Booths at art fairs during Miami Art Week are, on average, the most expensive in the world. The financial pressure this places on galleries, when viewed in the context of a generally beleaguered art market with high shipping and insurance costs, often means the work presented in Miami tends to be on the safer side. When you add the perception that Miami collectors are drawn to vibrant, slightly showy work, the result can be an offering that, at best, bores and, at worst, offends art fair purists. The antidote to this prevailing feeling at Art Basel Miami Beach – the flagship fair of Miami Art Week – is the Nova section, where slightly younger galleries present works by artists made in the last few years. Bigger risks are taken here, and the more focused presentations – capped at three artists per booth – avoid the salon feel that pervades other parts of the fair. Here are five standout artists/booths from Art Basel’s Nova section.
Michael Ho – Gallery Vacancy (Shanghai)
Michael Ho (b. 1991, Netherlands) is a painter on the rise. This year, he has shown work in group exhibitions with Thaddaeus Ropac and Modern Art in London, and now presents a wonderful work at Art Basel Miami Beach with Shanghai-based Gallery Vacancy. The key feature of Ho’s practice is that he paints on both sides of the canvas, a process that emphasises the materiality of the surface. His intricate depictions of the natural world – often punctuated by figures passing through—are in dialogue with the calligraphic ink works of Chinese art history. Ho is a second-generation immigrant from China; his process of painting from back to front is a neat way of thinking about beginnings, considering the foundations of a painting as analogous to the foundations of human experience.
Cécile B. Evans – Chateau Shatto (Los Angeles)
Cécile B. Evans (b. 1983) presents a series of sculptures with LA-based gallery Chateau Shatto. These objects are partly architectural models of the interior of the UN General Assembly in New York, and partly cross-sections of urban terrain, built up from the city’s detritus. Eerily, the rooms on the surface are empty, as if there’s been an evacuation. The bombed-out surface below, which forms the base of the piece, is made of New York street signs and rubble that resembles concrete, brick, iron, and steel. There’s a dystopian feel to the work, conveying a political message about our decaying institutional structures and the impact that can have on urban infrastructure.
Taewon Ahn – Project Native Informant (London)
Korean artist Taewon Ahn (b. 1993) continues his ongoing series HIRO IS EVERYWHERE – in which he paints his cat – at Project Native Informant. He uses a precise airbrush to make marks on organically shaped slabs of plastic resin. There’s a sense of humor at the core of the practice – after all, cats are funny – but there’s also a more poignant attention paid to the notion of connection in contemporary society. Ahn’s Instagram feed attests that his cats are a huge part of his life, and in creating an aesthetic that resembles the filters we find on our phones when accessing social media, he plays with the tension between real-world value and its accompanying digital imitations.
Evgeny Antufiev – Emalin (London)
London-based gallery Emalin presents the work of Evgeny Antufiev (b. 1986). Antufiev’s work has a wonderfully arcane quality; hailing from the Siberian republic of Tuva, near Russia’s border with Mongolia, Antufiev mines local folklore for inspiration. The works reference alchemy, shamanism, and often suggest the forms of mythical creatures. The presentation features bronze-cast vases with cement-set precious stones, alongside a series of mosaics that follow ancient craft and stone-setting techniques. The materials are often scavenged, and during the process of creation, the artist’s fingerprints are sometimes left on the work, imprinting a memory of inception and sparking thoughts of longevity, place, and the passage of time.
Melissa Joseph – Charles Moffett (New York)
New York-based artist Melissa Joseph (b. 1980) has a practice that merges found objects with technical, traditional artistic processes. During a recent residency in Texas, she began gathering small, discarded tires from the rugged landscape. Using the tires as a framing mechanism, Joseph fills the centers with woolen, needle-felted works. The scenes depicted are figurative snapshots, giving the impression of a hyper-contemporary, industrial response to Renaissance tondos. The imagery captures fleeting moments in the artist’s life, particularly those faint, recurring memories of childhood that take on huge significance in a largely unexplainable way.
Art Basel Miami Beach, December 6th–8th, 2024 the Miami Beach Convention Center @artbasel
