8 Works to Collect at ArtBO
One of Latin America’s leading contemporary art fairs, ArtBO welcomes 74 galleries from 28 cities around the world for its twelfth edition, which opens this Thursday in Bogotá, Colombia’s sprawling capital city. Showcasing both established and emerging talent, the fair has forged its way onto the international art scene since its 2004 launch. Below, we highlight eight artworks to collect, with a particular focus on new and under-recognized names, including rising Mexican artist Pia Camil and powerhouse Brazilian sculptor Anna Maria Maiolino.
Fabrizio Arrieta, Sisi, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Diablo Rosso, PROYECTOS, Booth B15
In the past several years, on-the-rise Costa Rican artist Arrieta’s kaleidoscopic paintings have caught the attention of South American markets. This canvas, from the thirtysomething artist’s new body of work, resembles a collage at first glance, but is in fact made solely from acrylic paint. This approach is typical of Arrieta, who often bases his compositions on digital collages he creates using fashion magazine cutouts and found imagery. The resulting paintings blend representation and abstraction to explore the figure and contemporary ideals of beauty.
Alejandro Ospina, Untitled, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Johannes Vogt Gallery, Main, Booth C4
Colombian, London-based artist Ospina painted portraits of millennial youth based off social media profiles before embarking on his ongoing “Algorithm” series, which explores the architecture of the web itself. Using a mix of broad, translucent strokes of color and geometric mark-making, Ospina fuses the history of painting with the sensory overload of the internet. “I try to work in ways that reflect continuous changes in attention at a rate and method that would have seemed absurd before the arrival of the internet, simulating what happens in our minds when we jump from image to image accumulating and merging layers of visual information,” he has explained.
Morgan Mandalay, The Expulsion, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Yautepec, PROYECTOS, Booth B19
Clowns, skeletons, birds of paradise, and painters drift through the dreamlike landscapes of Mandalay’s paintings. A California artist who is currently completing his MFA at UC San Diego, he is interested in how images transform across contemporary media: from object to .jpeg and “into an infinite life through meme, submeme, antimeme, nonmeme, hypermeme etc.,” as he writes. This surreal scene, which shows a figure entering into a floral Shangri-la littered with cigarette butts, is an alternative take on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from The Garden of Eden.
Elizabeth Jobim, Parade V, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Galeria Raquel Arnaud, Main, Booth C18
Rio de Janeiro-based artist Jobim is often associated with the “Generation 80” painters, who sparked a renewed interest in painting in Brazil in the 1980s. Her hard-edged, minimalist paintings explore the “moment of observing things...not only how we look at it, but also how we build our vision geometrically, organizing our perception,” as she’s explained. While her layered, sculptural canvases play with our perception of depth, here she toys with fragmentation, presenting an assemblage of small, painted surfaces as an imagined whole.
Anna Maria Maiolino, In-Out (Antropofagia) (In-Out (Anthropophagy), from the series Fotopoemação (Photopoemaction), 1973–2008
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Galeria Luisa Strina, Main, Booth C15
Italian-Brazilian artist Maiolino, whose renowned career now spans five decades, began her “Photopoemaction” series in 1973, at the height of military repression in Brazil. Here, she uses the history of ritual cannibalization as metaphor in her snapshots of mouths intended to “eat the repressive organs of the dictatorship, the enemies of freedom,” as she’s explained. Maiolino has also acknowledged other meanings in these photographs, including the struggle for speech, the discovery of language, and an effort to communicate between the sexes.
Cristiano Lenhardt, Nova Bandeira #4, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Main, Booth C10
Brazilian artist Lenhardt, who was a 2015 PIPA prize finalist, explores semiotics and perception across his works, which include geometric drawings, sculptures inspired by circus tents and parade flags, and surrealistic performances. For this standout piece, from his recent “New Flag” series, he’s affixed four prints resembling auras onto a pole. Together, the strand of drawings feels like a banner for New Age mindfulness.
Marc Horowitz, feelings that cannot be given form are never forgotten, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
MAMA, Main, Booth A44
L.A.-based Horowitz’s diverse body of work ranges from photography, film, and internet-based work to performance and social practice. What’s more, after painting in secret for 17 years, he recently debuted new canvases at a solo show at New York’s Johannes Vogt Gallery in May. This recent painting is part and parcel of his big reveal and shows his ongoing interest in exploring classical aesthetics, evidenced by the Grecian column, and art history’s humorous side, embodied in the cartoonish flattening of his figures.
Pia Camil, Bust Mask Jade, 2016
ON VIEW AT ARTBO:
Instituto de Visión, Main, Booth B21
On-the-rise Mexico City-based artist Camil, whose work was featured in solo exhibitions this year at the New Museum and Blum & Poe in New York, creates sculptural and textile-based works inspired by the urban landscape of her home city as well as objects from everyday life. At ArtBO, Bogotá gallery Instituto de Visión shows her new ceramic, paint-splattered “bust masks.” Resembling both ceremonial masks and jewelry display stands, the works draw inspiration from Carl Jung’s notion of the persona: the mask one wears in society.
