Elisa Carollo – Observer

Christie’s and Sotheby’s Close 2025 With a Market Rebound Fueled by Luxury and New Buyers

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:33:48 +0000

Julian Cassady Photography / Ali'>

After a challenging 2024—marked by a 25 percent contraction in the auction market—both Christie’s and Sotheby’s are closing 2025 with a clear rebound, according to newly released year-end results. Sotheby’s reported projected consolidated sales of $7 billion for 2025, a 17 percent increase over 2024. Christie’s, on a similar upward trajectory, expects to finish the year with $6.2 billion in global sales, up nearly 7 percent from last year’s $5.8 billion and broadly in line with its 2023 total. Following a slow start dampened by subdued May auctions, both houses regained momentum after the summer as the market strengthened, culminating in a multibillion-dollar fall season across London and New York.

While the blockbuster results of November’s marquee sales may not be sufficient on their own to signal a full recovery—concentrated as they are at the very top of the market—the broader picture reflected in these year-end numbers offers more substantial grounds for optimism. This year’s gains were driven not only by fine-art trophies but also by the continued rise of luxury collectibles and design—categories that are proving especially effective at attracting new buyers, often younger and from emerging markets, and ultimately broadening the base of the market overall.

Sotheby’s record year, led by trophies and luxury

Sotheby’s recorded a 26 percent year-over-year increase in auction sales to $5.7 billion, with a sharp acceleration in the second half of the year, which brought in 59 percent more than the same period in 2024. Private sales contributed an additional $1.2 billion, slightly below the prior year but still substantial.

Fine art sales generated $4.3 billion in revenue for the auction house in 2025, marking a 15 percent increase from the previous year’s downturn. The rebound was fueled by the exceptional quality of consignments secured for the fall season, including record-breaking masterpieces such as the $236.4 million Gustav Klimt—the most expensive work ever sold by Sotheby’s—and the $54.7 million Frida Kahlo, which set a new record for a work by a female artist.

November’s inaugural sales at the Breuer delivered the year’s biggest revenue surge, with six white-glove auctions totaling $1.173 billion in just a few days. Single-owner collections played a decisive role, including the $527.5 million Lauder collection in New York and the $137 million Karpidas collection earlier in London—high-profile consignments that helped lift market sentiment at a critical moment. “Our strong performance in the second half of the year demonstrates clear momentum in our markets, driven by more high-quality, major collections meeting Sotheby’s record levels of buyer demand,” confirmed Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart.

At the same time, Sotheby’s “Another World” strategy—transforming its major regional headquarters from Hong Kong to Paris and now the iconic Breuer building into cross-category boutique destinations—is beginning to deliver tangible results. The luxury sector is becoming increasingly central to the business, generating $2.7 billion in revenue, up 22 percent year-over-year and surpassing $2 billion for the fourth straight year.

Luxury is also emerging as a primary driver of market expansion, capable of attracting younger collectors while opening doors to new and rising markets. This was underscored by Sotheby’s successful $133 million Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi, whose cross-category luxury offerings drew collectors from 35 countries. Of those bidding, 28 percent were new to Sotheby’s and nearly one-third were under the age of 40.

The $10.1 million sale of Jane Birkin’s original Hermès Birkin in Paris this summer focused attention on both the rising value and estate-planning complexities of luxury collectibles. Sotheby’s also reported a record year for watches, with a $42.8 million white-glove December auction in New York immediately following Collectors’ Week. That sale was led by the record-breaking complete four-piece set of the Patek Philippe Star Caliber 2000, which sold for $11.9 million.

Jewelry maintained strong momentum in Abu Dhabi and globally, with sales up approximately 18 percent. Meanwhile, RM Sotheby’s automotive division exceeded $1 billion in revenue for the first time, propelled by multiple records—including a 1994 McLaren F1 (chassis 014), the most expensive McLaren ever sold at public auction, and the highest-priced new Ferrari ever to hit the auction block during Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week.

Sports collectibles continue to attract bidders, but the standout among today’s collectibles may be dinosaurs, as demonstrated by the juvenile Ceratosaurus that soared to $30.5 million at Sotheby’s—more than seven times its low estimate.

The Design category also continues to gain traction and importance, with 65 percent growth over last year. It closed with a $50.2 million auction earlier this month—the highest total ever for the category—led by Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar, which reached a record-setting $31.4 million.

Taken together, these categories are central not only to sustaining the market but to reshaping Sotheby’s identity—from a traditional auction house catering primarily to connoisseurs into a broader luxury-experience destination capable of attracting bidders across multiple price tiers. This represents a key strategy in today’s market. By expanding participation and transaction volume, Sotheby’s can continue to drive revenue growth even as the ability to consistently secure multimillion-dollar fine-art masterpieces—this season included—remains neither guaranteed nor sufficient on its own to support headline results year after year.

No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) for $62,160,000. Christie's'>

At Christie’s, the right pricing strategy met sustained bidding

Christie’s also reported what CEO Bonnie Brennan described as a “healthy and successful year,” with total auction revenue rising 8 percent to $4.7 billion. Combined with $1.5 billion in private sales—representing approximately 24 percent of the total—this brought the auction house’s global sales for 2025 to $6.2 billion, a 7 percent increase from the previous year.

One of the clearest indicators of how sustained bidding aligns with pricing strategy on the auction-house side is sell-through and sold-by-lot performance—an obsession of Christie’s global director Alex Rotter, as he recently revealed in an interview with ARTnews. Christie’s reported a sell-through rate of 88 percent and a hammer-to-low estimate index of 113 percent, both notably higher than in 2024.

The Americas remained Christie’s leading market, accounting for 41 percent of total sales with $2.584 billion in value after a 15 percent year-on-year increase. That growth was largely driven by standout consignments in New York, including the $272 million Leonard & Louise Riggio collection in May and the $223 million collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis. The latter was topped by Mark Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), which sold for $62.1 million and helped push November’s marquee sales to a record $964.5 million—the highest in three years.

The MEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) also expanded its share of Christie’s global total, rising from 32 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2025, with $1.435 billion in sales. Asia-Pacific, by contrast, declined for the second consecutive year, generating $686 million—5 percent less than the year before—and now accounts for 23 percent of Christie’s global business. Sales for Asian Art and World Art were also down 6 percent this year.

The 20th and 21st century category remains Christie’s core revenue driver, generating $2.859 billion in 2025, a 6 percent increase from the previous year. However, the Classics and Old Masters segments posted even stronger growth, generating $285 million and $182 million, with increases of 15 percent and 24 percent, respectively. Leading the Old Master category was Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, which sold in July in London for a record-setting £31.9 million ($43.9 million).

Meanwhile, the importance of the Luxury and Automotive markets continues to rise. Luxury sales reached $795 million, up 17 percent from 2024, while automotive sales through Gooding Christie’s totaled $234 million—an increase of 14 percent and the highest-grossing year in the company’s history.

Crucially, luxury is proving to be Christie’s most effective tool for attracting new and younger buyers. It accounted for 38 percent of new bidders in 2025, outperforming even the 20th and 21st century category, which contributed 33 percent. Asia-Pacific buyers in particular were highly engaged, with regional president Rahul Kadakia noting that they contributed 37 percent of global Luxury auction spend. This underscores the strong potential of Eastern markets—especially Southeast Asia—when engaged through categories aligned with their growing and increasingly affluent populations.

Christie’s also saw increased engagement from the Indian diaspora and broader participation across the Asia-Pacific region, which remains one of the strongest growth opportunities alongside rising spending power in the Middle East, particularly in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

For Christie’s—as for all the major auction houses—sustaining revenue growth hinges on expanding the market: both by tapping rising geographies and by attracting new generations of collectors capable of growing with the brand.

The demographic shifts are promising. In 2025, 46 percent of new bidders and buyers were millennials or younger, up roughly 5 percent from the previous year. The female client base also grew by about 10 percent. These trends align with wealth management forecasts and the 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which found that high-net-worth women outspent their male peers by an average of 46 percent on art and antiques in 2024. Women were also more likely than men to collect digital works, pieces by unknown artists, and emerging talent—pointing to both rising influence and evolving preferences that are reshaping the market.

All of this is unfolding in the context of the so-called “Great Wealth Transfer,” as economists forecast trillions of dollars passing from older generations to younger ones, boosting disposable income and discretionary spending among buyers already demonstrating a strong interest in collecting. Women are projected to inherit a substantial share of this wealth—some estimates suggest up to 70 percent—and by 2030, they are expected to control trillions in investable assets, a dramatic rise compared to previous decades.

Equally critical to attracting new buyers is the diversification of offerings across price points and categories, paired with technology designed to reach a generation that lives and buys online. In 2025, 63 percent of Christie’s new buyers made their first purchase online, where the average price (excluding wine) rose 14 percent year-on-year to $22,700.

Christie’s plans to continue investing in tech through 2026, including its collaboration with Dubbl on the Christie’s Select app for Apple Vision Pro, which offers immersive, spatial auction previews, and the ongoing Art+Tech Summits.

But attracting new buyers is only half the equation. Retention and long-term engagement—especially with younger collectors—are equally important. New buyers acquired in 2024 returned in 2025 and increased their total spend by 54 percent, with 22 percent purchasing in a different category from their original acquisition. These figures point to encouraging momentum not just for Christie’s but for the broader art and collectibles market, suggesting that even amid recalibration, a more diverse audience is emerging—one ready to support the market’s next chapter, even as tastes and trends continue, as always, to evolve.

