2025 Programming will be announced next January
Mark Eisen Sculptures
Presented by Modern Fine Art
Booth 800
Modern Fine Art debuts the extraordinary wall sculptures of artist Mark Eisen (1958 – 2023) at the show this year. Six mirror-polished stainless-steel sculptures are presented. These wall sculptures have never previously been exhibited and embody the artist’s unique principles, emphasizing pure shapes and silhouettes. They explore the potential of material transformation, the emotional impact of color, and the interplay of reflectivity, concavity, and convexity.
Eisen had a highly successful career in fashion, then spent the last ten years of his life realizing this sculpture collection, collaborating with the world’s best fabrication partners in California, New York and Europe to oversee the production. Throughout his career Eisen cultivated a cross-cultural, global perspective by creating fashion and objects that enhance life through beauty. An inherent minimalist, he was inspired by the basics of form, material and color. This grew out of early studies in Bauhaus thinking, which inspired him to converge the interdisciplinary fields of art, craft and design.
His sculptures were his final creations of pure passion, conceived to evoke hope and happiness in everyone who experiences them.
Norman Carton and Albert Kotin
Presented by Hollis Taggart
Booth 703
Hollis Taggart is pleased to present works by Norman Carton and Albert Kotin, two New York School painters who actively shaped the Abstract Expressionism movement. Both artists hailed from what was then part of the Russian Empire: Kotin was born in Minsk, and Carton was born in the Dnieper Ukraine territory, one year after Kotin. After years as a refugee, Carton finally settled in Philadelphia at age fourteen in 1922, while Kotin immigrated to the United States a year after he was born. Perhaps owing to their shared backgrounds as immigrants, they quickly adapted to the avant-garde circles of artists in New York, who were also themselves refugees.
In the 1950s, Carton became known for his virtuosity as an intuitive colorist, exhibiting alongside Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell in the 1955 Whitney Biennial. With the support of noted gallerists like Martha Jackson, Carton created vibrant and expressive paintings with impasto brushstrokes. The seemingly spontaneous nature of his paintings’ colors belies the artist’s exacting process of grinding his own pigments to produce controlled colors, fine-tuned to his specific requirements. Carton was influenced by the great colorist Arthur B. Carles, whose paintings were also guided by both feeling and chromatic accuracy. In 1962, with two other artists, Carton formed the Dewey Gallery, one of the first New York City galleries owned and operated by artists. Well into the 1970s, he was intimately involved with the Abstract Expressionism movement in New York and exhibited widely. His work is held in more than 20 museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Chrysler Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, among others.
If Carton’s works speak to his exemplary sense of color, Kotin seems to have been deeply interested in the spatial elements of a painting. In the 1950s, as he enjoyed a prolific output as part of the “Downtown Group,” a circle of artists in lower Manhattan that included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov, Kotin created paintings with all-over, heavily textured surfaces. Often experimenting with dense tangles of marks that seem to move in an eolic fashion, Kotin conceptualized space as “interwoven within itself” and as “a curtailed infinity moving with a force that creates an element of time and emotion.” His practice connected with the predominant dialogues and arguments of the time and captured his own grappling with questions of abstraction and expressionism. As the artist Alexander Calder wrote in 1968, “As long as there are people such as Al Kotin, there is no danger to art.” Kotin’s work has been exhibited at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (1947); The New School for Social Research, New York (1948); Stable Gallery in New York (1951, 1953-1957); Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1959); the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1963-64); and Long Island University, New York (1968), among others.
Hwang Seontae and Choi Soowhan:
From Light to Dark
Presented by Pontone Gallery
Booth 1107
Pontone Gallery is proud to present two Korean sculptors, Choi Soowhan and Hwang Seontae, whose practices overlap in means of execution but contrast in nature of content. Both specialize in the lightbox, a form which lends itself to careful and meticulous manufacture, blending the manipulation of light with the illusion of subtle image making. Seontae deals in serene and calm architectural interiors, whereas Soowhan investigates brooding scenes of atmospheric landscape.
