From a rare Frank Stella to a new Sarah Lucas sculpture: discover ten significant works in ‘OVR: Miami Beach’

The idea that digital showrooms must foreground new and recent artworks is being increasingly challenged. From post-war painting to sculpture, from Mexico to London via France, 'OVR: Miami Beach' is home to a host of works of historical significance.

In recent years, the canons of Color Field painting and Abstract Expressionism have undergone a welcome revision, with the contributions of artists of color and women artists becoming more widely recognized and valued. Well-known artists including Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, alongside rediscoveries such as Alma Woodsey Thomas and Carla Accardi, feature in the viewing rooms.

A pairing of the most daring of female YBA sculptors and one of Frank Stella’s Protractor paintings also feature in this examination of some significant works in OVR: Miami Beach.

Read on to discover highlights of 20th and 21st century art.

Black II (1949), presented by Helly Nahmad Gallery, is characteristic of Alexander Calder’s post-war practice, in which elements of painted metal are combined into graceful, abstract sculptures. Departing from his pre-war mobiles, which were suspended from a ceiling, Black II is a tabletop structure. At almost a meter tall, it is a significant presence, commanding attention through its juxtaposition of primary colors with sinuous shapes. This series of works forms a bridge between Calder’s delicate pre-war work and his later substantive sculptural practice.

Everett Gee Jackson was born in Mexia, Texas in 1900. Early on in his career, Jackson developed and nurtured a passion for Mexico and its rich artistic history, moving there in 1923, and establishing studios in Oaxaca and Mexico City. He was influenced by Mexican artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros. For Jarabe Dance (1945),  presented by Hirschl & Adler Modern, he deliberately chose a muted palette, as opposed to a realistic representation of the bright costumes, to focus on the dancers rather than the romanticized spectacle. He later wrote in a private letter that the work 'may be the best thing I have done.'

Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell was one of the leading artists of the New York school of painting alongside Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan. Her work is characterised by energetic, free-form shapes, executed muscularly on often unprimed canvas. Presented by Gray gallery, Pour Patou, painted in France in 1976, consists of contrasting turquoise, green, orange, black and white daubs on canvas. Mitchell often compared her work to poetry, and indeed, the violent contrast between the orange and green vertical brush marks– pressing a mass of paint into the canvas with opulent impasto – express a rhythmic, lyrical energy.

Helen Frankenthaler was a colleague of Joan Mitchell´s in New York, known from an early age as a painter with an uncompromisingly radical approach to her work. Her large colorfields appear as stains on her canvases; a technique she achieved by spreading a canvas on the floor, and pouring thinned paint directly on the surface. Unlike her contemporaries Mitchell and Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler used Magna paint, an early acrylic, which has different flow properties to oil paint and lent itself more willingly to her process. She controlled its flow through sponges, her hands and the application of force, pushing the paint into abstract yet premeditated shapes. Formations (1963-1964), presented by Yares Art, was painted in Provincetown, Massachusetts, off Cape Cod, when the artist was in her mid-thirties. The joyous palette could be a reference to the sea and the sand on her doorstep.

Alma Woodsey Thomas was an art teacher at a junior high school in Washington DC for 35 years. She produced a powerful body of work, sited between Color Field painting and Pointillism. Highly individualistic and idiosyncratic in her approach, she nevertheless became the first African American woman to be given a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, aged 80. Scarlet Sage Dancing a Whirling Dervish (1976) created when the artist was 84, is a late period work where her mastery of her palette and technique is highly evident. As her gallerist Michael Rosenfeld noted, 'this work has folded into the fabric of American abstract painting, and there is a broader audience of abstraction.'

Carla Accardi (1924-2014) is an important representative of the hard-edged abstraction movement in Italy. She was a founder of Forma 1 in 1947, an art movement dedicated to the principals of Futurism and Marxism. From the 1960s onward, Accardi painted her calligraphic marks on Sicofoil, transparent plastic sheeting used in commercial packaging, as with Segni Neri (1967), presented by Andrew Kreps Gallery. Combining gestural painting with industrial materials, Accardi’s work is an important bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Arte Povera.

Frank Stella is best known for his highly conceptual approach to painting. His geometric, flat works were conceived in opposition to the more individualistic, gestural approaches favored by the Abstract Expressionists. Damascus Gate, Stretch Variation II Half Size (1969), belongs to his series of ‘Protractors’ paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of concentric color. The canvases are outsized: in this case, the painting is over seven and half meters in length. As gallerist Edward Tyler Nahem notes: ‘this piece boldly embodies the culmination of the artist’s seminal ‘Protractors’ series of paintings, whose titles are based on the names of various gated cities in the Middle East that Stella traveled to in the early 1960s. With its vibrant palette, handsome composition and intricately executed interlace, this is the last remaining of the six Damascus Gate paintings - three large and three half size - that is not in a museum collection.’

Glamour, tragedy, the pitfalls of celebrity: Marilyn Monroe was a popular motif for Andy Warhol. His 1962 silkscreen of the actress, executed in bright, pop hues, became one of his most expensive works at auction when it sold in 2015 at Christie's. Four Marilyns (Reversal) (1979-1986), presented by Van de Weghe, is a silkscreen of the negative in quadruple repetition, characteristic of Warhol´s revisitation of his earlier oeuvre in the seventies and eighties. It is a darker, more abstract image, with Monroe´s face fragmented into four pieces, and the negative lending the subject a ghostly hue.

Tracey Emin’s work is characterised by her highly personal, narrative approach, centering on personal experiences, reliving sexual trauma, miscarriage, abortion, and sickness. Feeling Pregnant III (2005), presented by White Cube, is an installation of seven forlorn abstract human figures, clad in patched, hand-sewn smocks and dresses that allude to hospital garments and strait jackets. In 1999, the artist said ‘I knew intuitively as soon as I’d come round from my abortion that all the art I’d ever made was a real big bunch of crap and had to be destroyed immediately. I promised myself I wouldn’t start making art or making things again until I could justify it, parallel, alongside my life. Which I do now.’ Feeling Pregnant III and its ghostly forms alludes to the pathologization of pregnancy, where the expectant mother’s body is also an object of medical intervention and potential resultant trauma.

Fellow YBA sculptor Sarah Lucas has also long worked with distorted, grotesque versions of the female figure made from everyday, distressed materials: an approach to sculpture rooted in Arte Povera but employing a uniquely British vernacular. ALICE COOPER (2020), presented by Sadie Coles HQ, continues her 'Bunny' series, in which tights, stuffing material and found chairs are combined into vulnerable sculptures forming a heightened commentary on the erotic gaze. High heels, outsize breasts, long, sinuous limbs play with the concept of the classical sculpture as an object of the idealized erotic, while also manifesting fetishistic aspects. After all, nylon, and shoes, are banally fetishistic objects, so widely employed in advertising and popular culture that they have all but lost their erotic power. Lucas' humorous play with sexualised abjection reimagines the role of classical sculpture and the female form, reframing the gaze as a potentially awkward encounter.

‘OVR: Miami Beach’ runs from Wednesday, December 2 until Sunday December 6.

Top image: Frank Stella, Damascus Gate, Stretch Variation II, Half Size, 1969. Courtesy Edward Tyler Nahem, New York City.