FERNBERGER

NADA Miami

Anne Wehrley Björk, Vicky Colombet, and Kiki Xuebing Wang

December 3-7, 2024

Ice Palace Studios

Booth C308

For the 2024 edition of NADA Miami, Fernberger will present works

by Anne Wehrley Björk, Kiki Xuebing Wang, and Vicky Colombet.

Björk’s abstract paintings, inspired by the light and landscapes of

New Mexico, evoke the rugged forms of Chaco Canyon, where light

and shadow play across the terrain. Wang’s translucent layers reflect

the fragmented nature of reality, and Colombet’s ethereal

compositions, influenced by Eastern philosophy and the natural

world, evoke landscapes through a distinctive process of

deconstructed painting.

Friends of NADA Preview

Tuesday, December 3, 9:30 – 10am

VIP Hours (by invitation only)

Tuesday, December 3, 10am–4pm

Thursday, December 6, 10am–11am

Public Hours

Tuesday, December 3, 4–7pm

Wednesday, December 4, 11am–7pm

Thursday, December 5, 11am–7pm

Friday, December 6, 11am–7pm

Saturday, December 7, 11am–6pm

Vernissage Hours

Tuesday, December 3, 2pm - 4pm

Anne Wehrley Bjork
b. 1948 Northwest New Mexico
Lives and works in Lexington, KY
and Charleston Anne Wehrley Björk (b. 1948), lives and works between Lexington, KY and Charleston, SC. She originally hails from New Mexico, which has deeply inflected her work. Bjork’s current body of work is an investigation into this landscape of her youth, as well as its very particular light quality.

Chaco Canyon, near where she grew up, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the
ancestral home of the prehistoric Anasazi Indians. It is one of only 130 international sites designated as a “Dark Sky Park’’, where the night sky is devoid of any light pollution. The pathways, sandstone walls, and the petroglyphs of the Anasazi ruins there etched in her mind. Despite an affinity towards abstraction, in Björk’s own words, “There is a subtle narrative that takes place to be discerned by the viewer. Boulders appear poised to fall while a demi-lune floats in others. The light of turbulent skies adds dynamism in some of the paintings, while an Impressionist use of juxtaposed warm and cool colors create a softness in others, and crepuscule [dusk], overtakes the forms in others.”

The arc of Björk’s career resembles that of many female painters of her generation-- despite beginning her career in the 1970s, her work is finally gaining broader recognition now. During her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico, she trained with Agnes Martin, Joan Brown, Susan Rothenberg, and Deborah Butterfield, fellow women artists similarly drawn to the atmospheric quality specific to New Mexico, who encouraged her practice. Her commitment to the subject of Chaco Canyon has been consistent throughout, a constant in a career underpinned by a thorough investigation of light, color, and form.

Björk will have her first solo exhibition at Fernberger in February, 2025 followed by a solo exhibition with Margot Samel in 2026.

Vicky Colombet
b. 1953
Between New York City,
the Hudson Valley, and Paris

Colombet was raised in Paris by her French father and Filipino mother, who traveled extensively throughout Asia with her. These early travels and exposure to eastern culture and philosophy proved incredibly influential in her later artistic development. While studying at the Sorbonne, Colombet was enveloped in a progressive Parisian Intelligentsia. Helmed by Simone de Beauvoir, Colombet co-founded the “Women’s Rights League” and the newspaper, “The Feminist News". She also collaborated with iconic French actress and outspoken Feminist Delphine Seyrig on several Feminist projects including her film “Be Pretty and Shut Up”(1981). Colombet began her career as a painter in her early twenties, studying in the atelier of French painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986), who introduced Colombet to a painstaking process of deconstructed painting involving grinding and mixing raw pigments with various solvents (oil, copal, plaster, and water) from which Colombet evolved and created her own technique. Experimenting with the weights of pigments, their type of granulation, chemical response, their specific vibrations, and steps for grinding, she creates her otherworldly compositions.

In the early 1980s, during a time when painting was declared “dead”, Colombet created a type of painting that did not announce itself as painting. With the aim of pausing viewers upon encountering her work, Colombet developed her singular style and methodology of painting to resemble photochemical development processes or even a form of printing, but distinctly not painting. Despite using incredibly traditional painting materials, Colombet’s obfuscation of her own hand in the work presents something iconoclastic and enigmatic.

As she developed her own style and technique of painting, Colombet also embarked on a deeper study of Buddhism (to which she had been exposed during her childhood travels) with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thích Nhat Hanh. Her initial rigorous study at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and her continued Buddhist practice have tremendously affected her work. Her flattened but incredibly dimensional works have the power to evoke Buddhist concepts of oneness–that the macro and the micro exist on the same continuum.

Partnered with her existing interest in the works of painters with ethereal, mathematical and philosophical leanings such as Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin, Colombet has developed a style completely her own. She believes the use of pure pigment, chemical compounds born of the cosmos, gives unique vibrations and emotional resonance to her work. In the intervening years, Colombet has shown her work extensively internationally. She was recently the subject of an exhibition “Unexpected Dialogue:Monet/Colombet” that paired her work with Claude Monet’s at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, for which the museum produced an exhibition catalog. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, Capc Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as several private international collections. She has been awarded the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).

Kiki Xuebing Wang

b. 1993, Zhengzhou, China

Lives and works in London

Kiki Xuebing Wang (b. 1993, Zhengzhou, China) currently lives and works in London. The artist completed her BA at UCLA (Los Angeles, US) in 2016, and received her MA at Royal College of Art (London, UK) in 2020.

Working with oil paints, Wang creates translucent surfaces by building up multiple thin layers and sometimes smudging off each layer over and over again. For subjects, she is drawn to recognizable objects like flowers, seashells, and sometimes even umbrellas, that have their own regularized sense of geometry and pattern. Leaning into these patterns, Wang employs her arduous process to yield delicately fractured compositions.

In her own words, “I used to look at a lot of paintings from the Bay Area Figurative Movement, painters like Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, when I was studying and living on the West Coast for a few years. It has taught me to look at a painting in a different way from its combination of figurative and abstraction both seen in the figurative paintings. I am also influenced by Impressionist painters such as Cezanne, Gauguin, and Manet. They capture momentary and essence without details.” Through her paintings, Wang explores the complexities of perception, acknowledging that it often veers far from capturing the whole truth. Her work invites viewers to contemplate the intricacies of human experience, challenging them to confront the fragmented nature of reality and the subjective nature of perception.

Wang’s solo exhibitions include: “Ripples,” Linseed Projects, Shanghai, CN (2023); “Marble Dessert,” Ginny on Fredrick x Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK (2023); “Lapwings,” Half Gallery, New York, US (2022). Kiki Xuebing Wang’s works have been presented in group exhibitions including: “Notes Toward a Shell,” Tara Downs, New York, US (2024); “Tie up,” Linseed Projects, Seoul, KR (2023); “The Connection,” Billytown, The Hague, NL (2022); “A Place of One’s Own, Andrea fest Fine Art, Rome, IT (2022); “Harmonious Arrangement,” Half Gallery, Los Angeles, US (2022).

Wang will be included in a group exhibition at Perrotin in January, and will have a solo exhibition next year with Ginny on Frederick in London.