Ames Yavuz is pleased to return to Art Basel Miami Beach with a presentation titled God is a Woman, highlighting new and significant works by Emily Floyd, Joy Gregory, Thania Petersen, Patricia Piccinini, Pinaree Sanpitak and Kaylene Whiskey. Our presentation celebrates leading female artists whose works dovetail playful compositions with complex personal and political symbols. Working across painting, sculpture, photography and textiles, they offer vivid expressions of contemporary womanhood.
Emily Floyd’s (b.1972, Australia) sculpture The Collected Works of Lenin appropriates moments of collective action and reprises them from a feminist perspective. The Owl of Minerva is posed in a protective left wing gesture, offering shelter to a collection of letterpress blocks representing insurrectionary texts, recast as objects of irreverent play in a twilight rainbow.
Born to Jamaican parents in the UK, Joy Gregory’s (b.1959, UK) series centred on Barbie dolls speaks to gendered playthings, womanhood, and how little these ‘feminine’ ideals have changed over time. Set against the Atlantic blue of the cyanotype, there is also quiet reference to legacies of enslavement and their implications for access to leisure and play.
Thania Petersen (b.1980, South Africa) presents intricate new tapestries that introduce a new superhero who has emerged from the Indian Ocean and harbours distant mothers, identities and powers, becoming a contemporary icon that is celebrated and championed by all. These works are grounded in Petersen’s Malay heritage and experiences as a Muslim woman, subverting colonial biases through symbols of beauty, violence and community.
A dual sense of hope and hopelessness is evident in Patricia Piccinini’s (b.1965, Sierra Leone) hyperrealistic sculpture Eulogy, which imagines a man cradling a strange, gelatinous Blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus). This extraordinary creature, dwelling in the deep seas south of Australia and accidentally driven to the brink of extinction by the fishing industry, embodies Piccinini’s moving investigations into human science, ethics and nature.
One of the most important artists in Asia today, Pinaree Sanpitak (b.1961, Thailand) has built a powerful inventory of symbols exploring the spiritual and physical nourishment of the female body. For Art Basel Miami Beach, she will present a new series of large-scale paintings as well as sculptures that combine found vessels with layers of torn mulberry paper in the form of her signature motif, the breast stupa.
Kaylene Whiskey (b.1976, Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands) is a Yankunytjatjara artist whose joyous paintings are widely recognised for their celebration of strong kungkas (women). Her works hold a singular power to delight audiences with recurring cameos from Cher, Tina Turner and Catwoman, synthesising pop culture and desert culture to create a richly layered experience of Indigenous life today.