Women as Subjects and Objects: Meredith Rosen Gallery booth “Not Yet Famous” at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2025

Anna Uddenberg, White Noise (Easy Access), 2025. Polylactic acid, photopolymer resin, epoxy clay, foam, silicone pads, acrylic paint, nylon stockings, neck support, leather glows, acrylic shirt, Polyester suit, synthetic hair, steel wire, leather stilettos, Herman Miller Aeron office chair, 49.2 x 32.7 x 32.7 inches. Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Author: Nina Chkareuli 

“Not Yet Famous” is a well-researched and well-curated Art Basel Miami Beach presentation by the New York-based esteemed Meredith Rosen Gallery. Selected works of Gowoon Lee, Karl Gerstner, Anna Uddenberg, Anna Jermolaewa, and Tina Braegger are confronting the viewers here. By bringing in five artists from different generations and slightly or widely different cultures, the booth creates a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of sexuality, spectatorship, and voyeurism. While the booth presents women as objects of desire, the artists behind the presentation are subversively critiquing the society that creates the specificity of this notion. “If this is what you want, this is what you get,” they tell us, but ‘this’ is surgically measured, packaged, and catering to the taste. There is no humanity or life, just the human form of butts, strapped or walking around. Instead of more nuanced eroticism, the viewer is invited to absorb an overt sexualization of the body. Self-conscious focus on creating a situation is at the center. 

This absorption is a form of emotional and physical manipulation on the part of the artist and the women who are simultaneously the objects and the subjects. The roles here are reversed and refurbished, creating an intellectually stimulating conundrum. Women have grown accustomed to being the objects, the trophies, the prizes of someone else’s ambitions, yet they also hold the power and control to choose whether they are perceived as such or to choose themselves instead. Artists here show us women not as victims, but as very capable agents because it is in their power to create or not create this spectacle.

Anna Jermolaewa, Ass Peeping, 2003. Video 4.30 minutes. This is the fair presentation of Jermolaewa’s work since her 2024 Austrian pavilion contribution for the Venice Biennale and the first US fair presentation of Anna Uddenberg. Her gaze at a butt reverses the meaning; the form becomes an aesthetic shape rather than a biteable apple. If she were a man, the work probably would have been of a more aggressive, more predatory nature.

Gowoon Lee, Bow Wow, 2024. Oil on jute, 21 x 18 inches. It is another form of overt manipulation. What do we see? What do we want to see? Why do we want to see? The nebulous, sensual form guides our thinking, yet emotions do not always follow.

Karl Gerstner, Linsenbild, 1962-63, Illuminated lens with painted backgrounds, 25 x 25 inches - The black and white work created by a man is a perfect backdrop to an all-female cast in a way suggesting that everything else that we see is indeed an illusion. Art Today: Kinetic and Optic, 1965, was organized at the Buffalo Albright Knox Gallery Museum by Director Gordon M. Smith as part of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today. Featuring 84 kinetic and optic sculptures and paintings by 48 artists, including Karl Gerstner and his lens pictures, it was the first museum exhibition in the United States to consider the two movements simultaneously.

Finally, Tina Braegger, Through the Panic, 2025, oil on canvas, 10 1/2 x 13 1/2, brings a hint of mystery and childlike harmony to all the surrounding aggressiveness.

More about this booth here, on view in Miami December 3-7, 2025.

About the author: Nina Chkareuli is a Tbilisi-born, New York-based writer and curator.

Installation view, “Not Yet Famous,” Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2025, Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Anna Jermolaewa, Ass Peeping, 2003. Video 4.30 minutes. Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Gowoon Lee, Bow Wow, 2024. Oil on jute. 21 x 18 inches (two parts). Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Karl Gerstner, Linsenbild, 1962-63.Illuminated lens with painted backgrounds, 25 x 25 inches. Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Tina Braegger, Through the Panic, 2025. Oil on canvas, 10 1/2 x 13 1/2. Image courtesy of Meredith Rosen Gallery.