Coinciding with Art Basel Week 2024, Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami just opened “always vacationing among flamingos”, a solo exhibition by the artist collective assume vivid astro focus (avaf). The show features eight new, vibrantly colored paintings that immerse viewers with their scale, texture, and dynamic hues. Founded in 2001, avaf explores themes of gender, politics, and cultural codes through multimedia projects, often breaking down boundaries between the viewer, space, and artwork. In this exhibition, avaf shifts focus to painting, a medium they’ve explored for over a decade, emphasizing color as a universal language for healing and energy. The new works integrate botanical motifs, particularly from subtropical environments, adding organic elements like orchids into their signature abstract style. The paintings also play with texture, layering materials to create a sense of dimensionality that challenges the boundaries of the rectangular canvas.
Avaf’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP); Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, Oslo; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL, among others. Currently, the artist collective has also a solo exhibition titled “XI” at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach.
Assume Vivid Astro Focus: Always Vacationing Among Flamingos / Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami. December 1, 2024.
PS: Also on display at Fredric Snitzer Gallery is SPORE, an outdoor sculptural work by Troy Simmons.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Fredric Snitzer Gallery is pleased to present always vacationing among flamingos, a solo exhibition by assume vivid astro focus. This exhibition features eight vibrantly hued, effervescent new paintings by the artist collective. Created in a manner where the viewer becomes the centerpiece, these paintings envelop the senses with scale, a vast spectrum of color, and textures.
Founded in 2001, assume vivid astro focus (avaf) is an artist collective that can take on different formations and collaborators depending on the projects they are involved in. Past projects contain various media, including installation, paintings, tapestry, neon, video, wallpaper, sculpture, and performance. The collective’s work often examines themes of gender, politics, and cultural codes through a kaleidoscope of bold shapes and colors. At the heart of avaf’s projects lies the concept of inclusivity, where art becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) that dissolves boundaries between the viewer, the space, and the artwork itself.
For this exhibition, paintings become the focal point, a part of avaf’s practice that has spanned 10 years. In contrast with previous iterations of their work, even within their earlier presentations with the gallery, this exhibition starkly contrasts the abundantly sensorial, immersive installation experiences for one focused and isolated within the pictorial plane.
avaf explores the interplay between color as a universal language and its capacity to heal and energize. Drawing from the artist’s uniquely produced palettes, a system that they have employed to produce over 1,400 color tones, the new works aim to create a tactile and emotional connection between the viewer and the work. These colors also mimic the luminosity of our daily interaction with digital screens or devices, which parallels how the artwork is conceived – digitally manifested and with the base of the composition pulled from previously produced motifs, a way of looking back to look forward.
What separates this newest series of paintings from previous iterations is the emergence of botanical motifs that introduce organic elements that evoke the lush vibrancy of subtropical environments, including the intricate structures of orchids. Plants have always been part of avaf’s working and home environments, another element that the artist finds energizes a space, a parallel to their beliefs regarding color as a tool of energy or healing. These natural forms bring a new dimension to the collective’s artistic language, blending the vitality of nature with their signature layered abstract shapes.
This sensorial experience is complimented by a push-pull of textural elements within each painting. These negotiations of dimensionality are made possible through the actions of building up and removing layers of the physical paper. The action of tearing away to reveal the underlayer of corrugation is coupled with various paint applications, contrasting between rough and smooth, flat and protruding. When looking at the works as a whole, there is an evident progression and an increased awareness of expanding outside the rectangular format’s confines. Flatness expands to texture, which pushes into two-dimensionality that flirts outside the confines of the rectangle and ultimately results in one completely rounded artwork. What results feels otherworldly, an electrifyingly exuberant portal of flora and fauna.
