Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Art Basel in Miami Beach 2015

Through the story of their lives, their imagination and fantasy, their work is a search and a quest
of their own past, and they link it to our contemporary reality. The Gallery will also be presenting Cuba, 1962, Agnès Varda’s Cuban vintage photographs in a Kabinett section.
Some of the works that will be shown are directly associated to the specific relationship between
the United States and Cuba. They also explore the taboos related to the Cuban and
Afro-American past and recent history.
For this edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the Gallery will be showing Agnès Varda’s unpublished project grouped in a Kabinett section, a series of vintage photographs taken in Cuba after the
Revolution, between 1962 and 1963. The artist took around 2000 photographs during her
journey and she is thus part of the major French photographers who have documented a Cuban iconography, the post-revolutionary atmosphere and the upcoming harsh
awakening to come. This series will be showed in parallel to the VARDA/CUBA exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, unveiling new perspectives on post-revolutionary Cuba.

Ricardo Brey was discovered in 1990 by Jan Hoet during the third Havana Biennial and is now considered as a major artist of the New Cuban Art. More than twenty years after his departure
from Cuba to Belgium, the artist reties with his country of origin, heir of afro-Cuban faiths tinged with animism. He will be showing “Birdland”, a piece also displayed at the MUHKA Museum
in Antwerp in 2015. The artist’s creations are extremely spiritual. Life and death are depicted
alongside in a totemic dimension. His works are a mix between Cuban and Belgian objects.
Both cultures therefore coexist in an atmosphere in which Nature holds the major place.
Andres Serrano travelled to Cuba during the summer of 2012. Jorge Fernandez who manages
the Havana Biennial invited him to show his works where the artist dive back into his Afro-Cuban
roots. In his works, the artist shows Cuba in a contemplative way, especially through a series of portraits of the Cuban people, who seem to be above all historical, political and social issues.
The Gallery will be showing this series, which has not yet been presented in the United States,
in which Cuba, between magnificence and decline, displays all its charm and beauty.
Lorna Simpson is an Afro-American artist who comes from a family that was deeply engaged in the fight against racial segregation. With her Photobooth, she found abandoned ID photos
and arranged them in the way of a family tree. To represent the missing people in history, the forgotten and abandoned, she showed them through bronze squares instead of photographs
like the other members of the family. The artist, in her work, dives into the issue of cultural
identity and especially into the history and issues related to the Afro-American people.
Agnès Varda will be showing her work through the solo show VARDA/CUBA at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until February 2016. Ricardo Brey, whose artworks were displayed during his retrospective “Fuel to the fire forms” at the MUHKA Museum in Antwerp in 2015, also took part to the 56th Venice Biennial through the “All the World’s futures” exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Andres Serrano will be exhibited through two major retrospectives in 2016 at the Royal Museum of Brussels and at the European House of Photography in Paris. Venice Biennial also comprised of works by Lorna Simpson, who was previously exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2013), at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2013), at the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art at Gateshead (UK) and at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, USA (2014).