As always, Untitled Art helped kick off Miami Art Week this year, bringing work from roughly 175 exhibitors to a light-filled tent on the sands of Miami Beach.

Art lovers of all ages—seriously, I saw a three-week-old baby—seemed in good spirits at the VIP opening, especially if they could snag a seat at the fair’s Resy Lounge, with its complimentary food and drink served up by Los Angeles Italian restaurant Jon & Vinny’s.

Properly fueled—for once—for a busy week of art viewing, I am happy to share a few standout Untitled artists that caught my eye.

Auseklis Bauskenieks
Lazy Mike, Seoul, Korea and Riga, Latvia

Auseklis Bauskenieks, By the Robot Factory (1993). Courtesy of Lazy Mike, Riga and Seoul.

Just past the fair’s entrance, I was immediately drawn to paintings by Auseklis Bauskenieks (1910–2007). They looked vaguely Pointillist, but were punctuated by strange sci-fi elements, like a Peeping Tom robot interrupting a trio of voluptuous women bathing naked in a lake.

Bauskenieks is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century in his native Latvia, but his work is all but unseen in the U.S., Mikhail Ovcharenko, cofounder of gallery Lazy Mike, told me.

The dealer just started working on the estate with the late artist’s two brothers, and is focusing on placing the work in public collections. Works are priced at $20,000 to $50,000, which is on the high end for Untitled, but in line with the existing market in Latvia, said the dealer.

“There’s been a lot of response. It’s something pretty fresh and unusual,” Ovcharenko said, noting that he had a couple of works on reserve with museums midway through VIP day. “This selection of work represents the idea of the American Dream from an artist who was in a country under Soviet occupation.”

Sachi Moskowitz and Lacey Stoffer
Anna Erickson Presents, Nashville

Sachi Moskowitz and Lacey Stoffer with their booth from Anna Erickson Presents, Nashville, at Untitled Art Miami Beach. Photo: Sarah Cascone.

A striking two-artist presentation featuring Sachi Moskowitz (b. 1989) and Lacey Stoffer (b. 1991) was well on its way to selling out as the opening afternoon stretched on.

Moskowitz (who comes from a line of painters and ceramists) hand-paints idyllic landscapes, taken from photographs of her hikes across California, into her ornate, classical-looking vessels. Other recurring elements include silver charm bracelets, snakes, eight balls, and dice, which represent the risk of the unknown.

Stoffer, meanwhile, takes a multimedia approach to painting, adding hand-dyed yarn and collaging atop her linen canvas. “I was tacking them up with pins, and I liked the way it looked, so now I make paper clay pins,” she told me.

The two artists are both based in L.A., but didn’t know each other before being paired by Erickson. The trio excitedly instructed me to ask a question of a Magic 8 Ball toy before conducting my interview. Its affirmative response reinforced the positive energy in the booth.

The dealer had sold three of four large $9,800 canvases by Stoffer, plus several smaller $7,000 works in the booth’s back room, and more via emailed previews. Only one of Moskowitz’s blue and white ceramic vases, priced at $1,800 to 3,000, was still available.

Levi van Veluw
Secci, Milan

Levi van Veluw, Celestial Alignment (2024). Courtesy of Secci, Milan.

Polymer clay is a material more commonly associated with children’s arts and crafts than fine art, but Dutch artist Levi van Veluw (b. 1985) has proven himself a master of the medium with a selection of surprisingly large-scale wall-hanging sculptures on offer from Milan’s Secci gallery.

“You lose yourself when you look at this work,” Marta Lusci, the gallery’s head of communication, told me. “Everyone asks, ‘What is that? Is it paper? Is it marble?'”

The artist blends the white clay with blue pigment to create pleasing swirls of color that are vaguely suggestive of Delftware. The largest one is $50,000, with a smaller one already sold for $24,000 on day one.

Ulla-Stina Wikander
Jane Lombard Gallery, New York

Ulla-Stina Wikander, Western Boots. Photo courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery, New York.

It was a breakout moment at the fair for Ulla-Stina Wikander (b. 1957), a Swedish artist who has had minimal exposure in the U.S. apart from a single solo show, in 2018 at Mobilia Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jane Lombard Gallery had sold out of 12 of her sculptures, consisting of found objects that she painstakingly encloses in traditional needlework.

The charmingly nostalgic works, which transformed binoculars, ballet slippers, a stovetop espresso pot, and other vintage household objects into surprisingly cozy objets d’art, were priced attractively at $1,000 to $6,000. (Don’t miss the cowboy boots decorated with Wikander’s take on the Last Supper.)

“They’ve been very popular. One went to a collector affiliated with an institution,” senior director Lisa Carlson told me, adding that the gallery is hoping to host a project from Wikander in the new year. “She studied sculpture but was interested in craft and wanted to combine the two, elevating needlepoint into something different, a sculptural art form.”

Marco Di Giovanni
Il Chiostro Arte & Archivi, Saronno, Italy

Marco Di Giovanni with his work at Untitled Art in Miami Beach, shown by Il Chiostro Arte & Archivi, Saronno, Italy. Photo: Sarah Cascone.

You might do a double take when you spot sculptures by Marco Di Giovanni (b. 1976), made with antique marble columns, on view with Italy’s Il Chiostro gallery.

“It’s magic,” the artist, who studied engineering and Russian literature before turning to art, assured me.

In one, a pendant dangles from the ceiling, mysteriously repelled from an egg mounted just below. A second has a carefully stitched paper sculpture that hovers impossibly over a stack of paper, while a third has one column perfectly suspended above the other, with a tiny gap between the two clear glass orbs on both ends.

The three works, each priced at $11,000—buy the full set for a discount—are meant to form a Freemasons’ temple with three pillars: strength, beauty, and wisdom.

“They all work with duality,” Di Giovanni said. “If you are able to get rid of this duality you can reach the third column, the wisdom column. If you get rid of reality, you reach a higher level of consciousness that doesn’t belong to this heavy world.”

Harold Granucci
Art Sales and Research, Hudson Valley, New York

Harold Granucci, Nine Planets with Sun. Photo courtesy of Art Sales and Research, Hudson Valley, New York.

When dealer Lindsay Brown was hoping to find a third artist to round out a booth for New York’s Outsider Art Fair, an art journalist pointed her to the daughter of the late Harold Granucci (1916–2007), who spent decades painstakingly drafting precise geometric drawings of an undeniable beauty.

“The work has taken off,” Brown told me, so much so that she’s had to become more selective about sales, and was largely offering an edition of prints by the artist, produced by Griffin Editions in Brooklyn, asking $2,150 for framed copies of his carefully notated drawings inspired by the planets. The full unframed set of 10—there’s one for Saturn and a separate one of its rings—is on offer for $16,000.

There’s also a stunning original work, combining all 10 images, plus a central sun, for $125,000, that Brown hopes to place with a museum—the Smithsonian expressed interest on day one of the fair. During his lifetime, Granucci was notoriously secretive about his work and his methods, only interested in selling these “display” copies that didn’t include his notes. (His daughter does not share those concerns.)

“He really believed he was coming up with a mathematical discovery that nobody had made about intersecting right angles,” Brown added. She’s considering enlisting MIT mathematicians to help decipher some of the many mysterious notations that Granucci left behind in addition to his artworks.

Untitled Art is on view at 12th Street and Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida, December 3–8, 2024.