For Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, Roberts Projects is pleased to present a selection of works that contemplate slippages between history, fiction, truth and imagination. New and recent works by contemporary artists—including Luke Agada, Amoako Boafo, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Lenz Geerk, Esmaa Mohamoud, Suchitra Mattai, Mia Middleton, Collins Obijiaku, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Wendy Red Star, Betye Saar, Kehinde Wiley, and Brenna Youngblood— address the mercurial relationship between reality and representation through aesthetic innovation and conceptual risk-taking.

Examining the impact of globalization on modes of cultural production, Luke Agada's surrealist paintings evoke a disembodied collapsing of time and space that challenges boundaries between categories of sameness and difference; center and periphery; the Self and the Other. Agada’s upcoming projects include an artist residency in France.

Acclaimed for his portraits on single color backgrounds that place his subjects front and center, Amoako Boafo imbues his paintings with a singular tenderness that adopts a gestural mark-making reminiscent of 20th century modernism. The first major museum exhibition of Boafo’s paintings in Europe recently opened at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. Titled Proper Love, the exhibition will be on view until January 2025.

Produced through a unique succession of gestures that meaningfully build upon each other, Betye Saar’s mixed-media assemblages transform aesthetic objects with profound epistemic weight into mythical entities compounded by time. A highlight of our booth is Saar’s monumental Tower of Destiny, the largest of her washboard assemblages measuring over six feet tall. An exhibition of Saar’s work in costume design and wearable art, titled Let’s Get It On, will open at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium in January 2025.

Emerging from deep material investigations of craft-based practices, Suchitra Mattai imagines new paradigms from South Asian traditions of embroidery and weaving. Titled Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter, her first solo exhibition in Washington, DC opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and will be on view through January 2025.

Through a combination of sculpture and installation, Esmaa Mohamoud’s multidisciplinary practice examines notions of the monolithic versus the multitude to uncover new understandings of Blackness. Using a combination of brightly saturated colors contrasted with skin tones rendered in shades of black and grey, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe depicts figures of the African diaspora in ambiguous settings that evoke the distinct visual language of Americana. Best known for his vibrant paintings of Black and Brown individuals from the diaspora that subvert the hierarchies of the Western art history, Kehinde Wiley will debut a new work at this year’s fair.

Contending with the legacies of ethnographic art and Modernism, Daniel Crews-Chubb creates compelling works that embody an expressionistic, painterly language within a conceptual framework. Crews-Chubb’s paintings are the subject of a solo exhibition currently on view at the Long Museum in Shanghai, China.

Lenz Geerk’s psychologically-charged paintings employ a restrained color palette to heighten the emotional tension hidden beneath the surface of his fictionalized settings. Mia Middleton’s small-scale paintings explore interiority and memory to capture the threshold between conscious and subconscious, desire and aversion, reality, and fantasy. Collins Obijiaku’s new series of works on paper feature quarter-length portraits of African men against gestural renderings of the Atlantic Ocean at different times of day.

Multimedia artist Wendy Red Star underscores the importance of preserving Native traditions, such as those of the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe in which she was raised, by interrogating misrepresentations of Native people throughout flawed narratives from American history. Red Star is a recipient of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.

Connecting the works on view is a range of aesthetic responses to ongoing dialogues on the dilemmas of representation, embodying Saidiya Hartman’s belief in art as “the exercise of imagining beauty and what it might make possible.” As a collective challenge to social hierarchies of value, this presentation aligns itself behind the shared goal of producing a transcendent encounter with the visual that catalyzes a spiritual and psychic transformation. 

For additional information, please contact David Daniels, Sales Director at 1.323.549.0223 or david@robertsprojectsla.com.

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