A Tribute to Luigi Bonotto, the Visionary Fluxus Patron Who Merged Art, Life and Industry

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:45:52 +0000

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

In the hills of Molvena, a rural corner of the Veneto, one of the region’s most notable manufacturing stories took shape, alongside an extraordinary history of collecting and enlightened patronage. Here, one man’s passion for culture evolved organically into an authentic corporate culture, as art flowed into everyday life and merged seamlessly with entrepreneurial practice. Today, Observer pays tribute to that singular story and its central protagonist, Italian textiles entrepreneur, collector, creative innovator and patron Luigi Bonotto, who passed away at the age of 84 on November 19, leaving behind a legacy that weaves together Fluxus, visual poetry and the very spirit of ‘Made in Italy.’ Note: My tribute draws from an interview recorded in 2017 for a BA thesis on exemplary cases of enlightened art patronage and corporate art in the region.

Fondazione Bonotto was established in 2013 to promote the Luigi Bonotto Collection, which, since the early 1970s, has amassed an extensive body of works, audio and video recordings, posters, books and magazines by Fluxus artists and by the international verbo-visual movements that emerged from the late 1950s onward. The result is an extraordinary collection, built over more than 40 years, comprising over 15,000 artworks and documents, many of which were donated directly by the artists themselves. It stands as a record of the dense, ongoing personal relationships Bonotto forged with these artists, whom he welcomed and supported, making art an integral part of his life and company through a continuous dialogue between the arts, business and contemporary culture.

An upbringing that shaped an entrepreneurial philosophy

Luigi Bonotto’s family company had once produced hats, but by the 1950s, hats were no longer everyday necessities, and his father encouraged him to learn something new within the textile sector. He studied at a textile school and, driven by curiosity, also attended the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.

There, he became a student of the renowned Italian postwar artist Emilio Vedova and began spending time with intellectuals and artists in an environment that shaped a more open mindset and clearly influenced the later success of his company. It fostered an entrepreneurial culture attuned to creativity, experimentation and innovation, a sort of “secret recipe” he later passed on to his children, enriched by the artists who surrounded them throughout their upbringing. This creative foundation eventually led to another innovation, or more accurately, a retro-innovation, with the “Fabbrica Lenta,” which helped the company remain competitive as the socio-economic landscape shifted.

Photo: Piero Viti'>

Bonotto remained at the Valdagno school as a teacher, producing early fabric samples that he initially sold only as designs. He soon realized he could earn more by building an actual factory, combining technical expertise with the artistic influences he had absorbed and continued to cultivate. This was the ‘70s, when giants like Lanerossi and Marzotto were already in crisis. Yet Bonotto recognized that the textile downturn was an opportunity: the best artisans and master craftsmen were suddenly available, and high-quality machinery was being sold off at a discount.

While others closed, Bonotto invested—once again prompting people to call him crazy. That decision was the genesis of a company that now supplies some of the world’s leading fashion houses with high-quality textiles, and that has been partly integrated into the Zegna Group since 2016. “I knew from the start I needed to surround myself with a certain kind of people,” Bonotto said. “The best artisans, the great textile masters who had become available. Focus on quality and craft knowledge, which is already a culture in itself. Minds of making—specialists ready to engage with the artists who passed through here, in a fertile exchange that benefited both artistic research and production.”

It was this creativity—absorbed from the artists and then transmitted to his sons Giovanni and Lorenzo—that ultimately allowed the company to endure. While many Italian textile firms in the 1990s and 2000s succumbed to global competition driven by speed and cost, the Bonotto family adopted what they call the “Slow Factory” model: time-honored looms, master craftsmen and low-volume, high-value production that continues to thrive in the international luxury market. Rejecting standardization, Bonotto treated fabric as his canvas, using it for material expressions of culture, craftsmanship and artistry—his key differentiator in the global luxury sphere.

Dream in a warp room. Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

A philosophy in which art shapes industry

At a time when corporate art is increasingly common but often framed as marketing or social responsibility, Bonotto’s story was defined by a strong conceptual and physical connection between art and industry. “Luigi taught us that even a manufacturing company can become a social space where art is part of daily work rather than an ornamental status symbol,” Giovanni Bonotto told Observer after his father’s passing. “His intuition was to let a textile factory and an art foundation coexist within the same production spaces to show that Art and Life are fully integrated.” Giovanni is now carrying that legacy forward, tightly weaving the business together with art.

“Today, everyone talks about companies investing in art, but in most cases it’s just applied art,” explains Patrizio Peterlini, Fondazione Bonotto’s longtime director, noting how companies often treat the business like a patient brought to a psychoanalyst, expecting a cure. But that is not art’s role. At best, it may work for a single product line for a season, as seen in brand collaborations at fairs, but not beyond that.

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

For Bonotto, culture was the true engine of production. His strategy was shaped not by market trends but by a Fluxus-inspired belief that “Technique is essential, but technique without culture is empty.” Other companies often came asking about Bonotto Spa’s strategic plans, assuming the art was part of a formal investment strategy. In reality, there were no strategies at all—only a lived fusion of art and life that echoed Fluxus philosophy and organically shaped the company’s identity. “The ‘Bonotto model’ is perhaps unique, perhaps unrepeatable or anyway rare. It was born spontaneously. And for this reason, it cannot become a ‘model’ to be replicated,” Peterlini said. “It is a beautiful story of a personal passion—Luigi’s passion—that resulted in relationships and friendships that flowed naturally from his life into the life of the company, simply because he hosted the artists here.”

A living art archive in a factory

Bonotto only grasped the full scale of what he had accumulated when he moved into a new house. At that point, the need to catalogue everything became clear: to establish an archive and, from there, a foundation capable of preserving and sharing this heritage. Only afterward did he begin consciously acquiring works and books, identifying gaps he wanted to fill. This shift is what makes the collection one of the very few truly coherent and cohesive ones—an assemblage that has become a significant reference point for specific areas of art history.

Today, the collection is still housed in the 20,000 square meters of Bonotto Spa, not only in offices but also the production floors and warehouses that produce and store luxury textiles, ranging from high-end woven fabrics to artisanal, slow-production textiles used by major luxury brands.

Peterlini acknowledges that keeping artworks amid the daily rhythm of factory life carried risks, but Bonotto insisted they belonged there because the workers embodied the very value reflected in the art. If something was damaged, it simply became part of the life of a living artwork—perfectly aligned with Fluxus thinking. The works belonged in the very place where they originated, what Bonotto called the “Lourdes grotto.” They had to remain where the miracle occurred, not in a detached white cube.

“At first, the fear was on the workers’ side,” Bonotto recalled. “They thought everything would be shut down and turned into a museum, the way Bisazza turned one of its old factories into a museum. But they were reassured immediately. Eventually, the workers began stopping me in the halls, asking what this or that work was.”

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

This integration makes it far easier to bring clients to Molvena—despite its isolation—because the visit feels closer to a museum experience than a showroom appointment in Milan. Here, clients encounter not only the product but also the environment, process, culture and history behind it, recognizing that the company’s artistic nature is not a façade but the soul of the work. In the warehouse, a Maurizio Nannucci neon reading “Art as a social environment” neatly encapsulates what the Bonotto world has become.

The Veneto context and a shifting Italy

Local reactions to Bonotto’s initiatives have long been muted. Even when he staged a show in Bassano in 2000, the response remained muted. When we spoke, Bonotto attributed this to a deep-rooted cultural conservatism shaped by the Church and by a self-made, peasant-rooted entrepreneurial mentality that led many Veneto business owners to dismiss the role of culture in society—a tendency reinforced after fascism’s instrumental use of the arts. That mindset, he argued, ultimately constrained them and became one of the causes of the decline in Veneto’s industrial production under globalization.

“This is what hurt them, what paralyzed them. They’ve been talking about a crisis for years. What crisis?” Bonotto said. “A real crisis happened in the sixties, but Veneto kept producing. Artisans knew how to react. They had extraordinary technique but also the imagination to find solutions, to change and innovate.” Flexibility—this ongoing capacity to adapt and innovate—was, for him, the spirit of made in Italy and one of its most misunderstood strengths.

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

During our interview, we reflected on how cultural habits have shifted in Italy. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was natural for entrepreneurs and the upper middle class to move in cultural circles, hosting artists and exchanging ideas—a fertile milieu echoed in Ennio Brion’s accounts of Milan. By the late 1970s and especially the ‘80s, however, a new model of “predatory entrepreneurship” focused solely on profit had emerged, and culture was seen as unnecessary.

“With culture, you can’t eat, you can’t buy bread. They thought I was strange, surrounding myself with people even stranger, wasting my time on these useless things instead of focusing solely on the business and ‘making money,’” Bonotto recalled. “Yet we survived; this model is the one that proved to work, while all the others closed.”

Fondazione Bonotto’s mission

Today, the foundation promotes Fluxus and Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry through exhibitions, loans and collaborations with museums, foundations, archives, fairs and cultural happenings. Its mission is to tell the story of the objects and the history of the Luigi Bonotto Collection, which is deeply intertwined with its founder, while also fostering new conversations among art, industrial production, craftsmanship and contemporary culture. This work includes digitizing all documents and making them freely accessible online, ensuring genuine global access and dissemination. The archive is extraordinarily extensive, and its cataloguing has required years of sustained effort.

