18 New Dealers to Watch at Art Basel in Miami Beach

Miami Art Week’s hallmark fair is known to corral the world’s leading galleries within the sprawling Miami Beach Convention Center, but the fair actually welcomes a range of exhibitors, from respected young programs to blue-chip mainstays, with fresh faces from across that spectrum joining each year. As over 260 galleries from 32 countries touch down in Miami Beach for the 2017 fair, we caught up with 18 dealers, from Houston to Shanghai, as they prepared to make their debut appearances at Art Basel in Miami Beach.

Hales Gallery owners Paul Hedge and Paul Maslin opened Hales in Deptford, London, in 1992, and moved it to the East End in 2004,while fostering the careers of young and pioneering artists alike. “At the core of the gallery’s direction over the past 25 years has been the nurturing of emerging talents,” Hedge says. Today, its roster is rich with prominent names, from Trenton Doyle Hancock and Hew Locke, to Carolee Schneemann, Michael Smith, and Frank Bowling. And this past September, Hales opened its showroom in New York’s Lower East Side to the public, cementing its dedication to introducing its artists to an international audience.

The gallery’s booth in the Survey sector is a timely spotlight on three consequential paintings by Bowling. The British artist produced the large-scale pieces shortly after moving from London to New York in the late 1960s. “This move across the Atlantic and Bowling’s subsequent immersion in New York’s creative scene marked a defining moment in the painter’s career: his break with figuration and entrance into a new world of abstraction—or what he has called ‘pure painting,’” says Hales associate director Sasha Gomeniuk. The presentation coincides with a resurgence of interest in the artist, evidenced by a major Bowling exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at Haus der Kunst, Munich, and others recently at institutions including Tate Modern, the Menil Collection, and the Brooklyn Museum.

From the start, this São Paulo gallery has focused on artists who emerged from the era of Brazil’s  tumultuous military dictatorship of the 1970s and ’80s. They created transgressive, provocative work, while more broadly seeking to present art as a means of social and political change. Owner Jacqueline Martins has since developed a program around research-oriented conceptual artists.

At Art Basel in Miami Beach, the gallery will show the first-ever solo fair booth dedicated to Brazilian artist Letícia Parente, an important feminist artist of the ’70s and ’80s. The stand will present work from across the artist’s spectrum, from Xerox and collage works to videos that reflect on the female experience. Over the past three years the gallery has committed to bringing greater international exposure to Parente’s work, resulting in more than 10 significant sales to important institutions, including the Migros Museum, Verbund Sammlung, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Anat Ebgi moved to Los Angeles after graduating from Bard’s Curatorial Studies program with the intention of creating a space in which emerging artists could experiment. And over the past five years, she’s done just that, while amassing a roster of 16 artists, including Amie Dicke, An Te Liu, and Jordan Nassar. Earlier this year, the gallerist opened a project space, called AE2.

For her debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, Ebgi will present two artists across the Positions and Film sectors.

Writer and collector Allison Berg notes that Ebgi “has consistently introduced us to both technically and conceptually talented young artists who are on the rise internationally.” She credits the gallerist for her keen curatorial eye, adding, “Her program is about artists who are informed by historical references, are pushing the boundaries of their medium, and are inspiring important conversations.”

In the Positions sector, devoted to showcasing singular projects by up-and-coming artists, she will show Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s multi-channel video installation, from a new and timely body of work by the artist that, according to Ebgi, “focuses on themes of the black male figure in American pop culture, film, and literature.”

For the Film sector, the gallery is showcasing more works by Huffman, alongside the complementary video work of performance and film artist Jen DeNike. Mining Hollywood filmic archetypes and the cult of masculinity, “DeNike’s series of three vignettes entitled If She Hollers challenge notions of gender, race and sexuality,” says Ebgi.

Since opening in Manhattan’s Chinatown four years ago, David Lewis has amassed a stable of emerging and established artists including Jared Madere, Dawn Kasper, Lucy Dodd, and Greg Parma Smith. Recent additions include Pictures Generation icon Barbara Bloom and feminist pioneer Mary Beth Edelson.

