Bass Museum of Art Presents: The Endless Renaissance – Six Solo Artist Projects
Thursday, December 6 through Monday, December 10, 2012, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
VIP reception on December 5, 2012 9pm-12am.
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL 33139

The Endless Renaissance – Six Solo Artist Projects: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Barry X Ball, Walead Beshty, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ged Quinn and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook will be on view during Art Basel Miami Beach 2012.

The exhibition runs through March 17, 2013.

This December, the Bass Museum of Art shifts away from the curated group show to make room for six individual solo artist projects. On December 5, the Bass Museum of Art presents six international contemporary artists: Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland), Barry X Ball (USA), Walead Beshty (UK), Hans-Peter Feldmann (Germany), Ged Quinn (UK) and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Thailand). In 2009, The Bass Museum of Art embarked on an ongoing exploration of the notion that all art was once contemporary and inversely, that all contemporary works of art are part of a continuum of art history. This ongoing project and these six artists presentations pay homage to the Bass Museum of Art’s mission statement, “we educate and inspire by exploring the connections between our historical collection and contemporary art.”

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a video artist and photographer. She will present a three-screen video projection, The Annunciation, though the Gospel of Luke (1:26–38) provides the narrative and Renaissance painting the iconography, Ahtila interprets the Annunciation with moving images that are at once spiritedly reverential, contemporary, and humane. Through her choice of actors—some of whom are professional and most (a group women from a center for social services) of whom are not—Ahtila questions the nature of performance and the notion of linearity, and presents the “story” of The Annunciation in strikingly original ways. In two versions: one image in a single frame (38 min.), followed by three images (split screen) in a single frame (33 min.). Courtesy Crystal Eye, Finland. In Finnish; English subtitles. 71 min.. Ahtila lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Barry X Ball, through the use of unconventional materials and innovative methods, has reinvigorated the age-old tradition of figurative stone sculpture.  Ball employs an elaborate array of equipment and procedures to realize his works, ranging from the cutting edge to the traditional, from 3-D digital scanning, virtual modeling, and computer-controlled milling to hyper-detailed hand carving and polishing.  The sculptures’ complexity is echoed in their clinically poetic titles.  With their simultaneous fever-pitch intensity and surreal stillness, Barry X Ball’s bravura works make an expansive case for the reconsideration of contemporary sculptural practice. Ball lives and works in New York, New York.

Walead Beshty will feature a selection of glass and copper works that demonstrate an awareness of their own histories. Fitting perfectly inside proprietary sizes of FedEx boxes, these glass sculptures travel through the company’s massive infrastructure from venue to venue, becoming severely chipped and cracked. Likewise, Beshty’s large copper panels are handled directly by manufacturers, shippers and art handlers, resulting in smudges, hand-prints and tarnishes.  Beshty’s work exposes the marks of time and physical signs of usage that take place in the process of production, shipping and installation of works of art.  Just as an Old Master painting holds a provenance, a history of ownership and display, Beshty’s use of  fragile materials like copper and glass aid in the disclosure of each object’s “provenance”, and the evidence of their handling. Beshty lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Hans-Peter Feldmann’s approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art. This project is Hans-Peter Fedlmann’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters and multiples. Feldmann lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Ged Quinn specializes in allegorical paintings that include contemporary images in idyllic scenes based on classical paintings such as the pastoral works of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich. The Endless Renaissance Quinn will present densely layered paintings that transform art historical genre painting into contemporary experience. Quinn lives and works in Cornwall, United Kingdom.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is universally recognized as one of the leading video artists from Southeast Asia who was recently featured in dOCUMENTA (13). She will present works from her Two Planets series, in which members of Thai villages discuss several classic works of modern European painting while Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook fixes her camera on them. Contemplated outside of a museum in this atypical context, the work explores the conventions of viewing and interpretation that have come to be central features of the Western experience of art. Rasdjarmrearnsook lives and works in Thailand.