Art Basel Miami Beach 2024: What Not to Miss

Art Basel Miami Beach opens to press and VIPs. Photo by Lisa Freeman

 

By J. SCOTT ORR December 4, 2024

MIAMI BEACH – Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 kicks off this week with its signature mix of cultural whiplash and market mania, transforming South Beach into a fever dream where blue-chip masterpieces share oxygen with ceramic sculptures, handwoven textiles and AI-generated creations.

As the art world's power players and provocateurs arrive, this 22nd edition of the critical U.S. art fair is being watched as a barometer of both the market's resilience and its evolving relationship with technological innovation. The show features work presented by 286 galleries from 38 countries across nearly 500,000 square feet of exhibition space at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Despite whispers of a cooling market, the mood on the floor was imbued with a what-me-worry vitality. The private jet-set got a jump on the proceedings with VIP previews and champagne-soaked soirées starting Wednesday. The super-exclusive, million-dollar parties at private homes in places like Palm, Star and Hibiscus Islands in Biscayne Bay got underway despite a failed court challenge to a new Miami Beach order requiring permits for over-the-top bashes.

Basel opens as the art world’s cognoscenti contemplate market conditions as complex and confused as a Jackson Pollock canvas. The first half of 2024 saw major auction houses weathering a 26% dip in sales, according to Art Basel’s Survey of Global Collecting 2024. While this suggests that the global art market is poised for a second straight year of decline, research reveals a fascinating counter trend just beneath the surface.

The old guard's penchant for trophy pieces may be cooling, but a new generation is redefining collecting patterns, with works-on-paper and prints gaining momentum. Gen X collectors are leading the charge, outspending their millennial counterparts and showing particular verve for in-person experiences at galleries and art fairs, the survey showed. In another indication that the art market’s future may not be as bleak as some believe, a separate Art Basel survey of 1,400 VIP fair guests found 97% planned to purchase a work of art over the next 12 months.

Art Basel Miami Beach opens to press and VIPs. Photo by Lisa Freeman

In response to these market challenges, Basel attracted its largest cohort of new exhibitors in over a decade by offering a range of smaller stand sizes in its main Galleries section, along with the more modestly priced stands in the Nova and Positions sectors. Space in the Galleries section reportedly starts at $60,000, while space in Nova and Positions goes for $26,000 and $11,000, respectively.

There was no obvious successor to the title of Art Basel’s Most Talked About Absurdity, a mantle still worn by Maurizio Cattelan and his 2019 banana duct-taped to the wall installation. The banana, by the way, became the world's most expensive snack last week when a crypto mogul ate the thing after paying $6.2 million for it at Sotheby’s.

The fair's Meridians sector for monumental works is set to become ground zero for Instagram-ready spectacles, with one standout piece featuring a series of giant arcways visitors are invited to walk through. Meanwhile, in the main hall, galleries are betting on a renaissance of interest in latter-day contemporary art masters like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

While the satellite fairs scattered across Miami and Miami Beach feel more vital than ever, offering a necessary counterpoint to the main fair's market machinations, there is no denying Art Basel’s singular allure to the art world elite. It’s opening signals that the circus is back in town, and the tent is bigger and brasher than ever.

In South Beach for the public opening Friday? Here are five things you should not miss:

Elaine de Kooning, Kaldis with Scarves, 1969 Photo courtesy Berry Campbell, New York

Berry Campbell, New York

Women of Abstract Expressionism

Tracking the evolving historical narrative of Abstract Expressionism, Berry Campbell arrives at Art Basel Miami Beach with a presentation of previously marginalized female powerhouses, including a stunning 1969 portrait by Elaine de Kooning, a rare Alice Baber triptych from 1972 and works by Lynne Drexler, Mary Abbott, Sonia Gechtof and others.

“Not so long ago, many of these artists were still relegated to the margins of art history; however, through collective efforts of research and promotion, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of women artists of this time,” the gallery said. The exhibit comes at a time of growing interest in female artists more broadly. According to Art Basel’s collecting survey, the share of works by female artists in the collections of high net worth individuals rose to a ratio of 44% versus male artists’ works in 2024, up from 33% in 2018. 

The de Kooning, Kaldis with Scarves, is a portrait of artist Aristodimos Kaldis, one of her favorite subjects. In it, de Kooning captures Kaldis with kinetic energy and gestural bravado, centering on Kaldis's silk scarves, which cascade around his neck in a riot of jewel tones. De Kooning's brushwork is both aggressive and intimate, building the composition with swift, decisive strokes that capture not just Kaldis's physical presence but his larger-than-life personality. The piece sold at Christies one year ago for $138,600.

