Art Basel Miami Beach is a marathon, a smorgasbord, an epic feast, bringing together more art than one could ever possibly absorb. There are 286 exhibitors at the Miami Beach Convention Center this year, which means that if you spend one minute—just 60 seconds!—in each booth, it will take you nearly five hours to see it all.

My approach? Move slowly but deliberately, on a vague itinerary, making sure to visit certain galleries while staying alert to delights along the way, trying to lay eyes on it all. That is what I did on Wednesday, opening day, and I now report back with six standouts, with a slight bias for somewhat lesser-known art. (I swoon for big-budget, wall-power-packing works as much as anyone, and there are some below, but they really need no further flogging.)

A Jewel Box of a Claude Cahun Survey at Galerie Alberta Pane

Claude Cahun, Autoportrait aux Orchidées, 1939. Courtesy Alberta Pane, Paris and Venice

The outside world melts away as you enter Alberta Pane’s booth, which features black walls and burgundy curtains. The intimate space is devoted to small, tender black-and-white photographs by Claude Cahun (1894-1954), who brushed aside all fixed notions of gender and artistic categories in a too-short life. Cahun appears in many of them, variously in masks and makeup—each costume a way of being in the world, each image a world onto itself. In 1939’s Autoportrait aux Orchidées, the artist appears to be resting, eyes closed, surrounded by those flowers, as if lost in dreams. We are lucky that we got to see some of them.

Agosto Machado’s Solo Booth With Gordon Robichaux

Agosto Machado, Ethyl (Altar), 2024. Photo courtesy the artist and Gordon Robichaux

In its first appearance at Miami Basel, New York’s Gordon Robichaux gallery has staged a solo presentation for Agosto Machado, a Downtown veteran who assembles moving altars for lost countercultural luminaries via found materials. The one for the many-storied drag performer Ethyl Eichelberger, who died in 1990 at 45, includes photographs (like a stunner of Eichelberger, by Peter Hujar), matchbooks for old haunts like Max’s Kansas City, and, to quote a bit of the checklist, “a handmade feather butterfly, a mask with glitter, coins, a makeup compact,” and more. These minute objects are by turns personal, quotidian, mysterious, and rarefied. Brought together with clear care, with love, they have a power that is far greater than the sum of their parts. These constellations of artifacts are humble reliquaries, defining documents of an era.

Lee Kun-Yong’s Poignant Patinting at Leeahn Gallery

Lee Kun-Yong’s Water Torture (1987) on a wall in Leeahn Gallery’s booth. Photo by Andrew Russeth

Lee Kun-Yong, 82 this year and a star of the Guggenheim’s recent survey of Experimental Art from 1960s–’70s South Korea, is best known for loose paintings that chart the limits of his body. Lee picks up a brush and traces his wingspan reach, creating images that recall cartoon hearts or ghostly figures—angels, perhaps. You can see one of the latter on the right side of a chilling 1987 work that Leeahn Gallery brought to the fair. The artist painted it following the waterboarding of activist Park Jong-chul by government forces, which spurred on the movement to replace the ruling military dictatorship with a democratic system. Here, a man is near death, paint is streaking down the canvas, and an artist is looking on, bearing witness. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s bizarre, botched declaration of martial law earlier this week lends this unflinching work even more potency.

An Ernie Barnes Tour de Force at Andrew Kreps

Ernie Barnes’s Metamorphosis of Rocky (1988) at Andrew Kreps’s booth. Courtesy of the estate of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Photo: Dawn Blackman.

This is what Miami Basel is all about, or at least what it ought to be about: a great, ambitious artist being featured in high style; a gallery pulling no punches, risking it all. Thank you, Andrew Kreps. Ernie Barnes (1938–2009) painted this meaty beast of picture, the largest work he ever made, for Sylvester Stallone in 1988, when the actor (and artist!) had four Rocky movies under his belt. It is all rippling muscles and raw energy (even its fabric folds seem to ooze testosterone), narrating scenes from the boxer’s life with virtuoso abandon. (I took a post-workout cooldown after viewing it.) It is easy to imagine the pleasure Stallone must have received when beholding it in his home. Here’s hoping a museum gets it so that we can all do the same.

A Brand New Jana Euler at Greene Naftali

Jana Euler, Spraycan becoming painting, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo by Júlia Standovár

For almost 20 years now, the German painter Jana Euler has been uncorking one fresh idea for a painting after another, bobbing and weaving, refusing to settle on a single style as she plumbs icons and the everyday for psychological friction. Each new Euler is an event. She has rendered electrical outlets, contorted bodies, and for a 2013 outing (with Stewart Uoo) at the Whitney Museum, its Marcel Breuer-designed home and Whitney Houston. (The Pérez Art Museum Miami owns that last one, as it happens.) Greene Naftali brought a monstrous new Euler to Miami Basel that stands nearly nine feet tall and carries a winning title, Spraycan becoming painting. Is it about the impossibility of separating the art from the artist? The pressure on artists to perform as themselves in their art? The fixation some have with painterly process? This much is certain: It has a menacing process, and almost seems to attack its viewers. Can you hear its cackling laughter?

Rosetta Bakery

A Rosetta Bakery outpost at Art Basel Miami Beach.

In Miami Beach, Rosetta Bakery is an institution, an Italian-focused outfit with a serious devotion to quality that will celebrate its 10th birthday next year, and so it’s a thrill that it is on hand at the fair. Its croissants are rich with butter (and stuffed with pistachio cream, if you are into that sort of thing), its coffees are crisp and clean, and the variety of its pastries stuns. Ditch the diet, jab yourself with extra Ozempic, and visit early and often. You are in town only once a year. You deserve the best.