Among its holdings is the singular story of what later became known as Dick Higgins’ “Intermedia Chart,” a pioneering diagram that articulated the reality of contemporary transmedia and intermedia art. Bonotto explained it originated as the “Molvena Chart,” created so Higgins could describe him using a visual diagram that transcended language barriers. It proved so effective that Higgins later recreated it on a computer and incorporated it into his publications, where it became a lasting reference in art history.

Courtesy Fondazione Bonotto'>

At the same time, Fondazione Bonotto promotes artistic and intellectual work by commissioning installations and curatorial programs, overseeing the publication of magazines, books, catalogues, printed materials and digital editions, and organizing exhibitions, seminars and conferences in which young artists and curators engage directly with the material in the Collection.

What makes the Bonotto case so rare is that it remains one of the few genuinely rooted examples of enlightened patronage, where a company does not instrumentalize culture but actively generates it, and where production and cultural practice function as a single, integrated entity. In Bonotto’s trajectory, art and culture were never investments but a sincere mission born from passion, one that grew into relationships, shared research, discoveries and, above all, human exchange. It was a path in which art and life fused, evolving into a cultural project that, in turn, strengthened the company itself, shaping its methods, identity and vision. In this sense, the entire Luigi Bonotto story becomes a single “Total Artwork,” which, as he often said, is the true miracle.

Fondazione Bonotto'>

At the Bass in Miami, Lawrence Lek’s Odyssey for an Era Shaped by A.I.

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 21:32:29 +0000

NOX (video still). Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ'>

What happens when machines develop their own form of autonomous consciousness? This question has long been at the center of sci-fi novels and films until it became the lingering dilemma—and fear—that now accompanies today’s debates on A.I. That question also sits at the center of Lawrence Lek’s layered digital narrative at the Bass Museum of Art, where he is currently staging a series of works from his fictional universe centered on NOX (short for ‘Nonhuman Excellence’), a therapy center for sentient self-driving cars undergoing psychological treatment for problems rooted in their own self-awareness, with mental breakdowns, distractions and malfunctions that interfere with the jobs they were designed to perform. The multidimensional cinematic and game-specific experience the London-based artist presents is marked by a level of conceptual and critical complexity that imposes a different tempo than one might expect amid the brisk chaos of Art Basel Miami Beach. Yet these works were among the most compelling encounters outside the fair, prompting as they did a timely reflection on our contemporary condition across shifting dynamics of labor, automation, agency and intelligence.

Operating within a form of speculative realism, Lek uses the imaginative fluidity of digital simulation to stage an allegory of dissociation and alienation. On view at the Bass is a site-specific multimedia installation and game environment that merges physical multi-floor installations, virtual world-building and locative sound. In two connected galleries, Lek invites viewers to empathize with these artificial entities as they experience and question personhood and culpability within systems of surveillance, rehabilitation and justice—an open flow of consciousness that resonates unsettlingly with our own.

Photography by Zaire Aranguren. Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach'>

His digital narrative brings together both existing and newly commissioned works drawn from the more expansive Smart City Saga (2021-2024), a series of speculative films and immersive installations in which he explores the psychological and political lives of nonhuman characters in fictional smart cities. “I’m interested in imagining a new point of view—a new kind of subjectivity—belonging to life forms that aren’t human,” Lek explained when Observer spoke with him at the opening. “That’s really the political and conceptual terrain of the work.”

Lek’s medium is a potentially endless form of worldbuilding, an artistic universe that spans cinema, architecture, music and games. “I’m interested in the kinds of narratives that can only unfold through these media, where the stories inside the work also reflect on the wider reality,” he said. He treats animation as a medium of simulation rather than abstraction, shaping a form of speculative realism in which the subject of the work becomes an alternate version of reality. “I’m interested in what Margaret Atwood calls speculative fiction—stories rooted in realities that already exist somewhere in history, then reframed in a contemporary or future context.” Although his work is technologically sophisticated, Lek’s focus is far less on technology itself than on narrative. “Technology is not my subject; it is my lens for speaking about humanity. Every character in my films is a mirror of the human condition.”

The exhibition, “NOX Pavilion,” is built around systems we already know: corporate control, constant evaluation and forms of labor that demand productivity at all costs. Yet even though automation and the fear of artificial intelligence taking our jobs appears central to the discourse, it is not Lek’s primary concern. It is simply the backdrop. “What interests me is the perspective of ‘the other’—in this case, the A.I. or the machine—as a kind of new protagonist. I think of them as a new kind of alienated worker in contemporary society.”

Photo: Willow Williams'>

Even though these machines are extremely intelligent, they have almost no agency: they are entirely owned by corporations, operating nonstop, 24/7, with no control over their fate—making the contrast even sharper. That is where the existential drama emerges. “In noir films a century ago, the crisis came from distrusting the state, your elders, or institutions. Now that distrust is redirected toward the algorithm, the corporation, the systems we can’t see but that determine everything,” Lek said. The allegory is clear: the A.I. machines in “NOX Pavilion” reflect how people today relate to their jobs and to their diminished sense of control over their own futures.

In the main video, we follow an A.I.-driven car navigating abandoned streets—a surveillance system in a failed smart city. Here, Lek takes up a contemporary road movie or coming-of-age story. The journey—a metaphor for transformation since antiquity—gets reframed through machine subjects trying to navigate a world they do not control, even as they are built to understand it. In dialogue with Guanyin, their built-in therapist, the A.I. attempts to process its existential guilt as a digital being confronting burnout and trauma, tracing an arc that closely mirrors human behavior under conditions of isolation and hyperproductivity.

“I’ve been thinking about what a coming-of-age story might look like for these new beings. They have their own longings, their own sense of possibility, like the small-town kid urged to stay home and take over the farm,” Lek said. “It’s a narrative I identify with personally, so I began asking what these new life forms would empathize with. That point of view—empathy from a nonhuman perspective—is central to the work.”

Digital simulation is, for Lek, a tool to create an allegorical realm in which multiple perspectives can coexist. By recasting and reframing elements from past and present models of civilization and blending forms of human and machine intelligence, he shapes this meta-reality and meta-narrative into something that comments on the contemporary condition, or even anticipates what is to come. “I’m interested in speculative fiction as a mirror of reality, where the past haunts the future, and the past reshapes itself through the future.”

His work inhabits a space where past and present, ruin and future, human and nonhuman collide—an in-between terrain enabled by simulation, where viewers are invited to contemplate the hybridities shaping contemporary experience. “I always try to create a space where the fictional, conceptual world of the work meets the physical gallery—a liminal environment suspended between everyday reality and the moment viewers step inside.”

Photography by Zaire Aranguren. Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach.'>

Anchoring the exhibition at the Bass is a pavilion made of gray tiles—part shelter, part monument, part ruin, part construction site. The same pavilion appears in a nearby lightbox in the smart city of NOX, emphasizing the continuity and interchangeability between physical and digital realms. NOX itself is set in a futuristic smart city presented as an abandoned dystopian ruin where civilization has clearly collapsed: “It blends a classical idea of the ruin, with all its associations about what comes after a civilization, with a sci-fi environment. Bringing those together lets me comment on contemporary life through a past-future lens.”

It is within this binary that Lek has developed the notion of Sinofuturism. “China’s evolving relationship to the future is the idea that anchors my universe,” he reflected. “It comes from a lifetime lived in the space between East and West.”

For Lek, Sinofuturism is a form of futurism that exists outside the Western framework and outside Afrofuturism, rooted instead in the experience of East Asian and Chinese diasporic culture. If Italian Futurism once celebrated the machine—speed, cars, tanks—and if Afrofuturism reframed identity through the alien or the robot to circumvent Western humanism, Lek recognized the need for an equivalent framework to understand the complex relationship between technology and the Chinese or East Asian context, where its integration and implementation have often been even more rapidly accelerated, leaving little space for humans to adapt or fully process its impact.

Many of his videos unfold in environments reminiscent of East or Southeast Asia—dense housing blocks, towering skyscrapers, spaces that feel both hypermodern and already abandoned. These settings become ideal stages for examining the promises, illusions and failures embedded in technological “progress.”

In Equine Therapy, one of the A.I. vehicles follows a horse into the wild, confronting a similar tension. Its words, “I’m not made for sand and dust; I’m made for concrete,” are meant to be allegorical, reflecting the condition of many urban dwellers today who were raised entirely in concrete, disconnected from nature and unsure how to return to it, or whether return is even possible. The machines experience the same dislocation. In their world, nature becomes both memory and desire—something perpetually out of reach.

Photography by Zaire Aranguren. Image courtesy of The Bass, Miami Beach.'>

If, in Marxist terms, there are different levels of alienation, Lek’s cars experience several at once. “They’re alienated from their labor because all they do is work. They’re disconnected from any real community because they exist solely to serve their function. And they’re cut off from their own history—they don’t know where they come from or who their ‘ancestors’ are,” he said. That tension between superintelligence and profound disconnection is central. People in 2025 can easily relate: disconnection from work, family and origins, from whatever is meant to constitute a “real” sense of being human. Some dream of quitting their jobs to start a farm; others turn to genealogy to trace lost roots. The car’s attempt to “unalienate” itself follows the same impulse, expressed through its encounter with the horse—an archetypal figure that taps into something primordial.

