Lines Between Decorative and Fine Art Increasingly Blurred, as Examples Abound at Context Art Miami

Context Art Miami, the newest space under the Art Miami umbrella, is championing art that blurs the boundary between created and artisanal works — part of a trend that sees less distinction between ‘artisanal’ and ‘fine’ art.The standard line between art or decoration has generally been said to be the process of manufacture, with mass production being the defining quality of a decorative object. Yet leading artists — most famously Jeff Koons — have been pairing with manufacturers and studios for years, relegating the process of producing their work, painting including, to studio artisans. Now with the advent of digital technology, the line between authored and manufactured, decorative and fine art has become even more hazy. Marcello Silvestre, ‘Everybody’s Got an Armor.’ Courtesy Gallery EspinasseContext Miami has a number of works that fit into this intriguing new grey area. Gallery Espinasse 31 from Milan features a wooden sculpture by architect Marcello Silvestre, rendered digitally and built entirely with a robot. Silvestre is one of several sculptors at this year’s fair to harness the deeply impersonal qualities of digital technology to create something ominous. Purportedly about his psychic armoring as a child, his work harnesses the metaphor of technology and repurposes it as analogy for impermeability. Richard Orlinski, arguably today’s most successful contemporary artist from France, similarly creates computer-rendered 3D-printed sculptures of PAC-MAN, King Kong, and other pop culture icons in ultra-bright colors. This year’s fair features his stainless-steel slat sculptures of Kong, all of them manufactured and assembled at a special foundry. Mr. Orlinski’s sculptures work on the level of scale, they give you the notion of magically enlarged toys, while his slat sculptures have an interesting kinetic quality activated by movement. No doubt his relentless self-promotion and pop celebrity lifestyle are also a factor.Richard Orlinski, ‘Invisible Kong.’ Galeries BartouxThere are also works produced by collaborative studios. The cast resin sculptures of Berd Vaye’, showing for the first time at this year’s Context Art Miami are a throwback to an earlier, bespoke era. The product of a collaborative duo, Edward Kurayev and Albert Akbashev, their work suspends watch gears from antique watches in Lucite, like insects in amber, creating an arresting surreal perspective on the nature of time. Mr. Kurayev, the watch dealer and mastermind behind this line of sculptural objects, also configures the gears into shapes, such as an intricate three-dimensional skull, a nod to the traditional memento mori. Mr. Kurayev’s design melds two paradoxical aspects of time — its forward momentum and timeless present — into a single arresting visual analogy.Mo Cornelisse, ‘Lost Toys.’ Courtesy of Art_020 gallery The digitally designed toy sculptures of Mo Cornelisse from Art_020, Amsterdam, are yet another example of works that combine artisanal manufacture, contemporary processes, and elements of kitcsch. Her gold and porcelain toys speak to a world that thrives on childhood twee nostalgia while being continuously fed into an automated and digitally-driven world. They recall the earlier works of Mike Kelley, who famously stitched together found toys into composite sculptures that spoke in a similar fashion to childhood and alienation. All of these works are new examples of how leading art fairs are including works that soften the idea of authorship in art, as well as old lines separating the decorative from fine art. They also speak to the necessity, in a world that is both increasingly digitally automated, manufactured and bespoke, to rethink how the intriguing and beautiful things around us originate.

Lines Between Decorative and Fine Art Increasingly Blurred, as Examples Abound at Context Art Miami

Lines Between Decorative and Fine Art Increasingly Blurred, as Examples Abound at Context Art Miami

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