Overwhelmed at Art Basel? Here Are 7 Booths You Won’t Want to Miss in Miami This Year
With more than 250 galleries participating in this year's fair, there's a lot to see. Here are a few can't-miss booths to get you started.
Navigating the vast convention center during Art Basel Miami Beach is not for the faint of heart. Opening to VIPS today, the 2019 edition features 269 galleries from around the world showing the work of more than 4,000 artists. This year it is also inaugurating a new section called Meridians, devoted to over-sized installations, monumental paintings, and other art aytpical for a fair. Add to the to-do list a dozen satellite fairs scattered throughout the city and a bevy of museum shows, and one could easily be exhausted just by scrolling through social media.
But don’t worry. We’re here to help. If you’ve touched down in sunny Miami, but aren’t sure where to start, we’ve pulled together seven Art Basel Miami Beach booths worth seeking out.
Peres Projects
Dorothy Iannone, Dark Lips (1964). Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin. Photo: Matthias Kolb.
Of its booth, Berlin-based Peres Projects says “artists from our gallery help us to navigate a way forward” through the hyper-fast, critically fraught, and socially upended state of the world. Featured artists for this year include Dorothy Iannone, whose spiritually-inflected canvases are also currently on view at the Centre Pompidou, and Richard Kennedy, the newest artist addition to the gallery, whose works combine performance, opera, painting, and video to address the complexities of African American experience.
Peres Projects, Booth A14
Marianne Boesky Gallery
Gina Beavers, Pink Ombre Lips (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery.
If ever there was a perfect artist to show at Art Basel in Miami, Gina Beavers may just be it. With her caky layers of paint, social media-tinged subjects, and bright palette, her works are eye-catching enough to stop you in your tracks. Closer inspection reveals that there’s a lot more to the at-first-glance shallow subjects, including questions of consumerism and cosmetic transformations. Other booth highlights include Donald Moffett’s amoeba-like three-dimensional paintings that beg to be touched, and new paintings by the Dutch-born artist Hannah van Bart.
Marianne Boesky Gallery, Booth B11
Richard Gray Gallery
Jim Dine, Four Rooms (1962). Courtesy of Richard Gray Gallery.
The Chicago and New York gallery is best known for its thoughtful exhibitions which rely more on subtlety and close-looking than on flash. Even in Miami that is no exception with this curated selection of works that thoughtfully balance color and composition by the likes of Josef Albers, McArthur Binion, and Theaster Gates. Expect works that delved into the nuances of color, texture, and the legacy of Modernism, interspersed with pleasing still lifes by Alex Katz.
Richard Gray Gallery, Booth B2
Galerie Thomas Schulte
Allan McCollum, Fifty Perfect Vehicles (1989). Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Schulte.
If visitors came to Miami looking for color, this vibrant booth by Berlin’s Galerie Thomas Schulte won’t disappoint. Here you’ll find icons of the 1980s like Allan McCollum and Alice Aycock, alongside Michael Müller’s expressionistic paintings on glass. The star of the booth might be Angela de la Cruz’s shaped, candy-colored canvases, which hover between painting and sculpture. The fair presentation coincides with the gallery’s solo exhibition of the artist’s work currently on view in Berlin.
Galerie Thomas Schulte, Booth C16
Goodman Gallery
ruby onyinyechi amanze, you looked for a beginning but there was none (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
Goodman Gallery specializes in presenting a wide range of contemporary African art, and this fair booth is no exception. One of the strongest works is by Nigerian-born, Brooklyn-based artist ruby onyinyechi amanze, who creates layered tableaux that play with negative space and nonlinear narratives.
Goodman Gallery, Booth F16
Lehmann Maupin Gallery
Teresita Fernández, Twins (Mirror Image) (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
Teresita Fernández and Cecilia Vicuña are both enjoying much-deserved moments in the spotlight. The Miami-born Fernández is currently the subject of a mid-career survey at the Pérez Art Museum, while Vicuña recently won Spain’s top art prize, Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas, and was recently nominated for the Guggenheim Museum’s prestigious Hugo Boss Prize. This booth, devoted solely to the two artists, is a cross-generational conversation that touches on ideas of identity and land through the lens of history, natural resources, colonization, and legacy of the Americas.
Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Booth G22
Galerie Karsten Greve
Lucio Fontana, Madonna con Bambino (1950-53). Courtesy of Galerie Karsten Greve.
At the 18th edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach, Karsten Greve (which has locations in St. Moritz, Paris, and Cologne) is dipping into its impressive roster of artists and highlighting the cream of the crop. The gallery typically shows a work by the late Cy Twombly in every fair, and this year is no exception with a spotlight falling on Untitled (Gaeta) (2004) part of his “Winter Pictures” series which are based on Twombly’s home on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. Be sure not to miss the ceramics of the late Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana, which blend religious iconography with abstraction.
Karsten Greve, Booth A5
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