The art market is going through a Magic Eye moment. Like those optical puzzles, if you squint the right way, the entire picture changes. On the one hand, gallery closures, economic uncertainties and recent auction results offer a grim image of the current landscape. On the other, newly announced global fairs, a (slowly) upward-ticking stock market and even more recent auction results coalesce into a rosy financial vista. The much-talked-about Great Wealth Transfer is arming a new generation of potential collectors with capital, but that same group’s attitudes toward and knowledge about art and philanthropy has many in the cultural world seeing question marks instead of dollar signs. Add to that the promises and peril of AI, shifting tastes across the market, and a glut of events that leave collectors feeling as fatigued as inspired and you can assume that any adamant assertions about the direction of things have about as much foundational integrity as a sand castle.
You can see the results of all this at Art Basel Miami Beach, America’s biggest art fair—with nearly 300 exhibitors participating this year—on view at the city’s Convention Center through Sunday. Group presentations always dominate these events, but here solo exhibitions—or even group presentations with several works by the same artist—were almost nonexistent. Most fair roundups are framed as reports on “best booths,” but in South Beach this approach is impossible—standouts came in the form of single items or small selections of works that stood above the rest of the art on view from a particular gallery.
This made the search for the new and notable particularly herculean this year. Nevertheless, the task, undeniably more enjoyable than shoveling stables or harvesting apples, had its rewards.
Weinstein Gallery was the rare exhibitor whose group presentation isn’t just curatorially coherent but visionary. Its show of Surrealist works includes a miniature self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, painted as a tender gift for a friend; several works by Leonor Fini that offer an introduction to the overlooked Argentine-Italian painter; and an engrossing 1959 canvas by Leonora Carrington, “Sueño (Nephesh as the Soul in a State of Sleep),” whose spiritualized, otherworldly animals and occult-like figures are a prime snapshot of her recurring images.
Carrington, long shunned by the mainstream, is having a moment, as is clear from her well-received exhibition in Milan and the small presentation of her output at Gallery Wendi Norris’s booth. The works on paper here offer another perspective on her creative process, revealing elements that crop up across her oeuvre, but are fully realized artworks in their own right. In the same booth, the paintings by Enrique Martínez Celaya offer a less otherworldly though no less captivating take on the uncanny: An ominous bird towers over a small boy; plants sprout from a crisply made bed.
Well-known names were responsible for many of this year’s standouts. A triptych by Martin Wong at P·P·O·W hasn’t been exhibited in nearly four decades; drawing on images of his family, he creates a cast of characters rooted in Chinese myth and history, situating them in an exaggerated view of New York’s Chinatown. At Lehmann Maupin, looking at South Korea’s policy of mandatory military service, Do Ho Suh has created a garment—part suit of armor, part ceremonial robe—out of more than 500 dog tags.
This big-name trend is true of the Kabinett presentations scattered throughout the fair, specially curated nooks within larger booths. At Two Palms, Mickalene Thomas uses her sparkly collages to look at the history of black pinups and Jet magazine, pairing those with colorful sculptures of stacks of books by black authors, offering a stark juxtaposition that dives into the history of black publishing. At Roberts Projects, Betye Saar, who turns 100 next year, proves that she’s creating some of the most powerful work of her life with an altar-like sculpture made from a boat that extends her mysticism-infused practice to new realms.
Antonio Obá’s painting of a monk-like horseman at Mendes Wood DM, his copper-hued cloak glimmering under a turquoise sky while his gaze pierces the viewer, is a small master class in paint-handling and color theory. At Pearl Lam, the delicate craquelure of the monochrome panels by Su Xiaobai connects them to historic painting and celadon pottery. In the same booth, Damian Elwes’s oversize canvases reimagine famous artists’ studios, the British painter shifting his style across the works to acknowledge the hallmarks of the masters to whom he pays homage. Art-historical awareness is also present at Josh Lilley in the paintings of Tom Anholt, who draws from Hendrick Avercamp and Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his densely populated scenes of people romping across wintry hills and through verdant fields.
Particularly striking are the sculptures at Meredith Rosen by Anna Uddenberg of female mannequins shoved into ergonomic office chairs, bent into positions that would make even the most experienced contortionists wince. Provocative and trenchant examinations of the painful ways women must transform themselves in both the professional world and in the eyes of those who view them as objects, they prove that art still has the ability to shock.
Less in-your-face but equally capable of eliciting emotion are Eva Olivetti’s paintings at Piero Atchugarry Gallery. Olivetti, who fled the Nazis and settled in Uruguay, was involved with the Taller, the workshop of Joaquín Torres-García. In these mostly muted works, quiet scenes hum with an unspoken animosity that connects them to the horrors Olivetti (1924-2013) escaped. A brushy group of people could be a simple community meeting, presided over by a central figure, though the idea of fascism lurks in the background; the scratchy facade of a tavern brings to mind barbed wire and iron gates; what appears at first blush to be a communal shower leaves us haunted.
Finally, it would be impossible to discuss this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach without mentioning Zero 10, a section dedicated to digitally focused work. The presentations are outlandish and often funny—the crowd favorite came from Beeple, the man who launched a thousand NFT imitators, who created a kind of dogfighting ring, in which Boston Dynamics-style robots with unsettlingly lifelike heads of tech and art figures (Andy Warhol, Jeff Bezos) milled about. But most of the displays here are so self-referential, projects that use technology to insist upon technology’s own importance, that they left one yearning for a digital-focused artist whose creative gaze extends beyond the edges of a computer screen. Perhaps we’ll see one next year in Miami Beach.
Art Basel Miami Beach
Miami Beach Convention Center, through Dec. 7