From today, December 4 through 7, 2014, Dominique Lévy will present the exhibition TRUE GRIT at Art Basel Miami Beach. With significant works created from the 1970s through the 1990s, the show is inspired by the potent themes that transformed Charles Portis' 1968 novel True Grit - and the 1969 Academy Award-winning film based upon it - into bona fide milestones of American popular culture celebrated worldwide. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, and photography by Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Gilbert & George, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Peter Regli, Thomas Schütte, Kazuo Shiraga, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool.
The original story of Portis' True Grit is told from the perspective of an Arkansas woman named Mattie Ross, who recounts the time when she was 14 years old and in search of retribution for the murder of her father by a scoundrel named Tom Chaney. She is aided in her quest by the tough U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn and a young Texas Ranger called LeBoeuf, unlikely cohorts who nevertheless share with Mattie a single defining trait: "grit." Literally a collection of small, hard, abrasive materials such as dirt, ground stone, debris, and the coarse surface of sandpaper, "grit" is also a marked steeliness of character - a mixture of determination, fearlessness invincible spirit, and willingness to be society's outsider for the sake of a goal.
TRUE GRIT at Art Basel Miami Beach focuses on interrelated thematic threads harkening back to both definitions of the word "grit", to unrefined materials and the archetype of the outsider. In a strictly black, white, and red color palette, the works on view have evolved specifically from artistic attitudes of true grit - unwavering consistency, fearlessness, and the willingness to tread untested turf conceptually and materially.
Among TRUE GRIT's highlights are works made by Gilbert & George, David Hammons, and Keith Haring via materials and techniques that exude the grittiness of the pre-gentrification streets London's East End ("The London Nobody Knows") and New York's East Village and Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s. Also on view are daring explorations of tough, untested industrial materials, such as Alberto Burri's visionary experiments with acrovinyl and cellotex to create the "Crettos" that resemble the cracked surface of a desert floor. Günther Uecker's obsessive hammering of oversized nails onto the picture plane and Frank Stella's determinedly hand-built works from scraps of metal, industrial detritus, and car paint - rusty and sharp-edged - are primary examples of rough material investigation. Richard Prince, Sigmar Polke, and Christopher Wool have channeled the tough ethos of the of the streets with spray paint; Andy Warhol's glitter-splattered "Diamond Dust Shoes" nods to the dark, hardened heart of a seductive downtown disco scene; and Richard Serra's heavily applied paintstick drawings suggest an artist as craggy and indomitable as Portis' Rooster Cogburn. Perhaps the pivotal work of the exhibition is Barbara Kruger's large-scale photographic work "Cuando ellos hacen negocios hacen historia," with its transgressive mantra linking business and history with the mise-en-scène of TRUE GRIT.
Gilbert & George declared in the 1980s, "We want to be completely outside with-whatyoucall-hooligans and tramps." TRUE GRIT offers a glimpse of a group of exceptional artists' explorations of the dark hero's embrace of Portis' declaration that "outside is a place for shooting."
