Art Basel Miami Beach: Gravitas and the Suspended Universes of Jim Amaral

Galería Elvira Moreno will present a historical survey of the work of Jim Amaral (b. 1933, Pleasanton, California) in the Survey sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2026. Bringing together sculptures, reliquary objects, and drawings made between 1962 and 1999. Titled Gravitas and the Suspended Universes of Jim Amaral, the project examines almost four decades of his distinctive contribution to representations of the body, sensuality, and psychological experience in the art of the second half of the twentieth century.

In Amaral’s work, every form holds the possibility of becoming something else. Bodies fragment, double, and acquire animal, vegetal, or mythical attributes. His anatomies seem to retain the memory of a previous existence while anticipating another, as yet unknown. Within this state of suspended transformation, figuration becomes a site of inscription where memory, myth, and consciousness converge.

Based in Colombia since 1957, Amaral developed a practice that intertwines his early interest in poetry with psychoanalysis and the exploration of the unconscious. Desire, bodily taboos, sexual suppression and repression, and the experience of grief inform a profoundly intimate visual language. His engagement with surrealism unfolds through an iconography of his own, whose ambiguity lends the familiar an unsettling presence.

Vintage photographs and objects found during visits to the Marché aux Puces in Paris occupy a significant place in this inquiry. Through his interventions, Amaral transforms their surfaces into visual reliquaries: places where traces of other lives encounter his imagery and emotional world. In Altar for Narcissus (1986), two facing profiles inhabit a small, hinged assemblage. The image of the self becomes an encounter, a doubling, and an act of self contemplation; the object takes on the intensity of an interior scene.

The movement between drawing and sculpture reveals the persistence of these concerns. In Androgyne III (1978), anatomical ambiguity unsettles the conventions through which we recognize and name the body. In the bronze Sphinx No. 2 (1999), the hybrid figure acquires a totemic presence, at once corporeal and enigmatic. Between the intimacy of paper and the density of metal, Amaral develops a system of forms that connects the human with the chimerical, the ancestral with the futuristic.

The gravitas that runs through the project encompasses both the physical presence of these works and the weight of what they evoke: desire, loss, time, and mortality. Their suspended universes sustain a tension between matter's permanence and existence's instability.

Within Survey’s historical framework, the presentation offers an opportunity to reconsider the relationships between different moments in Amaral’s practice and to recognize the autonomy of his visual language. The selection invites close attention to a sustained inquiry into the forms that inner life assumes as it becomes image, object, and body.

With this project, Galería Elvira Moreno continues its program of research and historical reassessment, advancing perspectives that broaden our understanding of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Booth S8

Public Days (access with a ticket or a VIP Card)

Friday, December 4, 2026, 11am-6pm

Saturday, December 5, 2026, 11am-6pm

Sunday, December 6, 2026, 11am-6pm