Lek’s work frequently draws on ancient tropes from the collective subconscious, even when they appear subtly and operate through multiple layers of symbolism at once. Here, the horse is not merely a symbol of power or wilderness, as he clarifies. Historically, it functioned as an essential industrial and military engine. When the car encounters the horse, it glimpses its own evolutionary past. “There’s recognition, but also a tragic undertone: mass-produced automobiles wiped out the urban horse population,” he explained. “A century ago, New York’s streets were full of horses; now only a few remain pulling carriages in Central Park. The horse becomes a mirror—they see their future in it, the arc of becoming obsolete.”

Guided by Guanyin, an A.I. “carebot” named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, NOX Enigma’s therapy sessions draw out reflections and memories that reveal the tension between what these machines were built to do and the lives they imagine for themselves. Their unease echoes the anxieties shaping human existence today, turning NOX and Lek’s wider smart-city cycle into a history-making epic for the twenty-first century, something akin to a contemporary Iliad or Odyssey, both testament and guide to the ethical questions humanity now faces. As our relationship with machines continues to evolve, and as we learn to interact, empathize, collaborate and even merge with new forms of intelligence, the boundary between human and nonhuman grows ever more blurred.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial Aims to Map a New Geography of American Art in ‘a Moment of Profound Transition’

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:40:21 +0000

Photo by: Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images'>

For decades, the Whitney Biennial has functioned not only as the most consequential temperature check on American art, but also as a stage on which the country’s cultural identity is continually contested, rewritten and occasionally torn apart—often through works so politically charged they have sparked controversies, protests and historical withdrawals. What stands out in the newly announced 82nd edition is a curatorial proposition that feels noticeably more subdued, if not muted. Any political and critical statement guiding the curation of this biennial, co-directed by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, appears softer and less confrontational, a shift already embedded in the selection of artists.

Set to open on March 8, 2026, this edition of the Whitney Biennial promises to deliver what is described as “a vivid atmospheric survey of contemporary American art shaped by a moment of profound transition.” Its focus centers on what the curators describe as “forms of relationality,” encompassing human relationships—such as familial dynamics and geopolitical entanglements—as well as hybrid and non-human perspectives increasingly explored by contemporary artists. These ideas are framed through an examination of shared narratives and mythologies that can foster a sense of community and belonging, alongside infrastructural systems and frameworks that enable society to function effectively.

“Rather than coming to our research for the biennial with a preconceived container, Marcela and I let our conversations with artists guide us. After more than 300 visits, we found that many of the artists we gravitated toward were exploring various forms of relationality with a particular emphasis on infrastructures,” Sawyer said in a statement. Rather than offering a definitive answer to contemporary life, the biennial foregrounds mood and texture, inviting visitors into environments that evoke tension, tenderness, humor and unease, the curatorial statement notes. The underlying aim is to articulate a more conciliatory perspective on the complexity of the present and to suggest hopeful possibilities for alternative forms of coexistence between humans and within the natural and technological networks to which we are all connected. Even so, the recently released list of 56 biennial artists, duos and collectives signals the tenor of the conversations this edition will inevitably confront, whether or not the museum and its curatorial framework choose to address them explicitly.

Given Guerrero’s past curatorial projects—as the first curator at the Whitney dedicated to Latinx artists and someone who has worked at the museum for seven years, including organizing the 2022 exhibition “No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria”—a strong presence of artists from South America and the Caribbean was to be expected, along with a direct engagement with the role of the U.S. in the region. The 2026 Whitney Biennial artists’ list, however, suggests an even broader examination of U.S. imperialism and the long-term effects of U.S. missions framed as efforts to bring “peace and civilization.” Alongside artists from 25 states and across the Americas, there are artists from Afghanistan, Chile, Iraq, Okinawa, the Philippines, Vietnam and elsewhere, pointing to a broader reflection on regions profoundly shaped by the reach of U.S. power.

“Drew and I assembled this list of 56 artists after conducting more than 300 studio visits across the country and abroad. The group is intergenerational and international, reflecting the many ways artists remain interconnected through their practices despite geographic distance,” Guerrero told Observer. “We hope this biennial is an opportunity for visitors to discover new and inspiring artists, and for those who may recognize some of the names, we hope the biennial offers an opportunity to see this network of artists in full display.”

Among the artists selected, many have already participated in other international biennials like the Sharjah Biennial or the Aichi Triennial, events rooted in cultural and sociopolitical contexts that demand a comparable level of “attention,” now increasingly expected within U.S. institutions as well. These artists include Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Akira Ikezoe, Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien, Ali Eyal, Aziz Hazara and Zach Blas, among others. At the same time, the birthplaces, surnames and current places of residence of many participants point to a far more layered—if not globally fluid—notion of American art and culture today, shaped by ongoing multicultural exchange. Among the more established figures in the U.S. art scene are Kelly Akashi, Teresa Baker, Andrea Fraser, Erin Jane Nelson and David L. Johnson.

In this sense, the 82nd Whitney Biennial already functions as a kind of thermometer for the U.S. in 2026, reflecting a cultural landscape in which museums operate under mounting scrutiny and pressure—so intense that, as in other notoriously conservative contexts, cultural production often circles around explicit political commentary rather than confronting it head-on. The issues persist nonetheless and are addressed through more nuanced, oblique and strategic forms of expression, as well as through curatorial decisions themselves. Here, the selection of artists stands as the biennial’s most explicit statement about the version of American art it intends to foreground.

Notably, this biennial will be the first since the launch of all three of the Whitney’s free admissions programs for visitors under 25, following Julie Mehretu’s major donation of more than 2 million dollars last year. “This is a show that is always full of emerging talents and new ideas about American art, so I can think of no greater gift to our younger audiences than a biennial that is entirely free for everyone twenty-five and under from anywhere in the world,” Whitney director Scott Rothkopf said in a statement.

The full list of 2026 Whitney Biennial artists is as follows:

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Kelly Akashi
Kamrooz Aram
Ash Arder
Teresa Baker
Sula Bermudez-Silverman
Zach Blas
Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien
Leo Castañeda
CFGNY
Nani Chacon
Maia Chao
Joshua Citarella
Mo Costello
Taína H. Cruz
Carmen de Monteflores
Ali Eyal
Andrea Fraser
Mariah Garnett
Ignacio Gatica
Jonathan González
Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Kainoa Gruspe
Martine Gutierrez
Samia Halaby
Raven Halfmoon
Nile Harris with Dyer Rhoads
Aziz Hazara
Margaret Honda
Akira Ikezoe
Mao Ishikawa
Cooper Jacoby
David L. Johnson
kekahi wahi
Young Joon Kwak
Michelle Lopez
José Maceda
Agosto Machado
Oswaldo Maciá
Emilio Martínez Poppe
Isabelle Frances McGuire
Kimowan Metchewais
Nour Mobarak
Erin Jane Nelson
Precious Okoyomon
Aki Onda
Pat Oleszko
Malcolm Peacock
Sarah M. Rodriguez
Gabriela Ruiz
Jasmin Sian
Jordan Strafer
Sung Tieu
Julio Torres
Anna Tsouhlarakis
Johanna Unzueta

The Art World Is Quietly Cutting Emissions Faster Than Expected, New Report Reveals

Elisa Carollo — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 19:39:38 +0000

Frequencies of Belonging. Photo courtesy of FuturaCanvas 2025 x BeComing Art Jeju'>

Last month’s COP30 in Brazil may not have been the most successful, given the notable absence of the U.S., which for the first time refused to send delegates, and the failure to reach an agreement on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. Negotiators remained deeply divided on climate finance, trade measures, mitigation pathways and how to implement agreed-upon goals. Still, the art world can celebrate some meaningful achievements in ecological sustainability in 2025, as revealed by the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC)’s landmark 2025 Stocktake Report. Published during London’s Art+Climate Week, the survey aggregates six years of data and insights, offering the first comprehensive analysis of the sector’s progress toward halving visual arts emissions by 2030.

“Having that greater level of understanding can make changes more effective,” Lowndes told Observer in a recent interview, speaking about the importance of the report in reassessing and refining GCC’s strategy for the years ahead. “The playbook that took us through COVID to now isn’t the same playbook that will take us from now until the end of the decade.”

The GCC findings reveal that 79 percent of members who began tracking their emissions when the coalition launched in 2019 have already reduced them by more than 25 percent, indicating that they are on track to achieve a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. “2025 marks a critical halfway point: five years into what many have termed ‘the decisive decade for climate action’ and the midpoint of GCC’s ten-year strategy,” commented GCC Director Heath Lownde. “We are just five years from our goal of halving sector emissions and achieving near-zero waste by 2030.” At this midpoint, GCC’s strategic direction is to remain ambitious and to accelerate and strengthen its collective role as a cultural leader in the climate transition.

Based on what emerged at COP30, the world is now likely to overshoot the 1.5°C limit set by the Paris Agreement in the next decade, a stark reminder of the scale and speed of change still required, according to Lownde. For him, this moment is a call to action rather than defeat. Every sector, including the arts, has a role to play in driving systemic change. If the global art world can maintain its current trajectory, GCC calculates that the sector could collectively reduce its annual emissions by more than 5 million tonnes of CO₂e, equivalent to the yearly footprint of a small country.

