For the third week of FAIR, artist Sara VanDerBeek shares a selection of her favorite artworks on view. 

“Inspired by the work of Fatima Rodrigo presented by Livia Benavides 80m2 Lima, I have selected works that explore physical and emotional acts of interpretation and abstraction. Rodrigo’s Sentimental Geometry, 2020, powerfully embodies this in its compelling use of materials, pattern, and form. Significantly it is also the artist’s physical efforts to render and portray the continually shifting nature of our world that gives this work, and those of the other artists selected here their resonance.

For many of my chosen works, such as Jason Revok’s Kundalini Loop_B/Y/P_4/20, 2020 and Sanou Oumar’s 06/19/2019, 2019 at Gordon Robichaux I was inspired by the strength of the artist’s presence as expressed in the unique realizations of metamorphic surfaces and visual accumulations of imagery both representational and abstract.

For others I chose works that were powerful in their humor or seemed like pure pleasure to create, such as Nel Figueroa’s Subitamenta en una Mesa, 2020 and Adelina Ivan’s Two Points of One’s Own, 2019.

Lastly, I chose works with a mixing of bodies, and bodily forms with inventive spaces and species such as Lydia Maria Pfeffer’s Baby Dragon strapped to my belly, 2018 and Maryam Haseini’s Towards Yes Towards No, 2017, that spoke to the dreamlike realm of a shared subconscious flickering with images of light and loss.
 
As an artist and a former Vice President of NADA, I am deeply indebted to the founders of NADA, Heather Hubbs and NADA as a growing international community not only for the support it provided me starting in 2003 when I was simultaneously a young gallery co-owner and an emerging artist figuring out my practice, but also for the ongoing education it has provided me throughout my career and engagements as an artist and educator in NY since. The cooperative  nature of FAIR is another testament to the innovation and civic nature of NADA. I have been moved and inspired by all of the work presented here and by the collective spirit of the entire endeavor. It is heartening and I hope that this model that formed out of a crisis can evolve and be implemented in the future to ensure the collective communities, in and around NADA will survive and thrive. I look forward to engaging with the next iterations and events NADA will present during this incredible moment of transition and transformation for the global art community, and our larger societies.”

Sara VanDerBeek was born in Baltimore in 1976 and lives and works in New York. She has had one-person exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Recent group exhibitions include New Visions, Photo Triennial 2020, at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway and VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek, curated by Sara VanDerBeek and Chelsea Spengemann and featuring work by both Sara VanDerBeek and her father, pioneering film and video artist Stan VanDerBeek who studied at Black Mountain College at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina.