Galleries in Miami have become increasingly global. Multinational art dealers like Zilberman and Opera Gallery have set up shop in the city; Colombian gallery La Cometa opened a fourth outpost in Miami. Even New Yorkers like Ross+Kramer Gallery are being wooed down, though most of the blue chip operations like Acquavella Galleries and Pace Gallery seem to prefer Palm Beach.
Out of all these newcomers, Ukrainian Voloshyn Gallery has emerged as one of the more interesting programs, not least of all because of the harrowing story of how they came to the city. The gallery had been exhibiting a one-off show in a temporary space in working-class Allapattah, a quickly gentrifying neighborhood that is becoming a hotspot for galleries and museums, when Russia invaded Ukraine. With a return home unfeasible for owners Maxim “Max” Voloshyn and Julia Voloshyna, they settled in and opened a permanent space in late 2023.
Back in Kyiv, their existing gallery space has become a rallying point for local art lovers, keen on defying the Russian invasion by embracing normalcy—Max recently showed me photos of a full house at their last closing in the Ukrainian capital. In Miami, they’re a bit of a curiosity, injecting sobriety into a scene that tends to embrace flash and pop. Their inaugural group show in the Miami gallery, No Grey Zones, felt like an appropriate thesis statement: Abstract paintings by Lesia Khomenko resembled shrapnel flying and men in military fatigues; a floor-placed installation by K. Yoland let viewers peer down at a military training camp in California captured with satellite photography.
More recently, however, the gallery has been dipping into Miami’s strong suit, its connection to Latin America. They invited two prominent Miami-based curators, Gean Moreno, of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Omar Lopez-Chahoud, artistic director of Untitled Art Fair, to put together a pair of consecutively running shows titled Haunted.
Haunted I, which ran from April 6 to May 29, maintained the gallery’s stark aesthetic voice but applied it to another geographic canvas, recruiting Christian Lagata, Harold Mendez, Minia Biabiany, and Jonathan Sanchez Noa to illustrate suppressed histories and unspoken traumas across the Americas. Black and white photos by Spanish artist Christian Lagata feature wooden-stick tent frames set in barren scrubland, as if what was once a shelter or home has been stripped to its skeleton. Both the environment within the photos and the people that might have populated them have vanished, leaving only traces of what was.
Moreno and Lopez-Chahoud’s curation puts a strong emphasis on materials and their origins. Works crafted from fabric and natural materials, particularly Cuban tobacco, by Havana-born Jonathan Sanchez Noa hang from the walls. Alongside is a sculpture by Lagata consisting of a pair of tires hanging from a metal chain. All of these pieces are made with materials taken from the earth, rubber for the tires, steel for the chain, and their juxtaposition speaks to the violent extractive processes used to craft them. The tobacco wall hangings may at first appear handmade and less hostile than the sleeker and industrially processed tires and chains, but of course, plantation labor was used to harvest tobacco as well.
Moreno told attendees at the Haunted I opening that part two might be more startling and surprising. How right he was, Haunted II once again convenes four artists, but the interpretation of the titular theme is vastly different. “The first one was a little bit more haunted by historical facts, or historical losses,” Moreno said at the opening, “This one, the haunting is more of the spooky type.”
In Italian artist Matteo Callegari’s photorealistic paintings of venomous snakes, one sees repeated patterns of luridly colored striped segments reminiscent of Max Ernst or František Kupka. A nearby video work by Callegari shows him chasing down centipedes and other creepy-crawlies in the Peruvian Amazon. Animals are a focus of Aneta Grzeszykowska’s photo series SELFIE WITH THE DOG (2023) in which a scruffy dog chews up a rubber form of the Polish artist’s fingers and face. It is a contrary take on humanity’s treatment of the earth and its animal residents—mother nature taking revenge through beloved pets. Grzeszykowska is the only Eastern European artist in the show, Moreno says they had intended Haunted to serve as a dialogue between Europe and Latin America across both installments, which ultimately didn’t come to fruition.
Haunted II feels less coherent than Haunted I. The works clash stylistically and some don’t seem to fit the theme at all. A group of colored pencil drawings by Lorenzo De Los Angeles doesn’t give the requisite creepy factor. I was most drawn to a drawing by Harold Mendez, born in the U.S. to parents of Mexican and Colombian origin. Mendez was featured in both shows. Against a background resembling a concrete floor or signal static on an old television, a silhouette of the back of a man’s head is outlined; holes have been punched cleanly in the figure’s skull and neck. It’s a ghostly afterimage, with a long title: at that point, at that final place, at that extreme, where the act of being doesn’t even matter, or rather it isn’t really certain that it’s true (After Reinaldo Arenas by way of José Martí) (2024). The work speaks to a certain sense of fatality, which is more fear-inducing than snakes or vengeful pets.
Haunted I was on view from April 6 to May 29, 2024 and Haunted II is on view at Voloshyn Gallery, Miami through July 20, 2024.