Each artist takes a different approach to making the box. Seontae builds layers of graphic and photographic information underneath a panel of sand-blasted glass to make his smoothly delineated scenes. Soowhan’s technique is radically different: he drills a multitude of tiny holes in black plexiglass, their varied spacing and diameter defining a pictorial illusion. Common to both, however, is the subtle installation and manipulation of LED lighting within the structure to animate each artists’ visual invention. The consummate skill of such constructions fits neatly into a Korean tradition of painstaking craftsmanship.
Seontae presents us with an idealised vision of domestic harmony, where order and calm prevail. Light filters across monochromatic and unoccupied architectural spaces that speak of immanent arrival and the anticipation of comfort. There is, nevertheless, another possible interpretation that hints at a possible dystopian drama which may unfold in response to the questions “where is everyone?” and “what happens here?”.
Soowhan describes darkly lit woodland, unpopulated and sinister in its evocation of the folk tale and suspenseful horror film. Paths meander through dense stands of trees and undergrowth, light filters through the canopy to modulate the way. We are implicitly alone in these places, where nature holds sway and outcomes are unforeseen. Soowhan invites us to contemplate this complex ‘Emptiness’.
Both these sculptors address a notion of the solitary and ideas of a safe space. The fundamental difference between them being that Soowhan depicts the journey and Seontae the anticipated arrival.
2024
HRH Prince Nikolaos: Dialogos
Curated by Marilena Koutsoukou & Ethan Cohen
Presented by Ethan Cohen
Booth 605/506
Ethan Cohen is pleased to present Dialogos by HRH Prince Nikolaos, curated by Marilena Koutsoukou and Ethan Cohen, in a special exhibition for Art Palm Beach.
Dialogos showcases a fusion of ethereal photographs and luminous marble. The artist digitally imprints abstract and elemental images directly onto marble inviting the onlooker to inhabit the evanescent zone between the solid and the visionary. Through the artist’s uniquely crafted technique of digital transference, we swim in his native Greek dimensions of statuary, sand, sea, and light in a frozen wave of eternal time.
Key pieces of the show are landscape images on white marble, three tables and a cabinet, where the white marbles of Thassos are combined with a sculpted bronze patinated base. HRH Prince Nikolaos is fascinated by the grace of light found in Greek nature, something which he constantly seeks to recreate.
Gregory Scott and Kim Keever
Presented by Modern Fine Art
Booth 808
The exhibition focuses on the innovative studio practices of artists Gregory Scott and Kim Keever. Gregory assembles cast-filled productions for his videos complete with sets, props, and actors, including himself; whereas Kim manipulates dye and pigment interactions in large water tanks to reveal dramatic abstractions.
Kim Keever graduated in Thermal Engineering and was employed with NASA before devoting his career completely to art in the 1970’s. His cloud-like abstractions have evolved from romantic landscapes to become his signature imagery. With the aid of a 200-gallon tank and an affinity for his previous vocation in the sciences, Kim pours paint into water to capture swirling forms with his large-format digital camera, and he prints these striking and colorful results in large scale.
Gregory Scott’s images have always challenged the relationship between photography and painting, but in 2008, while working towards his graduate degree in studio art at Indiana University, he incorporated video, combining the three mediums and unveiling a new format to present narrative surprise. He addresses significant themes like identity and loss using humorous depictions of art history in museum and gallery settings. There is always at least one hand-painted element within the photographic framing that echoes the content of the video windows.
Gregory Scott was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1957. His work has been extensively exhibited and published internationally and acquired by notable permanent collections like the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; The Chazen Museum of Art, WI; The Norton Museum of Art, FL and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL.
Kim Keever was born in NYC in 1955. Kim’s photography is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY. Ray Waterhouse has successfully represented Kim since 2013, hosting shows in his New York and London galleries and at art fairs throughout the United States and Europe, placing Kim’s work in many collections in the U.S. South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia.
Most recently, Kim’s collaboration with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen can be viewed in an exhibition at The Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, Paris until April 28, 2024.
Sarita Westrup
Presented by Erin Cluley Gallery
Booth 1216
Reflecting on memories of growing up in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border, Dallas-based fiber artist Sarita Westrup translates border culture sensibilities into her practice of experimental weaving. Westrup’s basketry mimics corporeal forms: at times her work is fully open and materially transparent while at other times closed off to the surrounding environment. Balancing secrecy and openness, the artist’s woven structures recall connections between plants, animals, and other living things.
