The 13 Best Booths at UNTITLED, Miami Beach

The fifth edition of UNTITLED, Miami Beach opened Tuesday, returning to its enviable spot on the shoreline of South Beach. The fair, which launches its inaugural San Francisco edition in January, is a perennial favorite among the satellites for its tight curation—and this edition, featuring 129 galleries from 20 countries, is perhaps its strongest yet. Below, we bring you 13 standout presentations, from a powerful and timely statement on gun violence against black bodies to a young artist’s 21st-century update on classic landscape photography.

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM

With works by Stefan Behlau, Julian Charrière, Simon Mullan, Robert Lazzarini, Klaus Jörres

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

At more than 15 feet tall, a wall sculpture by Simon Mullan offers a dramatic entrance into DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM’s booth, quite literally: It features two doorways. The work is comprised of white, square ceramic tiles like ones you’d find in a bathroom or kitchen, but, unlike their domestic foils, these tiles are creatively intersected by lines of black grout. The work references ideas of fragmentation and harmony in art, music, and design. Like contemporary hieroglyphs, they’re written in a code that is intriguing but not easily deciphered.

Taymour Grahne

With works by Nadia Ayari

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Luscious, deeply hued paintings of tree branches overlaid with blood-red lines fill a solo booth by Brooklyn-based artist Nadia Ayari, whose politically and sexually charged work has evolved from scenes of violence to depictions of figs to this latest series turning heads at UNTITLED. These thick, impastoed paintings—each created with some 10 to 15 layers of oil—are on offer for between $8,000 and $15,000 and are accompanied by both works on paper and a new series of sculptures.

Denny Gallery

With works by Justine Hill, Nikolai Ishchuk, Caris Reid

Why You Should Stop

Tangles of abstract shapes by 30-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist Justine Hill dot two walls of Denny Gallery’s booth. Suggesting hybrids of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray, they embrace the history of abstraction—but sketched on the computer and brought back to canvas with a contemporary update. They are priced between $3,500 and $14,000, and, as of Tuesday afternoon, two have sold.

Machete

With works by Hulda Guzmán

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

In 32-year-old Dominican artist Hulda Guzmán’s solo booth for Machete, one painting, Alfombra de tigre (Tiger Rug) (2016), will stop you in your tracks. Like most of the work in the booth, the piece is painted on wooden board, allowing patches of exposed grain to become part of the painting. The work, priced at $11,000 and sold on opening day to a Miami-based collector from Puerto Rico, sees a magic Tibetan rug, stamped with a classic outstretched tiger motif, sprawled across a wooden floor. Gazing into the painting, through bay windows overlooking the expansive darkness that envelops a tiny speck of moon, you’ll imagine yourself in this luxe interior, ready to take a ride into the night sky.

SlyZmud

With works by Mercedes Azpilicueta, Irina Kirchuk, Vicente Grondona, Hernán Salamanco

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Three paintings by Vicente Grondona, created during the Buenos Aires-based artist’s recent residency at Braque in Paris, steal the show at Argentine gallery SlyZmud. Grondona pulled imagery from both Paris and Crete—Parisian vistas, a mime, a minotaur, the Palace of Knossos—but his strongest composition, picturing a gargoyle happily perched on a Parisian roof, was painted on a scrap of old haute couture cotton, using not one but three brushes at once.

DiabloRosso

With works by Ana Elena Garuz

Why You Should Stop

This solo booth features a response by Panama-based artist Ana Elena Garuz to her country’s continuous state of construction. A wall covered with minimalist curls of blue painters’ tape is paired with paintings that are riots of abstract forms, while a fantastic blue coil slinks across the booth floor. Together, the works form a striking, intelligent meditation on a country in constant flux.

Lora Reynolds Gallery

With works by Richard Forster, Lucas Simões

Why You Should Stop

Brutalism lasted a short period of time, but its influence is felt in structures all over the world—many of which are now being demolished. At Austin-based Lora Reynolds Gallery’s booth, Lucas Simões’s work is inspired by the Brazilian artist’s research into modern architecture through time. Concrete-and-wood sculptures are precariously held together by paper—a strategic but fragile balance meant to reflect the increasingly tenuous existence of Brutalist structures as time goes on.

moniquemeloche

With works by Ebony G. Patterson, Sanford Biggers

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

In perhaps the most powerful and timely booth at the fair, Chicago gallery moniquemeloche foregrounds instances of violence against black bodies. Sculptures and videos by Sanford Biggers—from the artist’s “BAM” series (2015–16), in which each work is named after a victim—are paired with an installation by Ebony G. Patterson, which features memorials to anonymous child victims of gun violence set in the dancehall aesthetic of her Jamaican heritage. “When we hear reports that involve children and police, somehow their blackness negates their possibility of innocence,” said Patterson, who on opening day was standing alongside her work.

rosenfeld porcini

With works by Leonardo Drew

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

While Leonardo Drew’s large-scale, masculine sculptures have been the source of much art world praise in recent years, it’s his new series of smaller, more delicate assemblages that’s drawing attention at UNTITLED—including two that sold on opening day. Here, he gives soul to organic materials, like cotton, wood, or rust, in his go-to earthtone palette. The best of the bunch, 34i (2016), pairs a paper-thin stack of iron rust flakes with chips of wood coated in brilliant blue.

Postmasters

With works by Mark Dorf, Nidaa Badwan, Austin Lee

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Photographer Mark Dorf, 28, embraces modern technology to create post-analog landscapes—think Ansel Adams’s classic vistas with a digital, 21st-century update. Among works priced between $2,500 and $3,000, don’t miss a stunning series of photographs, “Emergence” (2014–15), shot in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains during a residency spent among ecologists at a data-collecting bio lab. These Photoshop-manipulated images of mountains and forests present a view of nature through the lens of science and technology.

Shulamit Nazarian

WITH WORKS BY REUVEN ISRAEL, FAY RAY

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Two artists who produce cultural mashups come to a fantastic collision at Venice Beach gallery Shulamit Nazarian. Los Angeles-based Fay Ray’s black-and-white photographic collages (priced between $2,500 and $6,500) reference the pop and fetish cultures of her native California, where images of the feminine body, à la Mapplethorpe, meet objects of luxury and glamour, from leather to cacti. Meanwhile, Brooklyn-based Israeli sculptor Reuven Israel’s minimal, handmade sculptures ($16,500 apiece) fuse science fiction with references to the religious iconography of Jerusalem.

ada gallery

With works by Derek Larson, Tom Condon, Whitney Oldenburg, Jared Clark

WHY YOU SHOULD STOP

Good luck walking past Richmond, Virginia’s ada gallery without stopping for Derek Larson’s mirrored wall sculptures, featuring robotic arms wielding cameras that play animations of dancing aliens. In these works (on offer for $15,000 apiece), the Yale grad and former student of Jessica Stockholder blends science fiction with an interest in autoimmune diseases. Intestine-like appendages and eerie alien hands reach out toward the viewer in an attempt to communicate.

marso

With works by Théo Mercier, Carlos Arias