Art Miami 2021

Zeit Contemporary Art is honored to participate in Art Miami 2021, our inaugural art fair in the United States. Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of our founding, the presentation reflects several lines of work developed during ZCA’s first years. One section centers on joie de vivre, bringing together works by Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Sam Francis, Sam Gilliam, Damien Hirst, and Oscar Murillo that evoke Henri Bergson’s idea of the élan vital, or vital impulse. United by warm color, vitality, and a sense of human affirmation, these works range from Boafo’s textured celebrations of Black life and culture to Calder’s playful gouaches and the chromatic freedom of Francis and Gilliam.

A second section is dedicated to prints and drawings, with works by Pablo Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García, and Henri Matisse made during the interwar years in France. Together, they show the central role of works on paper in modern art. Picasso’s L’aubade: Études de nus allongés (Dora Maar) registers the impact of wartime experience through the body of his muse and model, while Matisse revisits classical genres such as portraiture and the reclining nude. Torres-García, by contrast, joins classicism and modernity through a language of universal symbols. This section also includes works from ZCA’s online viewing room, Lilt, Joy and Clarity: The Prints of Ellsworth Kelly, highlighting Kelly’s sustained exploration of color, form, and clarity through printmaking.

The presentation also features a wall devoted to major examples from Andy Warhol’s Ad paintings of the mid-1980s. In these works, Warhol returned to found images from American print culture, transforming diagrams, maps, advertisements, and newspaper fragments into radiant canvases shaped by the atmosphere of the 1980s. While the series recalls his early Pop innovations, it also reflects late Cold War anxieties and Warhol’s awareness of mortality. The red intensity of Valentine’s Heart Ad (Heart Fund), together with the subjects of Missiles (Positive) and Daily News (Gimbel’s Anniversary Sale/Artist Could Have Been Choked), gives this group particular historical and emotional force. Across these sections, ZCA’s Art Miami presentation reflects our ongoing focus on modern, postwar, and contemporary art, and brings together works we are proud to present through art fairs, special projects, and private sales.