GRACIELA HASPER

PROXIMITIES
Curator: Verónica Flom

Sep 25  |  Nov 28, 2018

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is pleased to present Proximities, the first exhibition of Argentine artist Graciela Hasper in Miami, on view from September 25 to November 25, 2018. The show will include a new body of paintings and watercolors works that demonstrate her continued research on abstraction and geometry, subjects on which she has been working since the nineties.  

For this exhibition, each of Graciela Hasper's works has its particular rules: over layered rectangles, curves, circles and squares establish their own system and become a platform for the celebration of color. So pure as such found in a children’s marker box, a palette of bright and shiny colors coexist harmonically within the same space. As curator Verónica Flom explains: “The paintings have the double quality of being both overpowering and subtle, like the wave of the sea that shapes the rock. The watercolors, on the other hand, are more intimate, and it is perhaps that intimacy that allows Hasper a greater degree of freedom. If in the paintings the contours seem perfect to us, almost digital, in the watercolors they become watery and even fragile.”

Graciela Hasper (b. 1966, Buenos Aires) was the subject of the survey exhibition Gramática del color, curated by Victoria Noorthoorn at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2013). Her most recent works have expanded to a larger scale, such as the site-specific pieces, Nudo de Autopista(2013), Notas de Luz(2016), both in Buenos Aires, and the mural for the Faena Forum, in Miami Beach (2016). She had solo shows at Sicardi Gallery, Houston; Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires; and Annina Nosei Gallery, New York. Her works have been featured in prominent group exhibitions at Maison Rouge, Paris; The Blanton Museum, Austin; and Americas Society, New York, among others. Hasper’s works are represented in several major collections including The Museum Fine Arts Houston; Fundación Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Museo de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, Spain; Jorge Pérez Collection; Alan Faena Collection; Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection; Deutsche Bank Collection; and César Gaviria Collection.

Verónica Flom received an M.A. in Museum Studies at New York University. She worked as Exhibitions and Public Programs Coordinator of Visual Arts at Americas Society, New York, and previously at the Art Department of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. She co-authored the publication David Wojnarowicz and Luis Frangella in Argentina(2017) with Ian Erickson-Kery.

On Monday, September 24 at 7 p.m., Faena Forum hosted a talk with artist Graciela Hasper, Zoe Luckov (Director of Exhibitions, Faena Art), Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna (Art Director, Related Group) and Verónica Flom (Curator, Dot Fiftyone Gallery).

ADAM SHOW

8 MALE ARTISTS

Feb 2  |  Mar 3, 2018

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is pleased to announce “ADAM”, an exhibition curated by Raquel Schwartz that explores questions and concepts through works by eight international male artists who reflect upon the nature of being, spirituality, and faith. Participating artists: Andrés Pereira, Douglas Rodrigo Rada, Fernando Carabajal, Iván Cáceres, Karsten Krejcarek, Oscar Abraham Pabón, Ricardo Rendón, and Roberto Valcárcel.  

What is a soul or a spirit? What happens after death? Is there life after death, and where is it? What does faith mean? Is there a God and where does He live? Do we reincarnate when we abandon this body? What are we made of? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the purpose of our lives? What are miracles? Perhaps the miracle consists in that we are finally able to be in control of our minds? Who are our neighbors in the universe? Where are they? How can we get in touch with them? Or is it possible that we are already in touch with them?

To know and to understand that we are interconnected and that our lives revolve around these mysteries is already an intrinsic part of what and who we are today as human beings in the 21st century; in fact, from the beginning of humanity, from Genesis and Çatalhöyük, we have created everything around questions like these. Devotion, sacrifices, massacres, laws, dogmas, wars, invasions, values, injustices, surrenders, and beliefs have tried to hold on to this spiritual and religious justification.

This exhibition does not attempt to answer any question conclusively; rather, it seeks to offer a comparison, from the point of view of art, centering on each individual artist’s questions and getting a closer look, from the point of view of contemporary subjectivity, in order to answer these questions, oftentimes by investigating each individual’s thoughts.

Raquel Schwartz

MICHELLE WEINBERG

SELECTIONS FROM SOMETHING VAST

Apr 13  |  Jun 17, 2018

Selections From Something Vast is an installation of recent graphite drawings and boxed arrangements of papier maché objects. The works shown demonstrate how Weinberg accommodates the maddening and inspiring accumulation of images and things in contemporary life. To paraphrase the designer Ettore Sottsass, she discovers value in a wasteful society by involving herself in the symbolic and spiritual meaning of useful things.