Referencing the imposing walls and fences along the border of South Texas, her work imagines migratory bodies in abstract forms; by crafting fenced patterns and enclosed structures, she creates channels and passageways out of impermeable places. In doing so, Westrup creates a dynamic visual language of and for the borderlands.
As she crossed the border into Mexico, Westrup saw agave plants, rocks smoothed by the Rio Grande, and the raw concrete of immigration checkpoints. These childhood memories surface within the artist’s chosen media of metal, mortar, reed, and Tampico fibers. Traditional North and Central American processes are also employed with cochineal, a vibrant dye derived from crushed cochineal insects. The use of baskets – a domestic tool meant for transporting and cradling – conveys tenderness and concepts of home.
Nikoleta Sekulovic
Presented by Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery
Booth 206
The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery will debut an outstanding new body of work by Madrid-based painter, Nikoleta Sekulovic. Previously recognised for her muted palette and economy of line in describing the nude female form, these new works establish clothed subjects in richly decorated contexts and elegant period dress.
Sekulovic’s imaginative surfaces engage with the notion of identity in a profound and symbolic way. Each piece is an act of homage to a poet, painter or philosopher; from the Victorian mathematician, Countess Ada Lovelace, to the New Zealand suffragette, Kate Sheppard.
At Art Palm Beach, the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery will unveil Sekulovic’s first ever male subject: the esteemed British writer and author of Howard’s End (1910) and A Room with a View (1908), E.M. Forster.
The artist’s paintings are imbued with a sense of contemporary craftsmanship that recalls Pre- Raphaelite design philosophy. The iconic legacy of Victorian artist, poet and social activist, William Morris, is a pertinent fount of inspiration. Through her artful transcription of Morris’s original floral designs, and through her inscription of carefully-selected verses of poetry on to the back of her canvases, she celebrates – and connects with – the moral and intellectual ideals of her subjects, whilst binding them to her own distinctive vision.
Nikoleta Sekulovic is an internationally acclaimed painter. Her work has been shown extensively across Europe, the US and Asia, including three solo exhibitions at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in London. Her work is held in numerous private collections across the globe.
2023
Bruce Helander
Presented by Paul Fisher Gallery
Booth 1101
Florida Artists Hall of Famer Bruce Helander will debut his new collection of colorful collages and paintings from his “Billboard Series” that explores the aesthetic tradition of American billboard imagery and its artistic communicative purpose. Curated by celebrated British art critic Anthony Haden-Guest, Helander’s special exhibit at the Paul Fisher Gallery will feature numerous captivating works that incorporate the tradition of outdoor advertisement depictions, which originally were hand-painted by commercial artists who stood precariously on scaffolding while holding a bucket of paint in one hand and a brush in the other.
Helander had a special introduction to sign painting as a youth in his family’s grocery store, where while he stocked shelves, he often observed billboard painters laboring across the street. In this layout, two workers in white overalls diligently “build” a complicated arrangement from a maquette held by a painter as a guideline for the composition. The unfinished background is a cubist inspired abstract pattern that continues from the top to the bottom as the rope scaffolding is lowered or raised, depending on the area to be painted. The configuration is spatially enhanced further by the three-dimensional juxtaposition of the giant outdoor billboard high above a commercial building in Times Square.
Other works in the exhibit include “Pleasure Bound,” a refurbished billboard painting of a family traveling in a classic convertible car to a drive-in movie, featuring “Palm Beach or Bust!” stenciled on the rear bumper. Other works on view commemorate the American tradition of artists such as Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali who also created advertising imagery.
Duncan McCormick
Presented by Waterhouse & Dodd
Booth 800
Duncan Robert McCormick is a Shropshire based artist with strong links to Birmingham and London. He has works in both private and corporate collections and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. This includes twelve pieces in the Morgan Stanley collection on long term display at their Canary Wharf premises.
After two decades of working predominantly in oils, McCormick started using acrylic paint as his medium of choice during the lock-down period. At the same time his work saw a shift away from his previous narrative-based work to gentle landscapes and interiors as a means of escapism.
