Art Basel Miami Beach 2024

The arts of the Americas.

The most memorable artworks I saw in Art Basel Miami Beach.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, the first edition led by Director Bridget Finn, brought together 286 leading galleries from 38 countries with more than 75,000 attendees from across the globe, the fair reaffirmed its position as the premier platform for modern and contemporary art in the Americas and celebrating its reputation as a must-attend event for artists, curators, art dealers, arts directors, collectors, museums and institutions.

Wine talks, cook tales, sparkling stories, trentodoc tastings, enotecas, cantinas and masterclasses.

The 22nd edition was a packed program for art lovers and enthusiasts.

My top choices for this year’s fair are:

Paloma Teppa  2. Arthur Monroe  3. and 14.Rob Pruitt 4. Anne Imhof 5. Beatriz Milhazes 6. Gabriel Orozco 7. Hayal Ponzati 8. Hilary Pecis 9. Jose Davila 10. Karel Funk 11. Kaylene Wishkey 12. Pinaree Sanpitak 13. Portia Munson 15. Salvo

Teppa has the need to re-affirm our link with nature and for her  to be surrounded with living plants is fundamental. She utilizes design to reestablish contact with nature  and to generate harmony in our lives and our surroundings. ‘The more we connect with nature, the more peaceful we feel’ she quotes.

Monroe was active as an Abstract Expressionist painter since the 1950s. He was part of the Beat movement and an unrecognised artist of colour with a careeer span of 60 years. Pruitt is an American post-conceptual artist. Working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture, he does not have a single style or medium. He considers his work to be intensely personal and biographical. I absolutely love his repetitive series of sunrises and sundowns and his ‘Suicide’ shades of blues. Anne Imhof was famous for her ‘Wish You Were Gay’ exhibition and has emerged over the past decade as one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation.

Beatriz Milhazes breaths vitality and frees colours in surrounded geometry with Brazilian motifs. Gabriel Orozco has been an influential figure in the international contemporary art community since the early 90’s. His aesthetic vocabulary is indebted to Conceptualism. Hayal Pozanti is a Turkish-American artist, based in the USA. Pozanti became internationally known in the early 2010s for her bright abstract paintings of geometric forms, based on a hieroglyphic alphabet which mixes tech, AI and human behaviour. Since 2021 she paints lavish abstract landscapes evocative of nature that upscale to the subconscious.

Hilary Pecis is an American contemporary artist based in Los Angeles whose work focuses on subjects of everyday life in both interior spaces and landscapes created with saturated colours. Her work has been shown both in national and international exhibitions and several museums. Jose Dávila is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist. Mainly a sculptor, Dávila also works with two-dimensional media such as painting (like shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024) drawing and prints. Karel Funk is a Canadian Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1971. Numerous key galleries and museums such as 303 Gallery have featured Funk‘s work which takes a closer look at people’s hoodies – the attributes of street wear often overlooked.

The paintings of Kaylene Whiskey incorporate pop culture references alongside traditional Anangu culture, in a playful interpretation of the artist’s childhood. Pinaree Sanpitak is a Thai conceptual and contemporary artist. Her work addresses motherhood, womanhood, and self by using the shape of breast to provoke the symbol of feminism and femininity. Portia Munson is an American visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, painting, and digital photography, focusing on themes related to the environment and feminism. Her lates installation at Art Basel Miami Beach ‘Bound Angel’ draws connections between the things we collect and what they say about us. The self-described feminist environmental artist creates fantastical installations from old found materials. And the final artist that draw my attention -already saw a big installation in the Unlimited section last June at Art Basel –Salvo was an Italian modernist painter and sculptor known for his conceptual practice; he later transitioned to richly coloured landscapes as seen here.