Art Basel Miami Beach: Nathan Mabry and Bernard Piffaretti

(Cherry and Martin archive - Cherry and Martin is now Philip Martin Gallery.)

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Cherry and Martin is pleased to present a two-artist booth featuring sculptures by Nathan Mabry and paintings by Bernard Piffaretti. In their respective bodies of work, both artists consider authorship and, specifically, how we read and experience that authorship.

The sculptures of Nathan Mabry (b. 1978, lives in Los Angeles) take as their starting point the tropes of various Western and non-Western sculptural traditions. Mabry’s work inverts, multiplies, and changes these tropes, flushing out their complexity while at the same time illuminating Mabry’s own personal expression. Mabry's monumental metal sculpture, "The Nostalgia of the Infinite (Le Papillon)” — which will debut in the booth at Art Basel Miami Beach -- is familiar yet distant, direct yet oblique. In contrast to the current embrace of unconsidered artistic authorship - often realized as ‘expressionistic’ - Mabry goes in the opposite direction. In his work, individual expression and intellectual commitment is regarded as growing out of a pre-existing set of conditions and interpretations, rather than springing as if unconditioned from the soul of the artist. The results are thrilling pieces, like the table-top sculptural arrangement, "Composition (Loop/Pool/Polo),” which provoke us emotionally through color, shape and form, and provoke us intellectually to consider the roots of our reactions.

Since the early 1980s, Bernard Piffaretti (b. 1965, lives in Paris) has approached the blank canvas with a first mark: a single line that he paints down the center of each work. Piffaretti paints a composition on one side of this line and then paints a duplicate on the other side of it. Piffaretti’s paintings question original and copy. They incorporate both individual expression and duplication of that expression into the final art object. Piffaretti’s paintings are primary sources marking the original spot of expression, and secondary sources that translate for him - and for us - the experience of that expression. In looking at Piffaretti's work, our eyes move through his compositions, matching color and shape, line and texture in a dynamic, yet strangely looping fashion that wraps back upon itself.

Nathan Mabry’s work was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX); his work is currently included in exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO) and The Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, MO). Mabry's work is in such collections as the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX); 176 / Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK); The Rubell Family Collection, (Miami, FL); Vanhaerents Art Museum (Brussels, Belgium); and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY). Nathan Mabry received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.