For the gallery’s first foray into Art Basel in Miami Beach, on view in the Nova sector, it is presenting a new, large-scale biomorphic painting by Dodd and new hanging sculptures, called “chandeliers,” by Kasper, which are made from cans, bulbs, and musical instruments.

According to Lewis and gallery director Dmitry Komis, participating in this year’s edition of the fair was “important for the gallery and these two artists at this particular moment of development,” since both artists are “coming off high-profile institutional engagements.” Kasper’s performative installation The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (2017) was showcased in Christine Macel’s “Viva Arte Viva” exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Art Basel in Miami Beach will mark Dodd’s first showing in the U.S. since her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016.

Lewis’s presentation offers a personal as well as professional reward for the two artists. “This is actually the first time their work will be shown together, despite over a two-decade long friendship and collaboration,” Lewis says.

Julia Fischbach and Emanuel Aguilar founded Patron two years ago in the Windy City’s River West neighborhood, focusing on Chicago-based artists with a political and conceptual bent to their work. They’ve since expanded their roster to include artists in New York, Los Angeles, and São Paulo.

Collectors Susan D. Goodman and Rodney D. Lubeznik credit Fischbach and Aguilar for their “smart, exciting, fresh and cohesive” program, with “one young talent after another joining the gallery.” They add, “We are hard-pressed to identify another ‘young’ gallery whose program so inspires and galvanizes us.”

For Patron’s first presentation at Art Basel in Miami Beach, in the Positions sector, it will present a new mural spanning the interior of the booth by Chicago-born, L.A.-based artist Harold Mendez. Constructed from many layers of material including tri-directional foil and graphite, the work explores Mendez’s “multi-ethnic and culturally layered identity as an American-born son of Colombian and Mexican parents,” says Aguilar. Mendez is also included in the fair’s outdoor, sculpture park-like Public sector in Collins Park, which is organized by independent curator Philipp Kaiser.

Both Fischbach and Aguilar see Art Basel in Miami Beach as a strong stepping stone not only for the continued growth of the gallery, but also Mendez’s career. After being included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and ahead of his participation in MoMA’s “New Photography” exhibition in March 2018, “his presence at the fair this year made sense as an extension of those presentations of his ideas,” Aguilar says. “It’s an amazing way to bookend a collection of great advances he’s seen in his practice and career.”

Ricardo Camargo has been a part of São Paulo’s art scene since he was 15, when he started working in his brother’s gallery. There he was privy to pivotal moments for Brazilian art, such as the first exhibition of Lygia Clark at the gallery in 1971 and Hélio Oiticica in 1972. When he opened his own gallery 22 years ago, Camargo decided he did not want to represent artists exclusively, allowing them the freedom to show elsewhere. “Versatility is something that I’ve always cherished,” he says. He has worked with artists including Claudio Tozzi, Tomoshige Kusuno, Antônio Henrique Amaral, Roberto Magalhães, and Maurício Nogueira Lima.

For his booth in the fair’s Survey sector, focusing on art made before 2000, the gallerist will recreate the studio of the late Brazilian artist Wesley Duke Lee, who is known for forging the Magical Realism movement in São Paulo and staging one of Brazil’s first happenings in the 1970s. Additionally, he will showcase nine works by the artist, ranging from 1962 to 1999, “that show his trajectory to becoming one of the most important artists to come out of Brazil.”

According to Camargo, Art Basel in Miami Beach is an ideal opportunity to explore the practice of an intrepid Brazilian artist. “What I like about Miami is that it mixes U.S. and Latin American culture well,” he says.

Since setting up his first London gallery in Chelsea in 1996, Offer Waterman has developed a reputation for focused surveys around 20th-century masters, like Frank Auerbach, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney. Now based in a five-story Mayfair townhouse, the eponymous gallery spans modern and contemporary artists from the U.S. and Europe, though “British art is my passion, and it’s what we are best known for,” Waterman says.

Following several years showing at leading fairs like TEFAF Maastricht and Frieze Masters, in Miami the gallery shows in the Survey sector with a booth aimed at introducing the Scottish-born, London-based artist William Turnbull, whose estate it represents, to American collectors and curators.

