The new project of Sanlorenzo Arts at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

On display in the Sanlorenzo Lounge in Art Basel Collectors Lounge is a commissioned work by American artist #mcarthurbinion. 

“Cobalto” by #mcarthurbinion - curated by Flash Art

Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

Collectors Lounge

2-4 December 2021 

Sanlorenzo reaffirms its presence at Art Basel, the most significant modern and #contemporaryart fair on the international scene. A collaboration began in 2018 with the signing of the global partnership agreement for the annual appointments in Hong, Basel and Miami Beach, born from the desire to bring new creative languages on board and seek an active bond with the art world. 

In 2021 the company reinforces its path aimed to support creativity and #contemporaryart by launching Sanlorenzo Arts, wich on the occasion of #artbaselmiamibeach 2021 presents a new project with the American artist #mcarthurbinion. 

Presented for the first time during Art Basel in Basel 2021, Sanlorenzo Arts is a platform dedicated to navigating the complexity of the present through creativity, also in its most innovative sides. It is an active and interactive channel for projects, related to the world of art and design, that addresses the most topical issues in the most original and resourceful ways, thanks to the sensitivity of artists, designers, thinkers and creatives. #sanlorenzo Arts has embarked on a journey of discovery and surprise, of continuous encounters, encouraging the construction of meaning and value, ready to set sail for new latitudes.

As part of this innovative journey, #sanlorenzo Arts has invited Flash Art, the iconic international #contemporaryart magazine, and its global network of curators, artists and thinkers, to conduct a dialogue between the art world and the #sanlorenzo brand. 

For #sanlorenzo, Binion conceived the site-specific work "Cobalto", presented inside the #sanlorenzo Lounge, which will be part of his “DNA” series, a body of work he began working on in 2013.

Binion's work combines collage, drawing and painting to create autobiographical abstractions. Using the scale of his own body, he builds compositions from vivid, geometric patterns, chained by a grid. Up close, the painting reveals a substrate of closely juxtaposed and rhythmically arranged copies of personal documents: pages from the artist's address book, his birth certificate and photos of his childhood home in Mississippi. 

McArthur Binion's “DNA” series of paintings is an index of time, work and identity that repurposes the minimalist grid to investigate a deeply personal narrative. Binion's essential combination of colour and form compresses a wide range of influences-personal history, relationships, writings and memories-all absorbed during a lifetime dedicated to the making. 

Offering an in-depth formal analysis and contextualising his trajectory within the interdisciplinary cultural scenes of New York and Chicago, McArthur Binion's “DNA” provides insight into the rigorous and experimental spirit that has defined the artist's wider practice and illuminates his place within a critical history of abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

For this specific work, the choice of Italian ink, which retains its original name Cobalt, is the connection between the artist's practice and the deeper, unknown marine world of #sanlorenzo. 

On 1 December 2021 at 11 a.m. at their Lounge, #sanlorenzo has organised a presentation event for McArthur Binion who, in dialogue with the curator of the Perez Art Museum Miami Maria Elena Ortiz, will talk about his artistic practice. 

The collaboration between #sanlorenzo and Art Basel is part of a coherent path that has seen the company collaborate, since 2017, with important Galleries and cultural institutions with the intention of creating inspirational encounters and seeking an active and never predictable link with the art world. As of 2020, #sanlorenzo is also Institutional Patron of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the most important museum in Italy for 20th century European and American art. 

McArthur Binion

McArthur Binion was born in 1946 in Macon, Mississippi; he currently lives and works in Chicago.

Since the 1970s, Binion has seen an alternative to Minimalist art through a personal philosophy within which he explores pictorial grids fused with personal memories intertwined with historical memories related to his experience of America's past, all layered using paint and personal memorabilia on the surface of the work.

Binion's works are deeply personal. The obsessive and exhaustive process of handwork is consistent with the traces of grids that dominate the board. The artist fuses his own documents with the canvas before applying a layer of oil paint. In doing so, he affirms his existence, considering that the layers of paint link his experience with authority and the art world in the United States.

McArthur Binion is represented by Massimo De Carlo, Milan, London, Hong Kong, Paris; Richard Gray, Chicago, New York and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, London.