This proved to be very popular with his audiences and a strong personal draw. His work continues to develop the same theme post-lock-down. Some of McCormick’s influences are clear, such as David Hockney and Peter Doig. Other, less direct, influences include Howard Hodgkin, Louis Le Brocquy, and Pierre Bonnard.
McCormick’s palette is heavily influenced by a period living and working in Barcelona. Above all, he views his art as a means to communicate positivity and share in the triumph of color.
Albert Willem
Presented by Waterhouse & Dodd
Booth 808
Albert Willem is a contemporary figurative artist who lives and works in Brussels. He is best known for his naïve-styled paintings, rich with wit and humour, with a folksy and infantile element to their composition. His subjects are generally light-hearted, deliberately avoiding profound themes, with twists of the humour that is integral to Willem’s practice.
Circus
Presented by Cavalier Gallery
Booth 334
In Bjørn Okholm Skaarup’s grand “Circus” installation, the animals themselves are running the show.
Comprised of 33 sculptures, the installation is inspired by the late-nineteenth century circus where costumes, banners, and colors created a neo-baroque symphony of larger-than-life forms and displays. Each sculpture within the installation highlights the spectacle of color and movement celebrated by a menagerie several years in the making.
In the artist’s contemporary bestiary, or classical book of animals in bronze, each sculpture presents a whimsical story or allegory to decipher, with sources ranging from ancient fables and art history to music and modern animation.
The Rock J. Walker M.C. Escher Collection
Presented by Walker Fine Art
Booth 1106
The late Dutch artist, M.C. Escher (1898 to 1972) is well-known for his woodcuts and lithographs such as Day and Night, Sky and Water I, Drawing Hands, Waterfall, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, and Puddle.
Such images adorn the walls of college dormitories and of major museum exhibitions, and are familiar to collectors of all ages. However, largely unknown are his drawings and watercolors, and the original woodblocks used for printing. He never offered these unique works for sale and it was only when select works from his estate were made available that they came to light.
This curated selection of the total collection consists of over 400 original works by the artist acquired over four decades. The Rock J. Walker collection is the second largest of the three comprehensive Escher collections that remain in private hands, it has been exhibited in a number of United States cities and Europe during the past three decades, most recently in New York at Industry City. It comprises works in all mediums and from all periods of the artist’s career, it is especially strong in unique works.
Above all, this assemblage contains an abundance of what made Escher famous. Tessellations, geometric figures, and impossible structures were the recurring themes in Escher’s oeuvre.
All M.C. Escher’s Works and Text © The M.C. Escher Company, Baarn, The Netherlands. All Rights Reserved. M.C. Escher ® is a Registered Trademark.
Raintype by Lorenzo Marini
Presented by Evan Lurie Gallery
Booth 206/307
This immersive installation, by Lorenzo Marini, is inspired by a rainy day. Only here the drops of rain never fall, but remain suspended in a linguistic universe waiting to be discovered. Letters only become such when joined with other letters and take the form of the word. They acquire meaning in their linear composition. In this work of art, the letters never touch land, but remain in the world of ideas, of the possible, of the potential. They are in no hurry to touch the ground, they are in no hurry to become a word, a sentence, a discourse. They love the freedom of space and the suspension of time. They aspire to become fragments of eternity.
Moss Giants
Presented by Galerie Fledermaus
In the 2022 edition of Utopia, Lille’s culture and arts triennial, Kim Simonsson’s famed Moss People re-emerged as Giants and transformed the city-center of Lille, France into a breath-taking work of public art for the 6th grand thematic edition of lille3000.
Now, for the very first time, two Moss Giants will be exhibited stateside at Art Palm Beach.
As they were initially conceived by Kim Simonsson, the Moss People are wanderers from the Nordic forests. They are gatherers wearing foraged clothes and footwear meant to protect them from the elements and hide them in the woods. Like migratory birds, they move from one place to another, each with a drive to find their own purpose. Through a narrative that weaves between the real world and the supernatural, these strange and rare elves draw us into the heart of the Taiga— those dense northern forests rich in tales of the imagination.
The narrative arc of the Moss People is essentially never ending; with each new edition to the series, their story continues— now, it’s scaled up.
The Doctor
Booth 218/319
The Philosopher
Booth 212/313