Alejandro Vigilante, installation view, image courtesy of Avant Gallery, Miami Beach.
As the commercial and academic faces of the Miami art market become increasingly diversified, new layers of contemporary art continue to surface seemingly as we approach Art Basel Miami Beach. The frenzy intensifies this time of year, but increased speed of production has, thankfully, not correlated to a decrease in taste or quality (on the whole). The presence of Pop Art, in either secondary or primary formats, is starting to show year-round in Miami; one such example is Avant Gallery, celebrating its pop-up location across from the W South Beach.
Now in its fourth year, the gallery unashamedly melds commercial Pop with innovative applied design. This is not just an interior design showroom with a smattering of decorator-friendly canvases or half-assed abstract sculptures. Fielding clever works from artists and artisans primarily based in the U.S. and Europe, director Dmitry Prut brings a very recognizable Miami flair to his new space, but tempers it with a discerning eye for emerging talent versus another dime-a-dozen secondary outlets. “I think I have a sense for what works, for what’s hot and new and hopefully, half the time I’m right,” Prut says. “But more importantly, it’s about adding a new dimension to the market here in Miami. No one has duplicated this concept.” Indeed, the generous, shiny space a stone’s throw away from the Bass Museum of Art and a block adjacent to the Miami City Ballet reveals a healthy variety of media formats: embellished silkscreens, photography with a late-sixties, jet-set nostalgia. Even straight-up cartoons are among the offerings.
Notable selections include locally-based Alejandro Vigilante’s lighthearted tributes to iconic celebrities filtered through Google searches and email dialog boxes screened in crackly, worn typography on boldly colored surfaces, L.A.-based Alec Monopoly’s witty re-inventions of the famous white moustached man painted onto defunct stock reports thickly coated in high-gloss epoxy, and representing the design field was Chad Jensen’s wooden bench resembling a bumpy egg-crate mattress (recently shown with the American Pavilion at the Shanghai Art Fair this past September). The crowd of mostly gawkers and party-hoppers likely let out a chuckle or two in response to Vigilante and Monopoly specifically, but the South Beach riff-raff was laced with a thin stream of highly sophisticated, intellectually demanding viewers who asked conservation questions, demanded artist bios and CVs, and probed potential market values. But regardless of the guest list, if this pop-up Pop shop proved one thing, it was that this was another vital element in the development of a self-sustaining cultural environment.
The works on view at Avant Gallery’s new home appeared to be sincere creations of a new generation of Pop artists, generously borrowing historical traces, but adding the kind of luxurious sheen that Miami will always carry. Be it known, this is a good thing. A space that celebrates new Pop creations has outdone any equally-slicked secondary market locale here; Prut’s unusual, entertaining operation has struck an important chord in the crescendo of Miami’s contemporary art concerto.
Image courtesy of Avant Gallery, Miami Beach.
Chad Jensen, Tufted Bench (2009), MDF & Pickled rift/White Oak, 18 x 57 x 14 inches, image courtesy of the artist and Avant Gallery, Miami Beach.
Alec Monopoly, installation view, image courtesy of Avant Gallery, Miami Beach.
