ART | BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2017 HIGHLIGHTS: DEBORAH TARR AT LPH

Who says contemporary artists hate the past? Deborah Tarr’s new work on display at the LPH boot of the Pulse Miami art fair during Art | Basel Miami Beach was a uniquely pro-modernist look at painting by a contemporary artist who understands irony.

Replete with subdued hues of earthy reds and yellow ochres, steely greys and somber blacks, Ms. Tarr’s paintings, mounted salon-style, represent a strange kind of fresh air in a current painting scene filled with scrawls, cartooniness and awkward attempts at camp and kitsch that never generate lift-off on the trajectory to novelty.