For Art Basel Miami Beach, Sikkema Malloy Jenkins is pleased to present a selection of paintings from Marc Handelman's 'Terra nullius' series, first shown at the gallery in the solo exhibition 'West After West' in May 2025. Handelman’s work is both research-oriented and driven by an expansive understanding of painting’s capacity to disrupt conventional systems of representation. The legacies of how land and nature are imagined, and towards what ideological ends, have been a formative source of inquiry for his practice over the past two decades.

'Terra nullius' is a multi-year project comprising over 200 paintings created after the full herbarium archive from Lewis and Clark’s survey expedition of 1804-06. As one of the most significant events in the westward expansion of the United States, the expedition further underscored how the desire to name, classify, and domesticate nature was embedded in larger imperialist ambitions. Working within the refuse of this history, Handelman’s reimagining of the archive considers how the afterlives of landscape painting and extractive research echo in present-day nationalisms and environmental crises.