Yesterday, Design Center of the Americas’ director of design services and design professionals, Alex Matamoros, shared his recent experience at Art Wynwood, Miami's recent International Contemporary Art Fair. Here's more from Alex about what he loved most during his day at the fair.
By Alex Matamoros
It's hard to pick favorites out of a sea of amazing art, but eventually it was clear that several certainly stood out from the crowd. Augusto Esquivel's Now Contemporary Art Gallery is the first on my list! This amazing artist was born in Argentina, and he arranges simple buttons and monofilaments into amazing sculptures.
Augusto has said, "I realize how insignificant and small a simple sewing button can be as it lays in my grandmother’s sewing box, but at the same time how unique and precious it can become as part of a work of art. Like an atom in a molecule, each button serves and shapes the whole. I hold the button to my ear and it whispers to me, ‘I want to be...'"
Michael Eastman's Barry Friedman Ltd. is another on my list. One of the collections on display from Michael was his series of pictures of Cuba. I love the look of the old mansions after 50-plus years of little to no maintenance. The rich and famous used to live in these homes, and now they are occupied by multiple families.
Michael is one of the world's leading contemporary photographic artists, and he happens to be a self-taught photographer who spent four decades documenting interiors and facades in cities as diverse as Havana, Paris, Rome, and New Orleans, producing large-scale photographs unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color. He is most recognized for his explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay, which create mysterious narratives about time and place—but I love him for all of it!