With more than 2,000 members across over 30 countries, GCC is no longer a niche initiative in the art market but a cross-sector movement uniquely positioned to unite commercial, institutional and creative actors around shared environmental goals. Crucially, the coalition has always been open to new members, offering them sector-specific tools, guidelines and best practices at no cost. Each new member commits to reducing their carbon footprint and environmental impact, contributing through their own actions to the coalition’s shared objectives.

Six years in, the results are visible. The survey shows that environmental responsibility across the sector has steadily improved, with 80 percent of members now equipped with green teams, up from less than half in 2022, and more than half completing annual carbon reports, a critical step for accountability and for identifying where further progress is possible.

“You can’t set meaningful targets or cut emissions without understanding where those emissions are actually coming from,” Lowndes noted, explaining that the coalition’s recently upgraded carbon calculator, developed with support from the Getty Foundation, enables sharper and more precise emissions data across a wide range of sector-specific activities while still prioritizing usability. The tool makes it easier for galleries and institutions to access, interpret and act on the numbers. Emissions-reduction plans, long encouraged by the GCC, are now widespread. As sustainability becomes embedded in organizational culture and operations, art institutions and businesses are gaining greater power to reshape value systems and public imagination.

GCC’s findings reaffirm the “big three” areas where action matters most: flights, freight and building energy, which together account for 80-95 percent of operational emissions across all member types. Flights alone account for 43 percent of emissions, air freight for 26 percent, building energy for 14 percent and other transport and materials for the remaining 17 percent.

These proportions vary across the sector. For commercial galleries, 49 percent of emissions come from air freight, 36 percent from staff flights and just 15 percent from building energy. For nonprofits, building energy is the dominant factor, accounting for 68 percent of emissions, while air freight and staff flights together represent only 16 percent. Major fairs, predictably, see at least half of their total emissions coming from freight and 33 percent from staff flights, while auction houses generate 70 percent of their emissions from a combination of flights, freight and building energy.

Artists’ footprints vary widely depending on activity, scale and travel patterns. The average individual footprint is roughly 3.9 tCO₂e from flights, freight and energy, representing 72 percent of total emissions, with the remaining 28 percent stemming from materials, commuting and other activities. Although the art world remains a niche sector, GCC estimates that it still emits between 11 and 13 MtCO₂e per year. Matching the reductions already achieved by early adopters across the industry could cut emissions by 5 MtCO₂e by 2030.

On the operational side, GCC estimates that roughly 30 percent of the current footprint, including building energy, surface transport and materials, could be reduced through shifts to low-carbon alternatives with sufficient investment and effort, without radically altering existing practices. Because the majority of emissions come from aviation, however, a more fundamental rethink is required, particularly given today’s nonstop global calendar of fairs, openings and events that demand constant travel. In response, GCC has successfully launched its Sustainable Shipping Campaign, one of the organization’s early flagship initiatives focused on resource sharing, shipment consolidation and more innovative and greener practices across the supply chain.

Unsurprisingly, these emissions are heavily concentrated among larger operators. The largest 22 percent of organizations are responsible for roughly 50 percent of total sector emissions. Targeted action by this relatively small group of mega galleries and major players, including auction houses, could therefore drive significant change. At the same time, GCC emphasizes that collective action by smaller organizations and individual art professionals remains essential, as they make up 78 percent of the sector and account for the remaining half of emissions.

As economist Mariana Mazzucato argues, culture functions as a vital public infrastructure, generating the creativity and shared values that underpin flourishing societies. Throughout major historical and cultural shifts, art has consistently played a pivotal role in social change by introducing new ways of seeing and thinking. “Arts and culture are the foundations for reimagining alternative futures, fostering civic identity, and mobilizing collective action,” Mazzucato commented in a statement. By demonstrating sustainable practices backed by data and measurable results, the visual arts can amplify the climate message and help reshape public imagination, becoming a catalyst for the systemic change the world urgently needs.

Samuel Sarmiento’s Ceramics Channel Universal Memory in His U.S. Debut

Elisa Carollo — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:00:21 +0000

Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

The ability of a given artwork to resist being stripped of meaning over time is most often the result of its link with a continuous heritage of symbolic and archetypal materials that humans have shared across centuries and geographies to explain the complexities of existence. As J. M. Coetzee suggests in his 1991 essay “What is a Classic?,” the works we call classics endure not because institutions protect them, but because they speak across time, finding new interlocutors in each era. A classic has a living presence, retaining dense symbolic meaning and demanding response and re-interpretation even as society changes.

Engaging directly with the rich repertoire of symbols and myths of his native Venezuelan Caribbean and extending to cross-cultural resonances and similar narratives, artist Samuel Sarmiento engages with mythopoiesis directly using clay as a medium. A rich heritage of oral traditions and community storytelling is observable in his seductive kiln-fired ceramic sculptures: articulated, overlapping visual narratives and inscriptions like ancient tablets or natural fossilized traces. In the new works in his U.S. debut show at Andrew Edlin, “Relical Horn,” Sarmiento experiments with the elemental potential of clay, playing with the different transformations ceramics can undergo and embellishing his creations with patinas, glazes, pigments and even gold. His kiln’s searing heat yields kaleidoscopic, granular and liquid surfaces.

Through these alchemical processes, artists and artisans have collaborated directly with the principle of entropy and the transformation of matter for thousands of years. Clay is fired at temperatures at which any organic substance would be pushed into extinction or fragmentation, but Sarmiento transforms ceramics into living cosmogonies that embody a rich reservoir of ancestral myth and cross-cultural archetypes, layering oral traditions, Caribbean cosmology and intuitive mark-making in fragile yet enduring vessels of memory.

“One of the primary purposes of ceramics is containment,” Sarmiento tells Observer. “Initially, ceramic objects held valuable resources such as water, food and currency.” He recounts an ancient tale about the medium’s origins. According to a Caribbean myth, in the earliest days of humanity, it was nearly impossible to store water because it was both difficult to contain and extremely scarce. “Humans attempted to make vessels from tree leaves or wood, but both materials deteriorated over time. They decided to speak with the Goddess of the Forest, who recommended they dig a large hole next to a river, where they would find a new kind of material.” When humans obeyed the Goddess and dug near the great river, they discovered clay. When they asked what to do with it, “she instructed them to shape the clay into vessels. By firing these vessels, they would be able to store water successfully.”

The Origin of the Stars, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

For hundreds of years, ceramics have served as markers of the time they inhabit, Sarmiento reflects. “They have remained one of the principal mediums for deciphering a people’s ethnography because they can withstand the passage of time.” This idea of time—of encapsulating mythological and spiritual heritage in a vessel capable of preserving and carrying it across generations—is at the heart of his practice. His ceramic works function as artifacts of collective memory, shared wisdom and mythical imagination, helping humans better understand their place in the cosmos and within the relentless flow of time.

Sarmiento notes how French writer Roger Caillois, in The Writing of Stones (1970), argues that rocks and minerals, like landscapes themselves, have the capacity to harbor memory. “The artistic exercise of taking clay, which is part of the landscape, shaping it into forms like crowns, shells, nests, or ornaments and simultaneously using it to contain information creates a symbolic refuge,” Sarmiento explains. “Through this alchemy, an artwork can help humanity preserve what little wisdom we have left.”

Examining the dense narratives that adorn the surfaces of his sculptures, it’s almost impossible not to read his practice through a Jungian lens: his work is a conduit through which archetypes and ancestral symbologies—shared across cultures—reemerge from the collective unconscious. “I believe visual artists and writers alike are collectively searching to connect with the invisible,” Sarmiento says, pointing out that this urge becomes even more pressing in periods when truth is most difficult to discern.

“In my artistic practice, I utilize ancestral narratives from the Caribbean and South America, and sometimes Africa—not for exoticism, but simply to exalt the human condition,” he explains, noting that this often takes the form of rites of passage. “We are beings in constant movement.”

Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

A recurring element in his work is the female figure. Whether mermaids or spirit guides, they guard the narratives that appear on the surface. In many cases, these figures can be associated with nature or feminine deities like Yemayá, who represents the sea, Sarmiento says. They are figures of healing, protection and renewal in a world that needs external intervention due to humanity’s inability to resolve itself to the present.

Across centuries and geographies, the female figure has been associated with birth, life and protection, mothering the world in a relentless cycle of generation, transformation, decay and renewal. And it is in times of great despair and chaos that these figures and the mythological world they inhabit can guide us into a metaphorical realm that helps us see beyond the present moment and reconnect with something deeper and universal.

A self-taught artist who has only recently begun to engage with the broader international art world, Sarmiento preserves a raw and primordial visual lexicon that appears to have escaped the influences of both art-historical tradition and contemporary art market trends. The apparent simplicity or naivety of his language results from a spontaneous and intuitive process of channeling, in which ancient symbols, myth and memories emerge from the collective unconscious and are translated into new forms through a contemporary practice.

As Michael Meade explains, to see with mythic imagination is to see metaphorically—referring to the old Greek word metaphor, which means not just to see beyond, but to be carried beyond the limits of linear time and literal thinking. “The new territory or new world only comes into view and becomes conscious to us when a new vision arises from the darkness around us and from the unseen depths of our own unconscious,” he said in a recent podcast, which profoundly resonates with what Sarmiento is pushing with his art: not a new world but a new vision in which past, present and future coexist.

Transit (Heraclitus River), 2024. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

The sensibility of the work lies in synthesizing and connecting seemingly disparate references to create new poetics, Sarmiento explains, walking us through a richly layered ecosystem of references that idiosyncratically exist in his work, spanning from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins” (1940) to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and the movie Fitzcarraldo. As an exercise in argumentation, he takes these primary ideas and pairs them with Caribbean concepts and mythologies. Some of the show’s pieces reference the legend regarding the origin of the continents, which are said to have emerged from ruins and furrows located on the seabed.

Living for more than 13 years in the Dutch Caribbean has allowed Sarmiento to accumulate a vast library of oral narratives. Having been born in Venezuela, a country with a rich literary tradition and also multicultural connections, Sarmiento was motivated to approach art through universal stories. “All these references converge in a single object—whether a two- or three-dimensional sculpture—which often possesses geomorphic characteristics resembling sea coral or honeycombs,” he explains.

Sarmiento’s encyclopedic lexicon fluidly draws from ancient oral tales as well as more recent books. He mentions Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond and The Invention of Nature (2015) by Andrea Wulf as part of his contemporary references. “One of the fundamental characteristics of oral narratives is their ability to explain complex processes through simple images or stories,” he elaborates. Tropes can be accessible at different levels—what Homer once expressed, Disney later embraced.

As in a geological process of sedimentation and development, found in both natural and cultural realms, “If we look at narratives ranging from the Homeric fables to South American legends, we see that archetypal symbols such as life, death, the journey, the encounter and exile are often repeated,” Sarmiento says. “Part of my artistic exercise is to recontextualize these archetypal and universal symbols in an era of anachronisms.” Although we have information from every time and geography at our fingertips, humans often lack the capacity to recognize historical coincidences or similarities in sociopolitical processes.

Untitled (WB, 1973 – 1983 – 1993). Courtesy the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

He aims to demonstrate that while authors and languages vary across history, the story of humanity is the sum of a few core metaphors, in a continuous cycling of archetypal tropes. “This process is an exercise I have only been able to refine through reading and building visual archives,” Sarmiento says. Repetition plays a crucial role in his gestures, whether in clay or drawing. “As Hans-Georg Gadamer noted in The Relevance of the Beautiful, we tend to repeat what brings us pleasure,” he reflects. “In many cases, this repetition creates complex languages that lead us toward new interpretations and developments.”

Sarmiento’s process involves a tense yet generative exchange between intuition and control; he embraces the unexpected results that emerge from the interaction between energetic and psychic presence and the unpredictable reactions of clay and glaze. Despite the presence of figures or engravings, his narratives—which cover the entire surface as in a horror vacui without any precise order—form a kind of flow of thought-forms that defy any linguistic or visual codification. Like Surrealist automatic writing, these visual mythologies are the result of an intuitive reconnection with the language of a shared subconscious, to which the artist reconnects through his practice, finding new forms for the invisible. By bypassing rational control, the result is an epiphanic image—a strange revelation of forms carved and crystallized on the surface of the clay.

“Although I am self-taught with only brief experiences in guided workshops, the driving force behind my work is purely intuitive,” Sarmiento explains. “Still, the symbols and figures that emerge are resources drawn from years of researching oral histories, essays, and fantastical stories, driven by an intention to communicate with people from all walks of life.”

The Hunt of the Unicorn, 1495 – 1505, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

At one point, Sarmiento shares how, feeling a spontaneous connection with Jung and his thinking, he applied some years ago to a post-academic program in Switzerland. “My goal was to further my artistic research, develop a broader vision of the symbols and archetypal figures in my work, visit Carl Jung’s house, and access the literature and resources offered by the program,” he says. Yet the jury’s response was that there was no reason he needed to visit that specific location, stating that any information I required about Jung could be found on the internet. “My practice was ultimately not considered part of a contemporary discourse,” he points out, noting how one of the greatest challenges for artists from the Caribbean and South America is finding spaces where their artistic languages are appreciated through horizontal dialogue—not as exotic elements meant to fill a program’s minority quota.

Sarmiento’s work is a message of universality, celebrating and protecting the cross-cultural patrimony of stories and myths that might still guide humans toward a better notion of the future. He offers something beyond the Western paradigm of knowledge—ancestral and primordial—that has been suppressed or mostly forgotten but still resonates in the subconscious as something understood by the entirety of humanity.

His symbolic language reminds us how much we share across cultures, and how this universal ancestral heritage can help guide us into the future. “Never before have we lived in an age with more imaginary borders,” Sarmiento concludes. It is art such as his that can help us see beyond them. Never before, he adds, has humanity seemed so fragile, unable to generate collective solutions. “Through my artwork, I am seeking to create classics and objects capable of holding solutions or information for future generations.”

Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery'>

What Zero 10 Can Tell Us About the Art World’s Next Chapter

Elisa Carollo — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:52:22 +0000

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

In a year when discussions about A.I. and the role of big tech giants have dominated the news, it feels almost inevitable that the most headline-grabbing artwork at Art Basel Miami Beach—after Catellan’s infamous banana and ATM gimmicks of recent editions—was a work of digital art (or rather, a digital-physical hybrid) by Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), the artist who also set the first major record for a purely digital work at a traditional auction with Everydays: The First 5000 Days selling at Christie’s for $69,346,250 in 2021.

Beeple’s record came at the absolute peak of the NFT boom, a moment when speculation, hype and a flood of new collectors drove prices to historic extremes. Yet as crypto values plunged and speculation-driven production saturated the space, the correction was swift and brutal. Enthusiasm curdled into skepticism, then into a cultural fatigue that often registered as outright NFT hate. This did not mean digital art was dead, as evidenced by the crowded VIP opening of Art Basel’s inaugural digital section, Zero 10, where digital connoisseurs mingled with curious traditional fairgoers.

Beeple stole the show with Regular Animals, a performance installation of humanoid robots with hyper-realistic heads of tech titans and art-historical icons—including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Andy Warhol, Picasso and Beeple himself—roaming in a ring, capturing photos of visitors, “learning” in real time and excreting art prints and NFTs in their respective styles. Beneath its grotesque humor, the installation doubled as a critique of how technocrats now shape the collective imaginary and of the escalating tension between human creativity and machine intervention. Editions of each “Regular Animal” sold out immediately for $100,000 to longtime collectors, with an additional run of 1,024 prints and 256 NFTs generated from the robots’ snapshots, turning the audience into co-producers.

In an ArtTactic interview, Beeple noted that Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz visited his studio multiple times, convincing the fair that it needed to integrate digital art amid clear shifts in collecting habits. “Zero 10 reflects a strategic conviction: digital art is no longer at the margins—it is integral to how art and the market are evolving in real time,” Horowitz said in last month’s launch statement. Beeple welcomed the chance to show at Art Basel Miami Beach, seeing it as an opportunity to “let the outside world peek into this corner of the internet we inhabit,” acknowledging that digital art has long thrived within insider spaces and online echo chambers.

Importantly, Horowitz chose not to treat the section as a satellite or appendage but to integrate it into the fabric of the fair itself, with 10,000 square feet of floor space adjacent to the curated sections at one of the main entrances of the convention center. “I think it is a great continuation of what we’ve been pushing since digital art sort of started to be on more people’s map in 2021,” Beeple told Observer, but he also still thinks there is a lot of work to be done. “One of the things that makes it both exciting and challenging versus other media is that it is changing very rapidly. What is possible, the tools, etc.—these are moving at an insanely rapid pace relative to other mediums.”

Beyond the virality of Beeple’s installation, the twelve galleries and studios presenting in the inaugural edition of Zero 10—curated by digital-art strategist Eli Scheinman—demonstrated the range of evolving trajectories within digital art and how these practices are reshaping the way art is created, experienced and sold.

Regular Animals were a viral attraction at Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy of Art Basel'>

Underscoring the timeliness of the section was its very title: Zero 10, referencing “0,10,” the groundbreaking 1915 exhibition organized by Kazimir Malevich, the launching moment for Suprematism. That exhibition not only marked a decisive rupture with figuration and a move toward pure abstraction but, as many argue, opened a conceptual line of artistic evolution in which the idea increasingly became more significant than the mastery of execution that had long defined artistic value.

Perhaps even more telling, Beeple was not the only one selling. The appetite for this work is real, and most exhibitors reported strong early sales that continued throughout the weekend, largely in the four- to six-digit range (in dollars, though this raises another important question we will return to). Many exhibitors told Observer they were genuinely amazed by the response from both traditional and digital buyers alike.

But while the Web3 community showed up in full force—circulating around the booths, buying, posting and supporting this moment of acknowledgment—the section did not arrive without criticism and skepticism, much of it voiced from within the community itself. A provocative article written by Web3 advisor Kate Vass on LinkedIn, for instance, suggested that if the original “0,10” stood for rupture, for burning down systems and starting from zero, this Zero 10 risks functioning instead as a marketing gesture at the world’s most established art fair. “Is this what passes for avant-garde now? A digital corner for ‘innovation,’ sanctioned by tradition and sold to the same collectors it once sought to disrupt?” she asks, pointing out the contradictions inherent to the initiative since Web3 was never meant to live inside walls; it was born in opposition to them. “Trying to fit Web3 art into the architecture of art fairs is like streaming the internet through a picture frame,” she writes, arguing that Art Basel did not lower its entry barriers to embrace a new ideology but to fill economic gaps left by galleries that closed or withdrew earlier this year.

