50 Must-See Artworks at UNTITLED, Art Miami, NADA, PULSE, and More
As Miami fair week approaches and galleries from around the globe begin to fill tents and convention centers all over the city, it’s important to strategically approach your itinerary. How else can you hit all the fairs—and artworks—you hope to see? Beyond the main event, Art Basel in Miami Beach, a crop of satellite fairs offer the opportunity to discover even more work, often by younger artists and at a lower price point. We’ve scoured the previews of Miami’s six strongest satellite fairs—UNTITLED, Art Miami, NADA, PULSE, CONTEXT, and Miami Project—to bring you 50 artworks you won’t want to miss on your 2016 tour.
UNTITLED, Miami Beach
OCEAN DRIVE & 12TH ST., MIAMI BEACH
Opens Nov. 30
For its fifth edition, UNTITLED returns to its perch on the sandy shores of South Beach with a tightly curated presentation organized by the fair’s artistic director, Omar López-Chahoud, along with curators Christophe Boutin and Melanie Scarciglia. True to form, the light-filled tent will teem with roomy booths from an international group of galleries and nonprofits hailing from some 20 countries, all bringing primarily new work by a diverse range of artists, including pioneers of the avant-garde and on-the-rise MFA grads.
We have our eye on Reykjavík gallery BERG Contemporary and their booth devoted to 1970s glitch-video innovators Steina and Woody Vasulka—in particular, their influential 1974 video Noisefields, a copy of which is also housed in MoMA’s collection. On the more recent side of things, we’re excited to see a new, opalescent diptych from Julian Charrière at Berlin’s DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM and a suite of multipart, exuberant abstractions from Justine Hill at New York’s Denny Gallery. If you find yourself in need of a short art break, you can borrow a special edition artist-designed surfboard from the fair and try your luck in the nearby waves.
Art Miami
3101 NE 1ST AVE., WYNWOOD
Opens Nov. 29
Held annually in the city’s Wynwood district, Art Miami returns for its 27th edition with a cohort of 130 international exhibitors spread over a 200,000-square-foot tent. After Tuesday’s VIP private preview, benefiting the local Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the fair opens its doors to booths hosting smaller-scale work by Modernist greats, like Picasso and Man Ray, as well as sculptures and paintings by pioneering Pop practitioners, such as Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol. You’ll also see more recent work by contemporary artists ranging from Chantal Joffe to John Baldessari. This year, we can’t wait to see diamond-in-the-rough pieces by influential but underrecognized female artists like Chicago Imagist Gladys Nilsson, whose dreamy figurative canvas will hang at Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery, and the Surrealist Remedios Varo, whose jewel-like drawing of two intertwined faces can be pored over at Mexico City’s Pablo Goebel Fine Arts.
NADA Miami Beach
6701 COLLINS AVE., MIAMI BEACH
Opens Dec. 1
After a stint at the posh Fontainebleau hotel, NADA returns in its 14th edition to the Deauville Beach Resort, a quirky but charming high-rise with which the fair has been long associated. Staying true to its passionate commitment to emerging art, NADA will host 110 galleries and project spaces from 17 different countries; significantly, 43 of them will be first-time exhibitors. One of those is New York’s Company Gallery, which will bring a solo presentation from sculptor, painter, and spellbinding performance artist Raúl de Nieves. His breakout show at Company opened earlier this year to rave reviews, and just last week it was announced that he is slated to participate in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. At Martos, painter Alex Chaves will unveil new figurative canvases inspired by the late Lower East Side artist Dan Asher, whose estate the gallery recently began to represent. Other highlights include new photos by Sara Cwynar at Foxy Production, David Leggett’s canvases of black cultural icons at Shane Campbell, and Eric Mack’s pegboard paintings at Moran Bondaroff.
Left: Alex Chaves, Keke, 2016. Courtesy of Martos Gallery, New York; Center: Raúl de Nieves, As Far As You Take Me That's Where I Believe, 2015. Courtesy of Company Gallery, New York; Right: Eric Mack, Bed, Bath, Beyond It, 2016. Courtesy of Moran Bondaroff Gallery, Los Angeles.
David Leggett, We Made It, 2014. Courtesy of Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Center: Hannes Michanek, Celestial navigation, 2016. Courtesy of Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt; Right: Melanie Ebenhoch, I feel like David, 2016. Courtesy of HESTER, New York.
Left: Orion Martin, Hobnail Garden Nigh Knot Tune, 2016. Courtesy of Bodega, New York; Center: Ryan Johnson, Day Figure, 2016. Courtesy of Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Right: Sara Cwynar, Tracy with Objects, 2016. Courtesy of Foxy Production, New York.
PULSE Miami Beach
4601 COLLINS AVE., MIAMI BEACH
Opens Dec. 1
Following PULSE’s 2015 expansion to two sprawling tents in North Beach, the fair returns to the site this year for its 12th edition, this time with a roster of over 75 galleries bringing together some 200 artists. With first-time participants representing 25 percent of the booths, there will be a bevy of new talent on display. We have our eye on Leipzig-based painter Henriette Grahnert’s humorous fractured figurations at Galerie Kleindienst, San Francisco artist Dana Hemenway’s woven extension-cord sculptures at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, and Los Angeles-based photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s mesmerizing fragmented portraits at Yancey Richardson. New brightly hued, dynamic paintings from New York-based Paul Wackers and Ghanaian Ablade Glover are also sure to stand out.
CONTEXT Art Miami
36TH STREET BETWEEN NE 1st AVE. AND BUENA VISTA BLVD., WYNWOOD
Opens Nov. 29
For its fifth edition, CONTEXT expands and moves one block north of its sister fair, Art Miami. Known for its accessibly priced work by emerging and established artists alike, the fair will corral over 100 galleries, this year with three curated sections to boot: Sound Positions, devoted to sound artists; Context Projects, showcasing artists working with new technologies; and Sculpture Garden, showing large-scale sculptures en plein air. Swiss-born, New York-based artist Katja Loher will fill Zurich’s Galerie Andres Thalmann with sculptural videos that resemble portals into otherworldly, idyllic lands not yet irreparably damaged by humans. New York-based artist Sam Still’s large-scale minimalist drawings, which depict rich black voids accented with subtle white outlines, will hang front and center at San Francisco’s K. Imperial Fine Art, while Korean painter Kim Myoung-Jin’s expressive, dreamlike pastiches of floating cartoonish icons will make a show-stopping appearance at Seoul’s Gallery GAIA.
Miami Project
6625 INDIAN CREEK DRIVE, MIAMI BEACH
Opens Dec. 1
This boutique fair, now in its fifth year, will host tightly curated presentations from 20 international galleries. Located just next door to NADA, the small—but very strong—fair juxtaposes both new and storied work from young, mid-career, and iconic creatives alike. Case in point: David Lusk Gallery’s booth brings together a surprising, stimulating combination of artists, highlights being a set of 1970s and ’80s still lifes by William Eggleston, new and haunting figurative canvases by Rob Matthews, and recent patchwork wooden panels by Greely Matt. Exciting new finds include Caroline Larsen’s hypertextural compositions depicting cornucopic bunches of fruit at FMLY as well as Gregory Euclide’s detailed dioramas of lush, unattainable Edens at Hashimoto Contemporary.
