A BREAKDOWN
I just got back from Florida and the total-art-saturation that is Art Basel Miami. It was my first time attending, and it’s hard to make an over arching, definitive statement about the experience (it was good/bad), mostly because such a statement would almost certainly be in direct reaction to my personal tastes. The best I can do is talk about what affected me personally, and draw conclusions from there. So in that spirit, I’ll attempt to disseminate my personal experiences, and highlight some of the specific works that I found the most inspiring.

BASEL
At Art Basel, the booth that stood out most was West gallery (Holland), exhibiting the work of Marius Lut. I almost missed it because they had Jasper Niens design the booth to have only an 18 inch-wide passageway as an entrance. The sharp contrast between outside space (the rest of the fair) and the inside of the booth was a welcome serenity; an eddy in the currents of foot traffic and visual stimulus. Upon entering (doing a sideways shuffle), you emerge in a small cubic room sprinkled with Lut’s paintings and sculptures. It’s a body of work that flirts with basic geometry without bothering to be constrained by it. Making these broad initial gestures while ignoring the finishing touches, lends it the expressive and relaxed quality of a sketch.
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