7 Under 40: Emerging Artists to Watch at NADA Miami Beach
Every year, NADA Miami Beach establishes the artists whose works will resonate in the art world during the year ahead. In choosing seven names, I was drawn to many that relate to a net-art aesthetic—but could have as easily made a list of all artists from the DIS generation (Jon Rafman, Rachel Lord, and Joel Holmberg, amongst the artists propagated by cult-followed DIS magazine, who blend culture and digital tropes). This iteration of the fair brings less focus on abstract painting and more on the digitally warped, hyper-consumerist zeitgeist of new media. Here is the list of names to watch for at this year’s fair:
Petra Cortright at Foxy Production
L.A.-based Cortright tops the list of artists I am currently most excited about. While her recent collaboration with fashion designer Stella McCartney and wedding to fellow artist Marc Horowitz have been a treat to follow on Instagram, her practice continues to evolve with conceptual spontaneity and freshness. She is a new addition to the Foxy Production Gallery roster in New York, which will be highlighting her webcam videos and digital paintings at NADA.
Peter Sutherland at Kinman
Sutherland is a photographer, documentary filmmaker, curator, and painter who captures vistas ranging from natural splendor to grimy, urban cool. Illustrating skateboarders and Southwest expanses, his tumblr is a pictorial manifesto of a transient generation, which breaks the rules of Gen X and rewrites those of Gen Y. He has been included in group shows at White Cube and Rodolphe Janssen and was the first Still House Group artist in residence. His picturesque photographs are printed on vinyl and adhered to plywood panels, creating a dual effect of material and image.
Sara Cwynar at Cooper Cole and Foxy Production
Showing at two booths at NADA this December, just after having started her MFA at Yale this fall, Cwynar is having a prolific season. She works with found images to repurpose them and probe the space between analog and digital. In the “Woman” series that will be on view at Cooper Cole, she rescans dated adult magazine photos, manipulating the scanner’s output to create an effect that simultaneously resembles smeared Richter-esque paint and computer monitor glitches.
Chris Succo at The Journal
Succo’s practice stands out for its lyrical quality and tension between control and exploration of the canvas, evoking the monochrome paintings of Christopher Wool. Last month, he had a show at Berlin’s DUVE Gallery and will have solo exhibitions at Almine Rech, Brussels, in March; The Journal Gallery, New York, in May; and Rod Barton, London, in the fall of 2015. At NADA, he will present new pieces at The Journal, completed while he was living in New York this fall. The nearly eight-by-eleven-foot paintings are the largest scale he’s ever worked on.
Brad Troemel at Zach Feuer and Tomorrow
A cofounder of The Jogging artist collective, Troemel will show at both Zach Feuer and Tomorrow Gallery. His works are physical manifestation of thought experiments, often connected to political causes, which impose a set of rules that the artist plays out. The “At Least I’ve Got a Job” paintings are based on “an archive of protest images” given to the artist by the Earth Liberation Front, as Troemel explains. The works use no paint and are colored solely by organic kale, carrot, and beet juice from Whole Foods.
Despina Stokou at Derek Eller
This diptych is an example of Stokou’s works that draw on Cy Twombly’s gestures—explorations of symbiotics and language and a process of visualizing often banal streams of information. Its text is pulled from a series of blog posts that Stokou wrote about “realistic, idealistic, and maybe a bit illegal schemes to subvert and slowly overturn the art world as we know it.” The name Oscar Murillo pops in there, as does the instruction to “Paint less than David Ostrowski,”a lined pulled from her blog.
Nick Doyle at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS
A former studio assistant for Tom Sachs, Doyle recently had his first solo show at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, which New Yorkmagazinedescribed as a “cheekily assured debut” of “SoCal adolescence fantasia.” Exhibiting a series of new works made while he was at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency this summer, he explores elaborate constructions, which playfully veer to dada tropes.
