Meridians

Almine Rech is pleased to announce Oliver Beer's participation in Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians with a new video installation entitled, Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR), 2023.

Oliver Beer explores the hidden acoustic properties of bodies through this new work entitled Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR), 2023, which is a development of his celebrated work Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me), 2018. This video installation consists of two performative films presented as a diptych on two large LED screens. The films feature two percussionists (as male and female counterparts) each using the other’s face as a percussion instrument to explore the different tonalities of the face through a gradual build-up of gestures, from gentle touches to more powerful contact, as a way to create rhythms and musicality through the body. The piece is at once tender and unsettling, the intensity also viscerally present in the moments of stillness.

Oliver Beer
Booth M4

Oliver Beer, Still from Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR), 2023 / © Oliver Beer - Photo: Oliver Beer Studio. 

Almine Rech is pleased to announce Hew Locke's participation in Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians with a sculptural installation entitled, Gilt, 2022.

Gilt, 2022 is the third in a series of commissions for The Met’s historic facade. Borrowing the format of trophies — emblems of competition and victory — Hew Locke created four sculptures that reflect on the exercise and representation of power. Like the facade of the building they adorn, when seen from a different angle, they are shown to be facades or fakes themselves. These works feature objects in The Met collection with interesting provenances, many rendered unfamiliar through appropriation, fragmentation, and recombination. Relying on an aesthetic of excess and artifice, Gilt leverages the relationship between guilt and gold across 3,000 years of art history, exploring the routes objects travel over time as well as the material and symbolic values that accrue to them as they change hands.

Hew Locke
Booth M3

© Hew Locke; Hales Gallery, London; and PPOW, New York / Photo credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen