Kehinde Wiley on view at Basel with Galerie Templon (Vittoria Benzine)
Brooklyn at Basel: Meet the artists repping the borough in Miami
The twentieth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach is officially underway and Brooklyn is on display throughout. A few highlights
The commercial art world, especially New York City’s slice of it, has infiltrated South Beach for this year’s annual Art Basel Miami Beach extravaganza. Great art will be on display well into the weekend on both sides of Biscayne Bay. Fashionable first-timers, take note though: This Swiss art fair, which helped kickstart Miami’s art scene back in 2002, is a different kind of party — one where it’s cooler to arrive early than late.
Art Basel Miami Beach opens to the public today and remains on view through Saturday, December 3. As usual, the artwork is more interesting than the wheeling and dealing. Exhibitors appear to be getting back to the basics for Basel’s twentieth year, focusing on tactility and paintings over the hot digital displays of literally yesteryear.
At 238 exhibitors, this year also marks the Miami event’s biggest edition yet. Galleries from Miami, Bogotà, Paris, and more showed up — including dozens of art dealers from New York. Brooklyn artists in particular are here with local and international institutions alike.
We’ll be on the lookout for the borough’s best at South Beach’s adjacent art fairs this week (there is a whole cottage industry of other art fairs that has sprung up around Basel), but where else to start but with the main event?
Just at the western entrance of the soaring Miami Beach Convention Hall, Chelsea-based Greene Naftali gallery presented a painting-and-suitcase assemblage by the mostly abstract artist Walter Price, following his solo show there this spring. The gallery’s group presentation also featured a work of oil and enamel on wood by Red Hook-based Jacqueline Humphries from 1995, the year Greene Naftali opened, and another canvas by Rachel Harrison.
Jacqueline Humphries, ‘Pass,’ 1995 (Vittoria Benzine)
Paris-based Galerie Templon just opened their first New York location this year. A massive canvas by Greenpoint-based Kehinde Wiley anchors their booth. Outside the booth hangs a trippy magenta-tinged mirrored lightbox by fellow Brooklynite Iván Navarro. One elementary school girl told her chaperone she wanted to break the glass and climb into the work’s incandescent portal. The gallerist replied that’s how we know the work’s working.
Ivan Navarro’s lightbox at Galerie Templon (featuring a selfie of the author) (Vittoria Benzine)
Artist and game designer Jacolby Satterwhite presented a disco steampunk steed painted against a dark background with Los Angeles-based gallery Morán Morán, which also featured Keltie Ferris, Soil Thornton, and Kon Trubkovich at their booth. Satterwhite’s bionic horse also appears in an accompanying VR experience, submerging viewers into an equally psychedelic world populated by models dancing on gold robots. Whoever buys the piece gets to keep the hardware too.
Jacolby Satterwhite at Morán Morán (Vittoria Benzine)
Art Basel Miami Beach’s carefully curated “Meridians” section hosts larger scale works. This year’s edition featured an enclosed installation of backlit stained glass and arranged found objects — some of the latest work from Christopher Myers, courtesy of TriBeCa-based James Cohan. Titled “Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me,” the work is accompanied by text that says it creates “a chapel for contemplation installed within a site-specific architectural structure” and also “filters collective and individual histories through the transformative materiality of narrative.” The installation will play host to live performances of original music throughout the fair.
Christopher Myers, ‘Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me,’ 2022 (Vittoria Benzine)
Clearing gallery has been based in Bushwick since 2011, though they’re getting ready to move to Manhattan in the new year. Their last show in Brooklyn is up through December, but the gallery is showing a contingent of Brooklyn artists at Basel, including Williamsburg-based Hugh Hayden and Quincy Langford and Bushwick-based artists Harold Ancart and Blair Whiteford — a recent signee to their roster.
Blair Whiteford, ‘Particle of Exchange,’ 2022 (Vittoria Benzine)
Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF provocative’s fully-functioning ATM has caused a stir at Galerie Perrotin’s booth. Anyone can take cash out there for no fee, but their bank balance will be publicized and ranked with their photo against all other participants who have withdrawn funds. This is another way one knows that art’s working: when it makes everyone palpably uncomfortable.
MSCHF’s ATM at Perrotin (Vittoria Benzine)
Vienna-based Galerie Krinzinger presented an elegant all-black work by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, who just announced his representation with Sean Kelly gallery. How does a Viennese gallery meet a rising Kings County star? As Thomas Krinzinger tells Brooklyn Magazine, he met Akinbola at a private party in Miami before the pandemic, and later invited him to participate in a residency, which culminated with a solo show in September 2021. They don’t call Miami Magic City for nothing!
Art Basel Miami Beach remains on view at the Miami Beach Convention Center (1901 Convention Center Drive in Miami Beach) through December 3. Tickets start at $55.
