Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Carpinteros, Kosmaj Toy (2012).

All images by A.M. Ekstrand for ArtObserved, on location at Art Basel Miami Beach Fair.

Art Basel returned once again in Miami Beach this past week for the 11th annual Art Basel Miami Beach Fair. Featuring over 300 galleries representing 36 countries around the world, the show has exhibited marked growth from last year’s event, with well over 2,000 artists flocking to exhibit at what has become the internationally-renowned closing party for the world art market each year.  It is of course always an irony that tens of thousands will fly down for the events and parties, with many of them never visiting the vast aggregation of what it said to be roughly $1.5 billion worth of art in one (large) room, a collection that few museums in the world could compete with.   Below is a selection of some of the works we thought to be notable from the fair.

Helly Nahmad Gallery, Mark Rothko No. 1 (1957) and Alexander Calder, installation view

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Los Carpinteros  Güiro – Pop up bar on the Beach – All photos in this post by Art Observed

The events surrounding Art Basel Miami Beach have grown noticeably in the past few years, thankfully so has the pixel count in the latest issue cell phone cameras of our Art Observed staff on site (though some photos below seem to belie this capability). Below is a selection of some of the people, art, cars-as-art, parties and events we tweeted and instagrammed live during the week @ArtObserved, in case you missed it.

Azealia Banks at the Standard Hotel for Terrywood on Friday Night

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Los Carpinteros, Cuarteto Rebelde (2012). All images courtesy of Kunstmuseum Thum.

Los Carpinteros, the Cuban artist duo, are currently showing Silence Your Eyes at the Kunstmuseum Thun as their first show in Switzerland. The pair consists of Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, and formerly had a third member, Alexandre Arrechea. They studied at the Art Academy in Havana, earning their name (carpenters) by creating large wooden sculptures from the readily available material. Many of their works employ architectural and design oriented themes, such as urban buildings and furniture, which are then shown in an exaggerated manner. Such themes are used to highlight the overlap between the private and the public and political realms. The inventiveness of the works belies their engagement with “politically charged” topics.

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Installation view of Los Carpinteros: Rumba Muerta at Sean Kelly Gallery.  All images via Sean Kelly Gallery

Currently on view at Sean Kelly Gallery is the project Rumba Muerta by artist duo Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez a.k.a. Los Carpinteros.  The duo was formed in 1991 (along with then-collaborator Alexandre Arrechea) and the artists choose to work under the name Los Carpinteros in order to renounce the socially problematic ideology of individual authorship.  Instead, the collective name evokes the cultural tradition of skilled artisans—in this case, carpentry.  Indeed, the notion of craft is crucial to their practice, as is that of design.  With Rumba Muerta Los Carpinteros incorporate aspects of architecture, design, and sculpture to create installations and drawings which seek to negotiate the divide between inhabited spaces, social consciousness, and non-functional art objects.

More text and images after the jump…

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Via Estuaire 2007

Once a center of naval activity, the newest and certainly most eye-catching bateau on France’s Loire estuary is armored with a shell of mirrors, reflecting the riverbank’s factories, natural marshes… and resident gigantic floating plastic duck? Florentijn Hofman’s “Canard du Bain”, a titanic incarnation of every child’s favorite yellow bath time friend is absurdly placed within a dingy, industrial habitat. A cartoon-like beacon, the river-bound sculpture injects a certain lightheartedness into the milieu. If it were not so innocent looking, its size would suggest that it could wipe out a nearby cluster of sailboats in a single gulp. (more…)