Booth installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman
VIP: June 17, 2025
Vernissage: June 18, 2025
Public Days: June 19 — 22, 2025
For Vielmetter Los Angeles’s 15th year participating in Art Basel, the gallery features a focused presentation of paintings by Patrick Wilson together with a selection of new works by Whitney Bedford, April Bey, Tonia Calderon, Kim DeJesus, Robert Pruitt, Nate Lewis and Rodney McMillian.
Anchoring the booth is a suite of hard-edge abstract paintings by Patrick Wilson. These subliminal portals of varying gradients and hues are rooted in Wilson’s color theory of logic and harmony, the conceptual gesture of the rectangle becoming sculptural as much as a picture-within–a-picture. Whitney Bedford’s detailed depictions of cactuses, weeping willows, palm trees and other California flora rendered in oil and ink are foregrounded against abstracted homages to historical landscape paintings. Bedford’s intricate trees are stand-ins for members of the artist’s family and herself, resituating the legacy of these male artists within the horizon line of Bedford’s own ancestry and studio architecture.
Tonia Calderon’s paintings explore time and nature through dense abstract color fields inspired by her deep love of poetry. Her acrylic flourishes glisten with engine fuel, glass, ink, plant pigments, and resin, marrying the detritus of the modern world with floral atmospheres. Likewise, Nate Lewis’s intricate works on paper are sculpted from paper, pulling back individual layers to create a dimensionality that recalls topographic maps or animal hides. The abstracted, hand drawn forms in graphite and ink, interspersed with frottage techniques, embossing and other printing techniques are equally inspired by music and capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian spiritual martial-arts practice which doubles as a defense and a dance technique.
The gallery will also present a rare still life painting by Rodney McMillian. McMillian’s work explores how the political, the domestic, and the personal intersect and manifest in the body. Over the past two decades, his intimate still life paintings have threaded through his reflections on the landscape and how its representation is fundamentally intertwined with and shaped by politics and history. These unique works stand out in his diverse artistic practice, encouraging reflections on Black citizenship and historical impacts.
Robert Pruitt’s portraits are otherworldly depictions of extraordinary Black life and mythology. Nestled in coffee-washes, Pruitt’s large-scale figurations in conté, charcoal, and pastel combine a series of experiences and material references, denoting a diverse and radical Black past, present, and future. Pruitt often references religion, spirituality, comic books and symbolic objects throughout his work as a means of exploring a Black American conception of transcendence and mythology.
Kim DeJesus’ iridescent paintings probe impermanence through memory and perception. These psychedelic collisions of pigment harness abstraction’s penchant for the poetic, suggesting spiritual reckonings beyond the conscious realm.