Jimena Croceri’s Impossible Jewel. Photo by Lisa Freeman

PIEDRAS, Buenos Aires, Positions

Sculpture/photographer Jimena Croceri

Argentina’s PIEDRAS, an artist-run project turned gallery, presents Jimena Croceri’s Impossible Jewel, a fusion of photography and bronze sculpture that explores the negative spaces between people and body parts, transforming them into a meditation on identity and human connection.

Impossible Jewel bridges ancient wisdom with contemporary dialogue through a series of photographs and bronze sculptures that explore the profound relationship between body and metal in pre-Columbian culture, where ornamental pieces served as talismans and non-binary corporealities flourished before colonial impositions. Croceri's sculptures—cast from the negative spaces formed by human bodies in contact—propose a new vocabulary for how bodies might inhabit the global present. 

One of the pieces, an untitled photograph, explores the negative space between two subjects' posteriors, which has been filled with bronze. Like the other photographs in the series, this one features a minimalist aesthetic in its drive to highlight the interplay between organic curved forms and metallic material.

Working at the intersection of performance, collaboration, and feminism, Croceri’s work dissolves traditional notions of authorship while exploring the boundaries of time and chance.

Reggie Burrows Hodges, Sloop Eldaz Crossing, 2022. Photo by Lisa Freeman

Karma, New York

Reggie Burrows Hodges, Sloop: Eldaz Crossing, 2022.

Karma, the dominant gallery presence in New York’s East Village, presents a group show of more than three dozen artists, including a masterful, monumental 2022 work by California artist Reggie Burrows Hodges

In "Sloop: Eldaz Crossing," Hodges employs his signature technique of painting from a black ground to conjure a spectral figure draped in luminous white, gliding through deep nautical blues. The work simultaneously evokes both spiritual passage and the historical weight of maritime narratives while maintaining Hodges’ characteristic ethereal ambiguity.

From his roots in Compton to global museum walls, Hodges has rethought contemporary portraiture, conjuring enigmatic figures that emerge through atmospheric brushwork, their identities shaped not by physical features but by their painted environments—a technique that has earned his work places in collections from the Met to the Stedelijk.

Pathways, Zhu Jinshi. Photo by Lisa Freeman

Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong and Shanghai

Zhu Jinshi, Pathways 

Pearl Lam Galleries makes its Art Basel Miami Beach debut in the Meridians section with a boundary-blurring exhibition that positions contemporary Asian artists in dialogue with Western art traditions. Among them is the installation Pathways, by Beijing-based abstract art and installation pioneer, Zhu Jinshi.

Zhu's monumental installation demands attention with its trio of sweeping Xuan paper arcs that invite viewers to physically navigate through an incomplete circle—a powerful metaphor for our fractured global condition that seamlessly merges Eastern philosophical traditions with contemporary spatial dynamics.

“Eastern philosophy highlights the importance of unity, as symbolized by a full circle, in keeping peace and order in the world,” Zhu said. “The full circle has long been missing in today’s world, with social order being repeatedly disrupted and conflicts gradually expanding from regional issues to global crises. Viewers are invited to contemplate their own feelings about walking through an un-unified pathway,” he said.

Emerging from the groundbreaking "Stars" movement to become a master of abstract neo-expressionism and installation art, Zhu developed a distinctive aesthetic language that explores the materiality of paint through massive impasto works and spatial interventions—a practice that has earned his work places in collections from the Brooklyn Museum to M+ Hong Kong.

Zilia Sánchez  Concepto II, ca. 2019. Photo by Lisa Freeman 

Galerie Lelong & Co, New York

Zilia Sánchez

In a presentation for Art Basel's Kabinett section, Galerie Lelong & Co presents a series of intimate sculptures and paintings by Zilia Sánchez that demonstrates her mastery of sensual abstraction through both her iconic shaped canvases and newly realized marble and bronze works.

In one work, Concepto II, Sánchez translates her signature shaped-canvas aesthetic into bronze, creating a duet of curved columns whose protruding forms mirror each other across negative space. This engaging exploration of geometric sensuality embodies and updates her oeuvre’s investigation into the dialogue between the architectural and the erotic.

First conceived in her native 1950s Havana and refined across continents, her practice transforms canvas-wrapped wooden armatures into undulating topographies that hover between painting and sculpture. While her muted palette and serial approach nod to minimalism, Sánchez transcends such categories through her exploration of feminine curves and cosmic energies.

At 97, Sánchez continues to influence contemporary discourse from her San Juan studio, with recent exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and ICA Miami. Her works are held in collections from MoMA to the Centre Pompidou. WM