Image: Julia Scher
THE MIAMI EDIT
December 6, 2025

Julia Scher

THE MIAMI EDIT

The Miami Edit is a focused series highlighting the practices and perspectives of the artists featured at this year's Art Basel Miami Beach. We look forward seeing you at our Booth J11 from 5–7 December, 2025.

 

This feature presents works by Julia Scher, focusing on her early œvre in the 1980s, a period during which she continued her experimentation with the medium of painting.
 
In the 1980s, Julia Scher began exploring the interplay of landscape, technology, and the body. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she painted grand depictions of both her native Sierra Mountains and the broad Midwestern plains, using these works to meditate on human presence in and her attachment to these landscapes. Scher describes delving into the landscape and the body alike, using the land as a metaphor through which we encounter ourselves. 
 
During this time, she rented out a 9000 square foot floor of the now historic Gold Medal Flour grain elevator on the banks of the Mississippi river for $125 a month–a typical Mid-West complex that has since been renovated, cleaned up, and turned into what the artist calls “a tourist attraction.” Scher remembers to have started painting her renowned Target Torsos during this time. Sanctuary, the painting Esther Schipper presents at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, was one of the first the artist produced in this studio.
 
Concurrently in the 1980s, Scher founded Safe and Secure Productions, a business focused on security installations—including locks, grilles, and cameras—for mainly women clients. She was drawn to surveillance technology for its capacity to help her feel close to loved ones despite being, as she put it, “perched at a far corner of the US.”
 
For the last forty years, Julia Scher's research has explored social control dynamics in the public sphere, focusing especially on themes of surveillance. While her art projects have since exploited various media such as interactive installations, site tours, performances, photography, writing, video, and sound, Sanctuary testifies to her initial training in painting. The work further bespeaks Scher’s interest in the function of surveillance that, literally, captures landscape on screen, ultimately shaping the environment we inhabit.