Newly transformed space unveiled with solo exhibitions by Ugo Rondinone, Mika Rottenberg and Pascale Marthine Tayou

The Bass, Miami Beach’s contemporary art museum, announces its newly transformed space will open to the public on December 1, 2016, with three solo exhibitions by Ugo Rondinone, Mika Rottenberg, and Pascale Marthine Tayou. This celebratory occasion will feature Rondinone’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and the US premiere of several significant works by Rottenberg. The Bass has also commissioned a site-specific installation by Tayou to inaugurate the new space.

After a 12 million USD project spanning the past 18 months, The Bass will premiere an entirely reinvigorated space as part of the institution’s multi-faceted transformation, accommodating four new galleries, a museum store and café, and a new Creativity Center for education to open in spring 2017, along with a new visual identity including name, logo and website.

Good Evening Beautiful Blue (December 1, 2016–March 27, 2017) by Ugo Rondinone marks the first US solo museum exhibition for the Swiss-born, New York-based artist. The exhibition is a part of a multi-institution retrospective, comprising works that span three decades of Rondinone’s practice, from the late 1990s to the present. Referring concurrently to the natural world, romanticism and existentialism, the work of Ugo Rondinone encapsulates a “mental trinity” that has underpinned his art for 30 years. 

Good Evening Beautiful Blue revolves around three installations, which elaborate around the sensation of circularity, entropy, passivity and dreaminess. Vocabulary of Solitude, 2016, an installation of 45 life-size clown figures that are each named individually in the present-tense (sleep, dream wake, sit, stand, walk, shower), together describe a day in the life of a single man as he goes about his daily routine without leaving his home. A separate gallery presents It’s late and the wind carries a faint sound as it moves through the trees. It could be anything. The jingling of little bells perhaps, or the tiny flickering out of tiny lives. I stroll down the sidewalk and close my eyes and open them and wait for my mind to go perfectly blank. Like a room no one has ever entered, a room without doors or windows. A place where nothing happens., an immersive six-channel video installation from 1998, displaying slow-motion loops of people doing various isolated mundane tasks. On view in the third space will be Clockwork for Oracles from 2008, a four-wall installation comprised of 52 mirrored windows (one for each week in the year) set against a backdrop of whitewashed pages from The Miami Herald.

Mika Rottenberg’s self-titled solo exhibition (December 1, 2016–May 15, 2017) will present a selection of work from various series within the past five years of the Argentinean-born, New York-based artist’s practice. Rottenberg’s work focuses on elucidating the mechanics of late-stage, global capitalism by way of absurd and poetic comparisons. The most notable work included in the exhibition is NoNoseKnows, 2015, a video and sculptural installation that documents a group of laborers in China who harvest pearls from oysters, which first debuted at the 56th Venice Biennale last year. 

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s exhibition, Beautiful (December 1, 2016–July 3, 2017) will greet visitors as they enter with a newly commissioned, site-specific work called Welcome Wall, composed of 75 animated LED signs, reading “welcome” in a wide array of languages. Born in Cameroon and based in Ghent, Tayou brings his self-described nomadic practice to Miami Beach for his exhibition, creating an organic and collaboratively formed intervention with the museum’s permanent collection. In the newly designed “Open Storage” gallery, Tayou presents his work alongside his own selection of objects from The Bass collection, creating a dialogue between contemporary art works and objects from the past, speaking to his overall practice and material considerations for incorporating various objects from his immediate surroundings into the installation. Tayou’s concern for the decolonization of histories and territories aligns with the international and transient nature of Miami Beach and the impact tourism continues to have in shaping the city.

Media preview day: November 29
To download a press kit and to register for the press preview, visit www.thebass.org/press. 

Members’ preview day: November 30, 10am–5pm
Members see the museum first. To join, please visit www.thebass.org/join.