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Art Basel Miami Beach 2022: Advisory Selections

As we hurtle towards the new year, Art Basel Miami Beach prepares to open its doors to exuberant fairgoers in the East Coast city. This year's edition will be the first since Noah Horowitz was appointed CEO of the fair on 7 November 2022, and with 282 exhibitors—almost double the number of galleries shown in the fair's first edition—he plans to deliver the biggest edition of the fair to date.

Art Basel Miami Beach always presents some outstanding art along with a good dose of art world gossip and glam, but the sheer number of galleries showing means the mass of art on display will most definitely be overwhelming.

Having previewed what the galleries have to offer, to ease the load, we have identified some exceptional works to look out for in advance. Our highlights include work by spearheads of contemporary art Mark Bradford, Nan Goldin, and Sigmar Polke.

Lynne Mapp Drexler at Berry Campbell Gallery
Lynne Mapp Drexler's brightly coloured composition reveals the American artist's mastery of Abstract Expressionist painting. Inspired by her life-long observation of East Coast landscapes, Drexler's remarkable work features a depth of mark-making made from planes of thick impasto rendered in kaleidoscopic colour.

'Drexler's best paintings achieve that quality rarely found in abstraction, by which our initial perceptual reaction begins to slowly unravel, revealing memories wrought from the natural world whilst stirring the inner parts of our subconscious', remarked Ocula Advisor, Rory Mitchell.

Drexler's presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach coincides with the display of her work in the exhibition Lynne Drexler: The First Decade (27 October–22 December 2022) at Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell Gallery in New York.

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Nanette Carter
Destabilizing #2, 2022
Oil on Mylar
26 1/2 x 28 inches
View Works by Nanette Carter

Judith Godwin Included in WE FANCY: A Legacy of LGBTQIA+ Artists at the League
Curated by Eric Shiner
Art Students League of New York
October 27 - November 27, 2022
View Works by Judith Godwin

Installation view, In Your Eyes: Experiment Like ESTAR(SER), Frye Art Museum.

In Your Eyes: Experiment Like ESTAR(SER)
September 28 - October 15, 2023
View Works by Mary Dill Henry

Ophir and Friends: A Tribute to Ophir Agassi
Curated by Karen Wilkin and Christine Kee
November 6 - December 18, 2022
View Works by Jill Nathanson

Women and Movement: Women and the American Art World
Debra J. Force (Debra Force Fine Art), Peg Alston (Peg Alston Fine Arts), Christine Berry (Berry Campbell Gallery), Linda S. Ferber (New-York Historical Society), Barbara Haskell (Whitney Museum of American Art), and Eileen Kinsella (ArtNet)

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
3:50 – 4:50 p.m.

IAC’s 27th Annual American Art Conference
The Cosmopolitan Club
122 E 66th St.
New York, NY

Register

In New York and beyond, this month and next yield many wonderful things for the art enthusiasts among us to see. Beginning with the beyond, a new show opening on the West Coast offers a worthy reevaluation of the midcentury art scene, while some blockbuster East Coast events (Alex Katz, Edward Hopper) are already bringing in crowds. 

“Lynne Drexler: The First Decade”

Sprawled across two galleries, “The First Decade” includes oil and gouache paintings made by Drexler between 1959 and 1969. A student of Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann, she developed a body of densely colorful, mosaic-like work in New York and, after 1971, on Monhegan Island, Maine, where she died in 1999. Through December 17, 2022, at Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Gallery.

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In 2022, artist Lynne Drexler's work exploded on the art market. An artist who had briefly shown in the early 1960s in New York, she continued to work on a remote island in Maine until her death in 1999. Two decades later, she became the artist of the moment. Sukanya Rajaratnam and Christine Berry have collaborated on a dual-gallery show of Drexler's work from her first decade, 1959-1969, The shows at Berry Campbell and Mnuchin have drawn in new audiences and further burnished Drexler's reputation. In this podcast, Christie's Julian Ehrlich joins Berry and Rajaratnam to tell the story of Lynne Drexler's extraordinary year.

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POLLOCK-KRASNER HOUSE AND STUDY CENTER: ART IN FOCUS
Lynne Drexler, A Forgotten Abstract Expressionist, Gail Levin, Ph.D.

Tuesday, November 1, 6 p.m.
Register

After studying in New York in the 1950s with Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself. She landed on Monhegan Island, Maine, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. Her paintings have recently commanded attention, and are now on view in “Lynne Drexler: The First Decade,” at Berry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan. Her story is that of a woman artist whose colorful and engaging pictures speak for themselves, though they don’t necessarily reveal the drama of her life, which this lecture by Gail Levin, author of the exhibition catalog, will illuminate. 

Female Artists Fight for Equality. It’s Not a Pretty Picture.

On Thursday, Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City will both launch shows dedicated to the work of Lynne Drexler, a painter whose trajectory follows a now-familiar narrative when it comes to women artists: though Drexler kicked off her career to much acclaim, even being compared to van Gogh, she languished in obscurity for most of her life.

It took until 2022 for her works to be reevaluated and command impressive auction results—estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000 at Christie’s in March, one of her paintings went for around $1.2 million. Drexler can’t enjoy her success, because she died in 1999.

“The art world loves old ladies and young bad boys,” Marilyn Minter, a deeply cool chronicler, in paintings and photographs, of the sensual mundanities of a woman’s life, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday, “and even if they love you, you’re not gonna succeed on the market over the most mediocre white male."

“There’s never, ever been a female artist that has hit the white heat of somebody like Damien Hirst or Julian Schnabel, where they can’t do anything wrong,” Minter said.

Minter was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, made a film that was displayed in Times Square and has been featured in several solo exhibitions, achieving an impressive level of prestige. Still, the same market restrictions endlessly echo and reverberate, like ripples in an infinite ocean: the most Minter’s work has ever sold for is $269,000.

“I don’t pay attention to the high end of the market because I’m not one of the players, so it’s better for me to not even look at all,” Minter said. “But I’m one of the lucky ones, because I can make a living from my work.”

Earlier in October, contemporary artist Caroline Walker set a new personal auction record at the Frieze London auctions when her painting Indoor Outdoor (2015) sold for $598,081 over an estimate of $67,519–$90,047, Artsy reported last week.

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