The thoughtful presentation homes in on the artist’s production from 1958 to 1972, during which time he visited New York, showed in the U.S., and befriended American artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Turnbull’s paintings and sculptures took a turn towards spare, minimalist, and often monochromatic forms. “We hope both collectors of American and British art will find his work of interest in Miami,” he says, noting that some of the works were originally shown in California in 1966. “We are really excited to be bringing this work back to the U.S.”

Since its inception nearly 20 years ago, Tokyo-based Taro Nasu has cultivated a program of conceptual artists from across the globe, including Simon Fujiwara, Mika Tajima, Pierre Huyghe, and Ryan Gander.

The gallery will spotlight the work of Japanese painter Koichi Enomoto in the Positions sector at Art Basel in Miami Beach. Enomoto’s work revolves around mythic motifs including good and evil, truth and falsehood, from both ancient and modern contexts. According to gallery owner Taro Nasu, his themes explore the conflict and relation between humanity and technology, especially in light of the rise of AI.

For the gallery’s debut at Art Basel in Miami Beach, Nasu wanted to present a Japanese artist who could speak to an international audience. “In this period of collisions between the nations, races, and of the revival of nationalism, Enomoto’s idiosyncratic mythmaking makes us aware of the precondition of our actual diversity and questions our actual senses and our future,” Nasu says.

When Nicole Russo started Chapter NY as a weekend-only project space in 2013, she didn’t know it would turn into a full-time endeavor just two years later. Russo has since been growing her roster—which includes artists Sam Anderson, Mira Dancy, Willa Nasatir, Milano Chow, and Paul Heyer—in addition to supporting the projects of non-represented artists. The latter initiative saw Keltie Ferris’s  “Body Prints” and Anicka Yi’s temporary recording studio, which she used to tape the first of her “Lonely Samurai” podcast series. On top of all of this, Russo also helped bring the collaborative gallery event Condo to New York this past summer.

Chapter NY tests the Art Basel in Miami Beach waters for the first time this year, after an inaugural run at Art Basel in Basel this past June. In Miami, Russo presents the multi-disciplinary work of Adam Gordon, who will transform the gallery’s Positions booth into a large-scale vitrine illuminated solely by the light of the exterior environment. She explains that this is a good opportunity for a wider audience to experience Gordon’s multi-faceted work, “which has been presented in galleries plenty, but never in such a public venue.”

There is also a separate yet connected performative element, which consists of a middle-aged woman, unknown to the public, who will wander throughout the fair and hover in close proximity to the vitrine for its entire duration. For Art Basel in Miami Beach, Russo was inspired to put together an “ambitious presentation,” which she says she hopes will grab the attention of curators as well as collectors who are open to adventurous work.

Richard Saltoun opened his London gallery in in 2011, with a focus on post-war and contemporary art.The gallery emphasizes “important [but]…unrecognized” art, including feminist, conceptual, and performance artists who cut their teeth in the 1970s, like Valie Export, Eleanor Antin, and Helen Chadwick, among others.

Senior curator of the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery in London, Vincent Honoré, who has followed Saltoun’s gallery for years, said he is “impressed not only by the ongoing quality of its exhibitions, but also by the commitment shown in each of its participations in art fairs,” citing its “in-depth research, top quality artworks, unexpected artists, and risk-taking.”

At Art Basel in Miami Beach, the gallery dedicates its booth in the Survey sector to the 20th-century Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo. The artist has not yet been shown at an art fair and the presentation will be the largest private collection of the artist’s work available for sale.

“It enables us to continue broadening our outreach,” Saltoun says of the showing at Art Basel in Miami Beach, “and introduce Vigo’s work and the gallery programme to South American collectors.”

Tyler Rollins founded his New York gallery over a decade ago, where he presented solo exhibitions of artists from Southeast Asia who did not yet have representation in the U.S. Today, he remains committed to the region, propelling one of few such gallery programs in the country.

Curator Ian Alteveer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art credits Rollins for his “support of some of the most compelling and engaged artists from South and Southeast Asia,” and notes that the gallery introduced him to the works of Tiffany Chung, Pinaree Sanpitak, and Sopheap Pich, whose sculptures were shown at the Met in 2013.

