exhibiting here include: Aperture Foundation, Atlas Gallery, China Square, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Flowers Gallery, Michael Goedhuis, Hackelbury Fine Art, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Jackson Fine Art, Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Laurence Miller Gallery, Modernbook Gallery, Modernism Inc., Lisa Sette Gallery, Barry Singer Gallery, Joel Soroka Gallery, and Bernice Steinbaum Gallery--just to mention a few at this fair. Of course, there are dozens more photography-oriented dealers and photography works scattered around the eight other shows here in Miami this week, making it the most important destination for top work any where in the world.

My own company, Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, will be exhibiting at Art Miami from Dec. 1-5 at Midtown Blvd (NE 1st Avenue) between NE 32nd & NE 31st Sts., Miami Midtown Arts District. We will be in Pavilion C all the way to the right as you come into the entrance and then up the last aisle until you come to our booth, C-28, one of the largest booths in the fair.

If you are coming to the fair and would like a complimentary pass, please email us at info@contemporaryworks.net. To see a bit of a preview of a few of the works that we will be bringing, go to: http://www.art-miami.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=10&tabindex=9&dealerid=16829&curidx=18&back=name .

Some of the 20th- and 21st-century artists whose vintage and contemporary masterworks that we will have in inventory include: Edward Steichen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Alec Soth, André Kertész, Édouard Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Edward Weston, Josef Sudek, Vik Muniz, Ilse Bing, Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Francois Kollar, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Dorothea Lange, Lee Friedlander, Robert Doisneau, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Morgan, Clarence John Laughlin, Raoul Ubac, Brett Weston, Eugene Atget, Arthur Siegel, Max Waldman, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Horst, Emmanuel Sougez, Zhang Huan, Abelardo Morell, Robert Polidori, Nobuyoshi Araki, Mitch Dobrowner, Arthur Tress, Luis González Palma and Ralph Meatyard.

We will also feature the work of artist Lisa Holden at our booth. Ms. Holden will be in attendance at Art Miami, and we will be exhibiting many of her works, including part of her new "Constructed Landscapes" series, which you can see here: http://www.iphotocentral.com/showcase/showcase_view.php/243/1/0 , including a short essay on the work.

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works will also proudly display one of the most important works of art at this fair or even during this week of fairs: Frank Auerbach's "Building Site near St. Paul's, Winter".

St .Paul's Building Site, Winter was included in Auerbach's first solo show, which took place at Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery in early 1956. Although this was the artist's first one-person show, it attracted extensive attention from London's leading critics, including David Sylvester who responded to paintings such as St. Paul's Building Site, Winter by asserting Auerbach's place in 20th-century British art, heralding 'the most impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon's in 1949.'

In his book on Auerbach, Robert Hughes writes of the artist's depiction of building sites and about the present painting: "In the 1950s he mainly painted holes. Sites in the center of London, bombed flat, were then being dug out and rebuilt. The excavations, chasms of mud and shored-up earth, overhung by cranes and crossed by scaffolding and catwalks, fascinated him--a triangulated structure, a diagram that reminded him of the vectoring of forms he had learned about from Bomberg and which were becoming the stylistic signature of his work, laid on the primal clay of the city. It was intensely picturesque (new ruins, still reeking of catastrophe) and its sense of incoherence slowly labouring to give birth to structural shape matched the processes in which, Auerbach by now realized, his own work was grounded."

Auerbach, himself, writing about "St Paul's Building Site, Winter", recalled making drawings "in the wasteland of bombsites and building sites which surrounded Wren's masterpiece in the early fifties." However, this is the only painting that depicts the St Paul's building site.

The Courtauld Gallery at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Oxford University, used this painting in its Oct. 2009-January 2010 retrospective show, "Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-1962" (also published in a catalogue of the same title). As Dr. Barnaby Wright, the curator for the project, wrote in his letter to request the use of this painting: "St. Paul's was one of the most famous building sites in London and the sight of the cathedral standing steadfast during the Blitz was one of the iconic images of the period. In this important painting, Auerbach also conveys a sense of St. Paul's resilience with the cathedral just visible through the apparent chaos of the building site in the foreground. The painting's thickly rendered surface exemplifies Auerbach's ambition and struggle to express the essence of his subject through the material character of the paint itself."