The small graphite drawings are a product of transit. They are the artist's travel papers, accompanying her on planes and car trips, a dossier she packes with her. They record characters and episodes from the moving stream of inspirations that comes from thoughts, observations of her environment, images from magazines, art and objects viewed in galleries and museums, friend's studios, from books she is reading, online researches and via social media. They are diaristic in their compulsive link to her lived experience. Their subjects are storefronts and vines, interiors and clothing, paintings and architecture, stage-y landscape, signs and billboards, an eccentric and abstracted scenography.

The papier maché works are the most recent iteration of her ongoing project called Shelf Life. They are composed of found packages and vessels, recycled for everyday use. Their branded messages are sometimes replaced with new banalities such as "Win" or "New", but most often their surfaces are coated with color relationships and geometric compositions. The familiar forms of some of the products co-exist with their new appearances, and in this way the artist collaborates with the layers of social veneers that we interact with in real life. Like dioramas, toy and gift sets, candy or perfume assortments, generic product and souvenirs, these works are alternately valueless and fetishized. They speak to the consumer lust for beauty, vitality and allure. They are coveted and bought home to become part of personal rituals. One of the sources for these boxed sets is the Chinese tradition of burning paper replicas of everyday personal items at funerals and tomb sweeping ceremonies. For Weinberg, they involve her in the ephemeral nature of things and human life, and the questionable longevity of shelf life - or of posterity, the afterlife of art.

Michelle Weinberg is a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors, architecture and public spaces. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies including a Creative Learning Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in Visual & Media Art, an Individual Artist Fellowship and Artist Enhancement Grant from the State of Florida, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, residencies at Mayer of Munich in Germany, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. Exhibitions of her work include: FIU Frost Art Museum, the Wolfsonian Museum, design sublime and Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami, Cyan Gallery in Barcelona, Curatorial + Co in Sydney, The Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College and ARENA and Open Source in NYC, The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College in Fort Myers, FL, The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA and Islip Art Museum, NY. Commissions include murals for The Wolfsonian Museum-FIU, Facebook offices in Miami, Bay Parc Plaza Apartments in Miami and Young at Art Museum in Davie, public art projects for Miami-Dade County, City of Tampa, City of Pembroke Pines, Cultural Council of Jacksonville, and City of Hollywood, all in FL. Weinberg is  Creative Director of Girls’ Club in Fort Lauderdale, and  a consultant to museums and non-profits, developing exhibitions, education programming and more.

GIAN PAOLO MINELLI

THE SKYN OF THE CITIES

Apr 13  |  Jun 17, 2018

In Gian Paolo Minelli’s “The Skin of the Cities” (the artist’s second solo exhibition with Dot Fiftyone Gallery), architectural photography becomes a social document, and social reportage becomes an artistic project:  the soft walls of society find their counterpart in the hard walls of the building. It is immediately apparent that Minelli is a photographer with a talent for capturing the sculptural quality of architecture, a formalist reproducing the built world with a brilliant sense of its spatial and plastic tensions.

This urban landscape exudes a coldness far removed from our conventional image of the Latin joie de vivre. Signs of violence, desolation and lawlessness are visible everywhere. Minelli’s photographs show how beautiful they are.  What is special about Minelli’s work is that it goes beyond the poetry of the brutal, the aestheticization of the ugly. People live in these streets and in these concrete bunkers. Gian Paolo Minelli knows them, has befriended them, works with them. He played a key role in setting up the community cultural center.  Tellingly, he doesn’t make portraits of these people. Instead, he sets up his tripod and hands over the self-timer to his subjects. They are invited to take pictures of themselves, to show us how they see themselves and the world around them. But Minelli is not a social worker with a plate camera. He never seeks to embellish the hardness and coldness of photography itself. On the contrary: Minelli’s work shows that these buildings, these streets and these people also have their style, their pride, and their beauty – whether we like it or not.