The gallery has shown in the main sector at Art Basel in Hong Kong for the past few years, which Rollins called “a fantastic platform for us.” But the time was right to try his hand at Art Basel’s stateside iteration, he said.

“Interest in contemporary art from Southeast Asia has grown considerably in the U.S. over the past 10 years,” Rollins says, “not just in New York but across the country.”

In Miami, the gallery focuses its booth in the Nova sector to Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo, whose work was included in the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year. The booth will feature new paintings addressing American colonialism in the Philippines. The pieces reflect on the artist’s early works that were included in the seminal 1992 exhibition at MOCA L.A., “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s.” (The artist spent his formative early years as an artist in California, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s.)

“The paintings explore the role of visual representations in colonial expansion—both as complicit agents and as modes of resistance,” Rollins says, “while also pointing to the return to the fore of popular consciousness many identity issues that were so prominent in the 1980s.”

This Buenos Aires-based, artist-run gallery has been operating for the past five years, working to support artists from its local Argentine art scene. Although its owners are attuned to the challenges contemporary artists face, founder Leopol Mones Cazón says the gallery was formed “not as a last resource, but as a vindication of being an artist today.”

In the Positions sector, Isla Flotante presents a sculptural hanging of monochromatic works—resembling the sound-absorbing panels in audio recording rooms—by Mariela Scafati, who toys with traditional conventions of painting. “For Mariela, paintings reveal their mysteries through simplicity and by doing so, they unveil more enigmas,” Mones Cazón says. “This display aims at modifying the viewer’s surroundings, offering a possibility beyond the white cube’s emptiness.”

The gallery hopes to engage in both the commercial and social spheres of Art Basel in Miami Beach. “We embrace the challenge of making these two worlds connect and hopefully continue to elaborate possibilities of coexistence,” Mones Cazón says “Contemporary art has become a strong weapon of interaction in the world economic order.””

Simon Wang opened his Shanghai gallery in 2013, and has since worked with emerging Chinese and international artists. In just a few short years, he developed a reputation for identifying innovative artists on the rise—names such as Guan Xiao, Wu Tsang, Allison Katz, and Nadim Abbas—and helping them reach an international audience and the attention of major curators. After showing at Art Basel in Basel for the first time this past June, and several years showing at the Hong Kong fair, Antenna Space’s Art Basel in Miami Beach debut is focused on ceramic sculptures by Chinese artist Xu Qu.

Xu’s new work, called Sir Harry Smith Parkes (2017), is comprised of sculptures borne of the artist’s recent research into the imperial Summer Palace in Beijing. Each component is comprised of a replica of a Qing Dynasty-style vessel, perched atop sleek brass and marble stands.

A Arte Invernizzi has cultivated a roster of largely Italian artists from the last 60 years who work in a minimalist vein, including Gianni Colombo, Pino Pinelli, and Igino Legnaghi. Interspersed are international artists of a similar ilk, like François Morellet, Lesley Foxcroft, and Günter Umberg.

When the gallery first opened its doors, self-taught mid-century painter Eduarda Emilia Maino—better known as Dadamaino—was the headliner of a three-person show. Over 20 years later, A Arte Invernizzi is adopting a similar strategy for its debut at Art Basel in Miami Beach, presenting her work alongside contemporaries like Rodolfo Aricò and Mario Nigro in the fair’s historically focused Survey sector.

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and former director of Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the booth will explore innovative forms of painting and the interplay of color and surface in the artistic context of midcentury Milan.

“In the 1950s and ’60s, Milan was really at the core of international creativity, and a seminal ‘workshop’ for new artistic tendencies,” says the gallery’s Epicarmo Invernizzi. Proof of this are Dadamaino’s experimentations with the seven colors of the light spectrum, Nigro’s use of the grid to structure his use of pigment, and Aricò’s use of shaped single-color canvases to envision spatial awareness.

