FUTURA 2000
Eric Firestone Gallery’s presentation for Art Basel Miami OVR will foreground the gallery’s scholarly commitment to reinvestigating the ever-evolving art historical canon. The gallery will feature both historic and contemporary works by Elaine Lustig Cohen, Charles DuBack, Martha Edelheit, FUTURA2000, Shirley Gorelick, Mimi Gross, Joe Overstreet, Pat Passlof and Miriam Schapiro. Our Art Basel OVR page can be viewed by clicking here. Additionally, the work will be physically installed in our East Hampton showroom and private viewings in person or via video chat can be scheduled by emailing efg@ericfirestonegallery.com.
Concurrent with the gallery’s New York City exhibition, the online viewing room will include recent work by FUTURA2000 (b.1955). In his exhibition catalog essay, Carter Ratcliff writes of Futura: “His paintings convey the presence of an individual alert to the world’s myriad possibilities and unfailingly graceful in addressing them. These qualities of grace and awareness give every canvas a liveliness tinged with a utopian spirit of reciprocity.”
Many of these artists, and their contribution to art history, are being revisited more widely now, with work included in major institutional exhibitions. Kunsthaus Graz in Austria recently paid tribute to the early years of the California Institute of Arts, where Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015) co-founded the Feminist Art Program, and created the legendary installation “Womanhouse.” Schapiro was a pioneer of bringing “women’s work” into modernist painting in her "femmages." In 2019, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles explored the Pattern and Decoration movement, showcasing Schapiro’s role.
The work of Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) has been on exhibit recently in “Soul of a Nation” (a traveling exhibition which originated at the Tate Modern, London), and in “Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Overstreet used abstraction as the site of layered, deep social and political content. His “Flight Pattern” paintings of the 1970s are tethered with ropes to the ceiling, wall and floor, paying tribute to nomadic cultures.
A major survey of Pat Passlof’s (1928-2011) work, on view at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in 2020, was an occasion to revisit her legacy as one of the significant women of Abstract Expressionism. A recently acquired work is also on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 2018-19, the Jewish Museum re-examined the legacy of Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927 - 2016). Her geometric abstractions were influenced by a modernist architectural aesthetic. In 1979, she was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery downtown. Cohen was also a prolific and pioneering graphic designer, responsible for shaping the graphic identity of the Jewish Museum.
In a recent New York Times review, Jillian Steinhauer noted that Mimi Gross (b.1940) “cultivated an intimacy that pushes against the cold monumentality of the canon. Today, when figurative painting has become a powerful province for artists who are not white, straight and male, this work feels as current as anything you would see in Chelsea.” Martha Edelheit (b. 1931), has addressed the theme of female desire for decades. In the 1960s her work explored the subject of tattooing; the flesh of the figures Edelheit depicted became places where the dreams and fantasies of the models emerge.
Charles DuBack’s (1926-2015) figurative paintings have a brevity and accuracy which can be associated with artists such as Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, who were colleagues and friends in New York and Maine. In the 1960s, DuBack developed a unique process of adhering real objects, like pieces of clothing, flags, and sailcloth, to his compositions, calling this work “projections” or “sculpto-paintings.”
Art Basel Miami Beach | OVR: Click here
VIP Preview days: December 2 - 4
Opens 10am EST / 7am PST
Public Days: December 4 - 6
Opens 10am EST / 7am PST
To view a preview of our booth or to schedule either a private viewing in East Hampton or via video chat, contact efg@ericfirestonegallery.com