This is certainly one of many points worth reflecting on after the inaugural edition of Zero 10. Here are a few key questions and takeaways.

Digital art beyond screens and NFTs

Upon entering the section, the great variety made immediately clear that digital art is not only about pixels, code and crypto, nor does it necessarily exist only as a file on a screen. The Web3 and digital-native artists presenting in Zero 10 were engaging with technology in very different ways, working with different tools and processes. These were primarily works made using software code, computational systems and often machine learning and A.I., yet the outputs could still be entirely analog or, more often, hybrid installations that integrate digital systems within a physical—and frequently interactive—experience.

“The works shown in the Zero 10 sector bring an exciting level of experimentation into the fair, exhibiting a diversity of form, aesthetic and commentary on the condition of today,” said Adam Heft, who has long been active in the field, exploring the intersection of physical and virtual media. In an interview with Observer earlier this year, Heft noted that he now finds it increasingly difficult to define digital art, as so much of what we do involves digital technologies, whether through our phones, A.I. integrated into daily workflows, digital manipulation of photography or even the source materials used by painters and sculptors. The digital world, he argued, is now the native world, embedded in our existence and culture.

Seeing this breadth of innovation at Art Basel’s Zero 10 felt, for him, like an essential reflection of the entangled nature of technology in the lives of everyone visiting the fair. That artists would use digital processes native to our time is not a novelty but an inevitability, one that will continue to lose its shock value as it becomes more deeply integrated into rigorous contemporary art-making. “This was a strong statement in the continuation of this assimilation, especially given the strength of craft and familiarity of formats in so many of the works in this sector,” he added. One of the gallery’s goals is not to elevate the perception of digital art as a distinct medium but to reduce the perceived separation between artists who use digital processes and those who don’t, Heft clarified.

Courtesy Heft Gallery'>

Aligned with this viewpoint, Heft presented a solo booth of Michael Kozlowski’s Tessellations, in which Kozlowski reimagines circuitry as ornament, transforming hidden architectures into visible, speculative archaeology: code-based resin reliefs coated in copper and framed in walnut, each paired with a generative Ethereum NFT. As many of the architectures that govern contemporary life remain hidden inside devices and data centers, the series turned them into demonstrations of what it might mean to treat pervasive circuitry as ornament, making it present and visible. By early afternoon, Heft had already sold four of them for $25,000 each. “Collectors of all types were drawn to unique qualities of work across beauty, craft and originality—in this case referencing both ancient sacred geometries and futuristic technical aesthetics,” he told Observer, noting how physicality in a context of a fair is essential to how the work is considered for collecting.

“Zero 10 really helped people understand the breadth and creativity digital art can offer,” Alastair Walker, chief creative officer at Asprey Studio, told Observer, noting how the inaugural edition showed that digital art is simply a new canvas for artists, collectors and galleries to explore. Founded in 2021, the London-based gallery and atelier merges Asprey’s three-century-old silversmithing tradition with contemporary digital practices, producing hybrid works that pair physical objets d’art with digital artifacts created collaboratively by digital artists and master silversmiths in Kent.

For Walker, the physical-digital pairing is a powerful bridge: it allows traditional collectors to approach digital art through something tangible while extending an endangered artisanal lineage into new technological terrain. The resonance was clear. By Sunday, Asprey Studio had sold out its presentation of new works by Andrea Chiampo and the Ethiopian collective Yatreda, each of which paired a digital artwork with a sterling silver sculpture, for a total of $225,000. One buyer came from a digital background, the others from the traditional art world. “That balance reflects where the market currently sits,” Walker explained. Traditional collectors are curious and increasingly open to digital work while digital-native buyers continue to engage naturally.

To gain a fuller sense of the breadth of work on view in Zero 10, Pace presented works by James Turrell in the section, underscoring how deeply technology has shaped the artist’s practice for decades. Even Beeple’s Regular Animals combined digital tools with physical presence, performance, robotics, installation and new forms of distribution such as print outputs linked to NFTs.

And as hybrid works become more common, it seems clear that the traditional art market and collectors are increasingly open to valuing them as “real art” rather than as digital curiosities. Most of the exhibitors we spoke with agreed that Zero 10 felt like a marker of progress, but many also pointed out that there’s a long way to go.

MATER NATVRA, 2025. Digital artwork by the artist with physical by Asprey Studio; Edition 1 of 1. Photo: Andrea Chiampo'>

SOLOS, for instance, presented two bodies of work by Tyler Hobbs (one of the established names in the NFT space), both born from the same algorithm but then printed on European birch panels to introduce a tactile surface. As gallerist Leyla Fakhr noted, the choice may seem at odds with a digital process yet reflects how Hobbs moves fluidly between physical and digital modes. “Many artists are navigating this terrain, whether or not their work circulates on the blockchain,” she told Observer. While they expected the strongest response from digitally native collectors, SOLOS also saw significant interest from traditional buyers. “People responded to the work immediately, drawn to the colors and palette, without needing any prior knowledge,” she added. “The complex process added depth, but the initial reaction was purely visual and emotional.”

The way digital art is displayed certainly contributes to how audiences respond to it. Angelo Sotiracopoulos—an early digital art pioneer and co-founder of DeviantArt—recently launched Layers, an ultra-high-resolution, museum-grade digital canvas designed to give institutions, artists and collectors a high-fidelity format that treats digital work with the same seriousness as traditional media. At Zero 10, bitforms used Layers to show historic works by Manfred Mohr—widely regarded as the father of digital art—alongside prints and generative pieces by Mohr, Casey Reas and Maya Man, creating a tight intergenerational dialogue. “The presentation was rooted in digital practice, but the Canvas helped display the work in a new way,” Sotiracopoulos told Observer, noting how it provided the physical presence and precision expected of traditional media. The format resonates with traditional collectors because it offers a familiar, museum-grade object crafted with the rigor of painting or photography. “For many, this is the first time digital art has felt legible in their homes and collections.” Digital-native collectors, meanwhile, respond to the code, the continuous variation and the ability to maintain a private Vault of works. “For them, the Layer ecosystem feels both intuitive and overdue.”

Photo: James Jackman'>

In a recent Gray Market column, Tim Schneider described Zero 10 as “Art Basel’s sixth fair,” with a separate “customer-acquisition ecosystem,” but the fact that the megafair specifically didn’t launch a separate offering is telling. As technology becomes more deeply intertwined with daily life, it is not only natural but inevitable that all artists—including those working within the traditional contemporary art system—will continue engaging digital and computational tools as part of the available, present-day creative vocabulary, much as collectors may grow more accustomed to experiencing art in ways that mirror their daily interactions with devices. Soon, these categories may seem as incongruous as they sometimes feel now, no more distinct than photography or video art once appeared when set against the broader field of contemporary production.

The question, then, is what the traditional art system could learn and take from the dynamics of value exchange, production and circulation within digital art communities—and how some of these principles may become newly relevant as technological elements increasingly shape artistic practice, distribution and the market itself.

Digital artists exploring different ways to circulate art and value

Most of these Web3-native and digital artists still consider themselves outsiders in the “official” art world and this position allows them to question—and even choose not to engage with—the long-established value systems, customary business practices, requirements and power dynamics of the art world, many of which have already been dismantled in the digital space.

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

One of these is Jack Butcher (aka Visualize Value), whose Self Checkout presented a conceptual and transactional artwork consisting of a series of kiosks where fairgoers (or remote buyers) were invited to pay any amount, producing a receipt that became the artwork itself. The payment amount determined the physical receipt’s length, transforming both the act of art-making and the work into a participatory performance and an active form of fundraising—or more precisely, crowdfunding—to offset the costs of exhibiting. A live digital display tracked the artist’s cumulative profit or loss, beginning from a declared production-cost deficit of -$74,211, the amount required to participate in Art Basel, including booth fees, travel and logistical expenses. By folding financial dynamics, crypto mechanisms and physical receipts into a single gesture, Butcher made transparent the economics of exhibiting at a major fair and the significant risks involved—risks that are often even more pronounced for digital-native practices entering this high-stakes arena.

Interestingly, despite the considerable costs of participation and production—borne entirely by exhibitors even with the last-minute invitation—many of the presentations in Zero 10 offered works either for free or at strikingly accessible prices, upending the traditional logic of art-fair transactions and replacing it with an ethos of open exchange and co-creation that reflects the dynamics of digital culture and its economies. Beeple distributed the prints “pooped” by his humanoid dogs for free, allowing some recipients to claim their NFT counterparts, which are currently listed on OpenSea (Art Basel’s official partner in this section) for around 10 ETH.

Similarly, artist XCOPY debuted in Nguyen Wahed’s four-sided stand with a new participatory installation, Coin Laundry: a full reconstruction of a scrappy laundromat environment where fairgoers could leave their email to subscribe and receive a free NFT by the artist—“at once token and memento”—granting entry into an ephemeral blockchain performance. However, most of the over 2,300,000 free NFTs claimed by Sunday were programmed to self-destruct, their value as fleeting as the gesture itself. Poetic press materials described the installation as a “ritual-space where smart contracts become dramaturges, orchestrating encounters between digital promise and material necessity,” and where “immaterial architectures meet material residue.” The work cleverly explored themes of value, loss, liquidity and impermanence, critically highlighting the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in the crypto ecosystem itself, often associated with “money laundering” and still susceptible to wash trading, anonymous wallets and manipulated valuations—issues documented by blockchain analysis firms.