Some of the works featured at Dot Fiftyone Gallery have been recently shown at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in the exhibition “Photography in Argentina (1850-2010): Contradiction and Continuity,” curated by Judith Keller and Idurre Alonso. This show examines the historical and political complexities in Argentina, highlighting the heterogeneity of its reality, the creation of contradictory histories, and the power of the construction of images in the configuration of a national identity. A set of approximately 300 photographs across 200 years of history was the challenge that the curators managed to unveil, bringing together a comprehensive panorama of Argentine history through photographic documentation and by rescuing the talent of contemporary artists. This exhibition was part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in Los Angeles, which took place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than seventy cultural institutions across Southern California.

Minelli’s highly original synthesis of documentary and content-oriented photography, on the one hand, and conceptual, formalist photography, on the other, is always easy and natural. His photographs guide us into the glowing core of the cities, which is mostly found at their periphery, and we come to realize that the fissures, the rust, the ruins, and also the defiance, the self-affirmation, the silent dignity, humor, and beauty reveal themselves in the façades of their buildings and in the faces of their denizens.

Gian Paolo Minelli, was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1968. He arrived in Buenos Aires in 1999 and, since then, he’s been living between Switzerland and Argentina. In Buenos Aires, he developed his series Zona Sur (2000-2010); Playas (2004-2008); Galpón Colón (2004-2005); and Cárcel de Caseros (2000-2002). In these works, which Minelli calls “photo essays,” since he considers them more like a development of ideas rather than a sequence of photographs, he offers several answers as to the form and operations of the city.

In 2008, he received the Swiss Art Award, as well as the Applied Arts Award in 1996, 1999, and 2002 in Berne, Switzerland. From 1998 to 1999, he was artist-in-residence at the Swiss Culture Institute in Rome, Italy. He was also awarded the Cité des Arts Prize in Paris, which allowed him to extend his residency there (2009-2010). The Skin of the Cities/La piel de las ciudades was recently published, a review of his entire career as a photographer, curated by Tobia Bezzola and published by Codax and JRP Ringier Publishers (Zurich, 2009).

Minelli has had solo exhibitions at different museums, contemporary art centers, and galleries in different cities around the world. He has participated in more than seventy-five group exhibitions in remote cities such as Buenos Aires, Rotterdam, Krakow, Rosario, São Paulo, Miami, Basel, Mexico City, Bogotá, Turin, New York, Rome, Hamamatsu, Zurich, Liverpool, and Geneva. He edited and published the following books: Variation of Theme, Lugano, Switzerland (2017); Zona Sur, Barrio Piedra Buena, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001-2006 (2007); Cárcel de Caseros 2000-2002 (2003); Transfer (1999); Buenos Aires: encuentro con treinta artistas (1997); and Notturni (1997).

CONSUELO CASTAÑEDA

INSTANTS

Jul 12  |  Sep 12, 2018

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is pleased to announce INSTANTS, a solo exhibition featuring recents works by Consuelo Castañeda. The exhibition opens on July 12 and remains on view through September 12, 2018. Occupying both of the gallery’s spaces, the exhibition features new paintings, photographies and a video animation work created by the artist specially for the exhibition.

Consuelo Castañeda, (Havana, Cuba, 1958), is a multi-disciplinary artist, professor and art critic based in Miami and Havana. Her work includes painting, installations, photography, graphic art, architecture, and print. She emerged in the Cuban avant-garde of the 1980s, helping catapult their cultural production onto the international stage and shifting the popular understanding of the relationship between art and politics in Cuba and in wider Latin America. Described by Joseph Kosuth as a post-postmodern artist, Consuelo Castañeda undoubtedly left her mark on the Cuban art of the 1980s, the so-called “prodigious decade.” During those years Castañeda was active on the Cuban art scene and at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), where she taught many students who are noted artists today, including Tania Bruguera, Tomás Esson, Glexis Novoa, Ciro Quintana, Ana Albertina Delgado, and Luis Gómez, among others. In fact, Castañeda taught an entire generation, which flourished at the end of the decade and whose members have largely chosen to live off the island, she was apivotal figure in Cuba until her emigration to Mexico, and then Miami, in the 1990s. Her work as a painter, photographer and multimedia installation artist has recently shifted to social media and digital format. Her focus is on creating interactive works that anyone with a modem and a computer can readily access. Castaneda received the Cinta Fellowship in 1997-1998 as an installation artist. The artist participated in the Havana Biennials in 1984, 1986, and 1991. In 2016, Castañeda returns to Cuba for her solo show “CCC2016” after an absence of almost three decades.