Franck Prazan has been running his Paris gallery since 1993, specializing in post-war artists who worked in Paris, such as Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung, Jean Hélion, Wifredo Lam, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, and Zao Wou-Ki, among many others. Applicat-Prazan has made it a policy to work with private collectors “who by definition [take] a long term view of things.”

Prazan describes his comprehensive presentation at Art Basel in Miami Beach as a continuation of the gallery’s work around the world, including at both other Art Basel fairs, in Hong Kong and in Basel.  Its Miami booth in the main sector includes various choice works from artists on the gallery’s roster, including the aforementioned artists, as well as Karel Appel, Serge Poliakoff, and Jean-Paul Riopelle, among others.

“We are convinced that the North and South American collectors are now fully ready to re-discover the European Abstract Expressionist painters,” Prazan says.

Brussels-based dépendance gave important artists like Sergej Jensen, Haegue Yang, and Jana Euler their first international solo shows, and was the first to show Thomas Bayrle, Michael Krebber, Richard Aldrich, and Ed Atkins in Belgium.

“Since the very beginning, dépendance introduced young artists to Brussels when they were relatively unknown,” says gallery owner Michael Callies.

In its Nova booth at Art Basel in Miami Beach, the gallery will show Atkins, Peter Wächtler, and Gillian Carnegie, the last of whom is a new addition to the gallery program. “Each of the artists has developed a strong, unique figurative language, of humor and melancholy, offering reflections on human subjectivity in all its complication,” says Callies.

Among works on view will be Carnegie’s dynamic representational paintings; Atkins’s drawings, from a new series called “Old Food,” which is related to the work on view his current Berlin exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau; and Wächtler’s drawings and sculptures, which are inspired by the protagonists from his prodigious writing practice.

Following years of showing at Frieze London and Frieze New York, Callies says Art Basel in Miami Beach “is important for us since we have a lot of clients in the U.S. whom we would like to meet,” and a chance to to expand the gallery’s collector base.

François Ceysson and Loïc Bénétière began their gallery in Saint-Étienne, France, in 2006. Later, they were joined by art advisor Bernard Ceysson (who is François’s father), and began to expand their footprint across French-speaking Europe, with outposts in Luxembourg and Paris. The gallery has since opened a second, large space in Luxembourg—with nearly 13,000 square feet of exhibition space—and a branch on New York’s Upper East Side. “Multiplying exhibition spaces is for us is neither an obsession nor a goal in itself,” explains Bernard Ceysson. “It is simply a matter of better serving our collectors.”

While the gallery’s roster includes sought-after young American artists like Sadie Laska, Sarah Braman, Trudy Benson, and Joe Fyfe, at the core of the program are 13 historically important French artists from the Supports/Surfaces movement, including Claude Viallat and Noël Dolla, whose works will feature in the gallery’s Art Basel in Miami Beach booth. The movement, which traces back to the South of France in the late 1960s and ’70s, consists of artists producing spare, reductive works—frequently featuring grids—that examine the physicality of painting.

“Viallat and Dolla were amongst the numerous intellectuals challenging cultural production within the context of social and political unrest in France,” says gallery director Loïc Garrier. “Today, they continue to call their own pictorial practices into question and to interrogate painting’s political and social paradigms.”

When Kerry Inman founded her gallery back in 1990, she sought to foster Houston-based artists, particularly those at the early stages of their careers. Nearly three decades later, she’s retained her mission to form lasting relationships with local artists, even as it’s grown to include artists from across the U.S. and abroad.

For its first showing at Art Basel Miami Beach, Inman is showing the works of Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus, whose work “takes on real and invented music histories to probe the underpinnings of cultural politics in the United States and imagine a series of metaphysical encounters,” Inman says. In addition to new collage works inspired by Jet magazine, the gallery shows pieces from Cyrus’s ongoing project Pride Record Findings, which began in 2005 and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The work, centering on a fictional music label that was shaped by the politics of the 1970s, is “a distillation of political and social struggles of the past and a tribute to the many ways resistance and resilience inform Black music and culture, and by extension, define American life,” Inman says.

“Bringing an artist to a fair like Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time is a fulfillment of our core mission to cultivate artists and introduce them to an international stage,” she says.