Departing from works produced by the artist Pedro Caetano, the “Influx” project is inspired by the movements and artists that influenced his artistic practice throughout his career. In addition to Pedro Caetano, Bergamin & Gomide presents 10 works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Isa Genzken, Jac Leirner, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler.
Pedro Caetano’s (1979) work establishes a dialogue with the legacy of artists linked to some of the main currents of art in the Twentieth Century – particularly with North American Minimalism and the generation of artists that emerged in the cities of Cologne and Dusseldorf in the 1970’s.
Caetano combines these references with contemporary elements that, taken from their original context and imbued with an acid humor, create new pictorial narratives by exploring the dynamics of attributing value in art and society nowadays.
The circles are recurrent elements in Pedro Caetano's paintings, as in the works Unidade Darks (2020) and Unidade Sweet Delight (2020). After applying several layers of paint, the artist creates the notion of color contrast that becomes visible by marking the circles on the canvas. The result of this confluence of elements and techniques is located in an ambiguity zone that reveals an attitude that is at the same time of reverent and irreverent towards the canons of art.
Banana Ouro (2020) is a minimalist caricature exercise, Pedro Caetano used only yellow paint and blue and green crayons to seek depth and three-dimensionality in the painting. By varying the amount of matter in each row of circles on the linen, the splashes and flaws are left intentionally, in contrast to the precision that minimalism would require.
Among the highlights is Donald Judd (1928-1994), considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, whose radical ideas continue to provoke and influence art, architecture and design. Judd created installations and sculptures in which he considered space itself to be a material just as essential as the industrial surfaces out of which his objects were constructed - as in the brass, bronze and plexiglass sculpture (1969) presented at Art Basel Miami Beach - a change that had great importance for the then emerging generation of conceptual artists.
German artist Isa Genzken (1948) transits between Minimalism and Conceptual Art, producing in a wide variety of media and techniques. With an approach focused on materials and assemblage, her totemic sculptures are created from harvesting, fusing and re-constructing references from plethora of sources. In the series Weltempfänger (1987), in English "world receiver", the artist presents radio species made of concrete that evoke considerations about how communication is transmitted and received, and how we decide what is made permanent or temporary.
“My antennas were also meant to be ‘feelers’, things you stretch out to feel something, like the sound of the world and its many tones.” - Isa Genzken
Piss Painting (1978) is part of a series of works that can be considered the most subversive of Andy Warhol's (1928-1987) career, in which he experienced abstraction with a touch of irony. The aesthetic form achieved through the use of bodily fluids residue - when uric acid reacts to the canvas surface - is a transgressive step that places Warhol's work among the discourses dealing with social divisions, artistic experimentation with body, abstract art and eroticism.
While studying at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles back in the 1970s, Mike Kelley (1954) and Tony Oursler (1957) put together a punk rock band called The Poetics. This experience in their youth contributed to both in creating an aesthetic that breached with the paradigms of conceptual art and minimalism. In 1996, Kelley and Oursler decided to release a document of their audio works from this period, which resulted in the production of new works such as the installation Singing Stop Sign (1997).
Enfant terrible of the German punk scene, Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) was a prolific artist who refused to choose a specific media or style, he produced works as a painter, sculptor, draftsman and graphic designer. For Kippenberger, a fragment of a drawing could generate the painting, which in turn would instigate the sculpture or the invitation of the exhibition or the poster, in a performance gesture that exposed critically, and almost always ironically, a ceaseless creative process that can be observed in the two works from 1986 featured at Art Basel Miami Beach.
By colliding a variety of recognizable signs, the works that encompass the “Influx” project presented at Art Basel OVR: Miami Beach question preconceived ideas regarding the social role of the artist and art itself.