Welcome to the world’s glitziest (and campest) art fair: Art Basel Miami Beach. Hot on the heels of Art Basel Paris, this year’s Floridian outing promises a sizeable contingent of historical and contemporary queer art, spanning surrealist, non-binary artist Claude Cahun all the way through to radical trans collagist Ebun Sodipo.
Of course, where there’s an art fair, there’ll be queer representation in 2024. In this spirit, Art Basel has put its Nova section to good use – here, emerging galleries focus on new work from up to three particular artists – spotlighting everyone from the Olly Shinder-modelling artist Michael Ho, to Tumblr heroine-turned-radical-art-DJ Juliana Huxtable, whose name you might recognise from Berghain or the cooler dance festival line-ups.
Elsewhere, a section called Survey hones in on pre-millennium works that bear newfound relevance today, such as Claude Cahun’s.The Kabinett section offers blue-chip galleries an opportunity to dedicate part of their booth to a specific showcase, such as P·P·O·W’s focus on Manuel Pardo, the gaudy gay obsessed with elaborate depictions of his mother and flowers.
As the dust settles in the art world following Dean Kissick’s viral lament – “descriptions of work are dominated by the language of decolonial or queer theory,” he moans – we’ve doubled down on the latter. Sorry!
Tellingly, Wendy Olsoff, the co-founder of New York stalwart and underdog champion P·P·O·W gallery sits on the board for Art Basel’s Miami Beach selection committee. If that means buyers such as Bernard Arnault or François-Henri Pinault pick up a brick-worked cock painting, then so be it. Miami is here and queer for the foreseeable. These are just some of the names to look out for…
Manuel Pardo, P·P·O·W Gallery
A vision of camp, the late Cuban artist’s paintings – delicately lined and blocked-out in brash tones of cerise and fuschia – riff on stereotypes to present something highly stylised, albeit cartoonish. The thinking went that, if gay men are clichéd for their dedication to women as hairstylists, designers or make-up artists, then Manuel would up the ante, embracing his status as a mummy’s boy.
Across his works, his mother Gladys is reimagined in dollface dresses, complete with sweetheart necklines and fifties patterns – polka dots (Untitled, Stardust, 2007), daisies (Untitled, Stardust, 2006) or dainty florals (Mother and i in Technicolor, 1995).
Manuel – who passed away in 2012 – and had spent years living in New York as a respected artist, was an easy fit for P·P·O·W given the gallery’s USP of showing 20th century New York art.
“While there are obvious ties to artists like David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong and Hunter Reynolds in terms of the radical portrayal of queer fantasies,” Wendy Olsoff says, “Pardo’s work goes beyond the obvious, as he was an artist who was primarily fixated on imagining alternate universes that function as doubles for our present time,” she adds.
Looking at Manuel’s wider works, you’ll also notice motifs specific to his life experiences as a gay man living through the AIDS crisis. “It was Pardo’s decision to focus his attention and career on envisioning lush alternate worlds, while still encouraging realistic safe sex practices through his imagery, that made his response to the epidemic so singular,” says Isaac Alpert, P·P·O·W’s director of estates.