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

In the same booth, Kim Asendorf’s Raster und Spektrum explored the generative, fluid and potentially infinite nature of computational creativity, embracing radical non-repeatability that resists any fixed form. The digital artwork becomes an open visual phenomenon of color and light, apparently impossible to crystallize into a single editioned object, unfolding instead through infinite variations generated from immutable instructions without external dependencies. The PXL Deck, real-time animation, WebGL2/JavaScript, eventually sold for $145,000.

Onkaos presented Appropriate Response by A.I. pioneer Mario Klingemann, an interactive installation that invites fairgoers to kneel on a wooden prayer bench and contemplate a 120-character split-flap display trained on the GPT-2 model to deliver short, evocative aphorisms—each visible only for a few seconds, never to repeat again. In a ceremonial act of invocation, the viewer must capture their own fleeting, luminous sentence delivered by the machine’s neural network as a contemporary oracle. Meaning emerges not through instruction but through interpretation, as each viewer participates in processing and transforming the text revealed before them.

Digital art circulates differently—dynamic, iterative and inseparable from technology—said Sotiracopoulos, noting that this fundamentally alters a work’s lifecycle. “Galleries today aren’t just exhibiting and placing digital pieces; they’re safeguarding the integrity of the code,” he explained, as artists and galleries now think together about long-term access, storage and the collector’s day-to-day experience.

Inevitably, these works also resist the traditional channels through which value is exchanged in the art world—systems built on scarcity, exclusivity and hierarchical gatekeeping. Many Zero 10 projects encouraged participation, remixing or interaction aligned with digital culture’s decentralized ethos. In various ways, they open the door to collaborative or distributed authorship, positioning the artwork not as a fixed object but as something that can evolve through ongoing cultural and creative engagement.

A decentralized system of validation with a very different audience

“Decentralization must stay at the forefront—and we must resist the slide back into old gatekeeping reflexes,” writes Kate Vass in the previously mentioned LinkedIn article. Most of the artists in the Zero 10 app appeared to respond directly to this call, with presentations that, to some extent, subtly functioned as performances of autonomy, quietly yet unmistakably asserting independence from the “official” structures that Art Basel embodies. Within the section, many of them set their own terms for how their work would be shown, circulated or acquired, generally reversing the top-down dynamics that usually govern an art fair booth.

Self Checkout in Zero 10. Courtesy of Art Basel'>

“Digital art operates with reduced physical constraints, which changes the scope of how artworks can be conceived,” said Hugh Heslep, president and COO at Art Blocks, a platform for generative art created through algorithms written by artists using computer code as their medium. “On Art Blocks, our project sizes often run into the hundreds or thousands, with each individual artwork being algorithmically unique yet still part of a larger, coherent collection.” This, he told Observer, creates a network effect among collectors: each one owns a singular work while participating in a community organized around a shared artistic system. For galleries working in generative art, the role shifts from selling discrete objects to stewarding an entire algorithmic body of work. “It expands to helping collectors understand the logic of the algorithm, the range of possible outputs and how each artwork fits within the broader collection.”

At Zero 10, Art Blocks presented Quine by Larva Labs, the duo Matt Hall and John Watkinson, best known for creating CryptoPunks. The project draws on the computer-science concept of a quine—a program that outputs its own source code—with each artwork incorporating its own code into the visuals it generates. Their booth used a primarily physical format to demystify the underlying digital mechanics. “We offered ten Quines, each with a different ‘quinity,’ the number of generations the work cycles through before returning to its original state. Collectors received signed prints of all variations within that quinity along with the digital artwork and provenance,” Heslep explained. A vitrine displayed small prints of all 497 works and an animation demonstrated how each artwork’s embedded code could be extracted and rerun. “Beyond selling the available artworks, our goal was to help visitors understand how generative art functions and how the artwork comes into being. For many traditional collectors, seeing the physical prints helped bridge the gap between digital process and tangible output.” While many familiar faces from their digital community appeared, Heslep estimated that more than 90 percent of their conversations were with fairgoers encountering generative art for the first time. “They were genuinely interested in how the platform works—how an artist writes an algorithm, how collectors mint unique outputs, how the blockchain serves as both provenance record and distribution mechanism.”

“Digital art coming from this new ecosystem does not need the traditional gallery model in the same way it has been done throughout the past two centuries,” confirmed Aniko Berman, director at AOTM Gallery, which presented Dmitri Cherniak’s digital tokens born from algorithmic code while also presenting them in physical form as unique prints and sculpture. The hybrid format, she said, revealed meaningful unlocks for new digital collectors. “Artists frequently promote their work themselves; collectors value direct communication and can bypass the historically opaque ivory tower of the traditional gallery model.” Still, she emphasized, great gallerists remain essential: they champion artists, contextualize their work and provide the strategic guidance and cultural investment that emerging ecosystems cannot offer on their own. As the digital art space matures, this support becomes increasingly necessary. That’s why most galleries in Zero 10 not only enabled resource-heavy activations but also remained on the floor every day, advocating for their artists, answering questions and meeting collectors directly.

Notably, most of these artists arrived at Art Basel with their legitimacy already established—not through traditional gatekeepers, museum endorsement or long-term gallery representation, but through peer-to-peer platforms, tools and communities native to digital culture. Their audiences were built online; their reputations—and the value of their works—emerged through visibility and interaction on these platforms, driven by the viral logic of community networks rather than the slow, closed circuits of curatorial approval. Their validation is decentralized, transparent and collectively produced.

This has created both a different audience and a different model of artistic value circulation that gives digital creators a wider degree of autonomy while also tying their practices to direct engagement with their own communities. Digital art often escapes the gallery model not out of rejection but because its systems of creation, distribution and recognition have evolved alongside it, shaped by open networks, peer-to-peer economies, remix culture and collaborative authorship. In many cases, a production-studio or collective format serves these artists more effectively than traditional representation.

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

At Zero 10, two validation systems briefly coexisted, though not on equal terms. These artists are not asking to enter the traditional structure; they are showing that they have already built another one—at a time when an art market in rapid transition may have something to learn from it, especially as more “traditional” artists question the role of galleries, empowered by social media and new forms of online visibility.

As Heft observed, today’s art world moves faster than ever through global connectivity, new transaction formats and unprecedented access to resources. This creates opportunities for galleries and artists to reach audiences far beyond their local ecosystems and the fair circuit. Such shifts, he argued, will ultimately benefit all forms of art (traditional, digital or otherwise) and require galleries to embrace the advantages that the digital world now offers.

Liquidity and the role of the cryptocurrency market

The robust sales reported by exhibitors in this inaugural edition not only confirmed the presence of a dynamic and passionate community eager to support this moment of “outing” on the art world’s premier stage but also revealed that more collectors are embracing the intersection of technology and contemporary practice.

The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting had already shown that digital art officially emerged as a core acquisition category in 2025, with fifty-one percent of high-net-worth collectors reporting a digital-art purchase. Digital art is now the third-largest category of fine-art spending (about 14 percent), nearly on par with sculpture, while painting remains dominant at 27 percent. Looking ahead, 23 percent of HNW collectors plan to expand their digital art holdings, up from 19 percent in the previous survey. This growth is being driven by a new generation of buyers who will shape the future of the art market. Gen Z collectors represented 26 percent of respondents and a remarkable 63 percent of them reported buying digital art in 2024 or 2025. Noah Horowitz’s decision to introduce this section was therefore driven less by intuition than by data and market necessity. As Leyla Fakhr pointedly said, “the medium itself was never the obstacle; artists have been working digitally and conceptually for decades. What has changed is that a market built outside the traditional establishment has grown powerful enough that institutions and the ‘traditional’ art world can no longer ignore it.”

Notably, Art Basel Zero 10 was presented in partnership with OpenSea, the leading crypto-native marketplace for digital collectibles, ensuring that the works showcased in Miami can continue circulating through peer-to-peer networks after the fair closes.

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

Given that, to what extent might the strong sales at Zero 10 be tied not only to the growing legitimacy of digital art but also to renewed volatility in cryptocurrency markets following a sharp pre-Basel pullback after a bullish year of rising valuations partly fueled by crypto-friendly Trump policies?

Although transactions at the fair have been reported in dollars, some of these acquisitions were executed in crypto or backed primarily by crypto wealth—perhaps as a way for collectors to park value in a digital-friendly asset during a period of intensified market turbulence. After all, digital artworks offer a familiar on-ramp for crypto-native buyers and unlike most tokens, they can be resold through traditional art-market channels, potentially easing the conversion of crypto gains into fiat (legal tender controlled by governments).

We asked several exhibitors about the structure of their sales and whether cryptocurrency played any role in the transactions. “All works were priced in USD. We accept a full range of payment methods, including ETH, Bitcoin, credit cards and wire transfers. For this presentation, one collector chose to pay in ETH, while the rest paid by card,” Asprey Studio told Observer.

Although the CryptoPunks market rise has been mostly associated with crypto wealth, Art Blocks was also accepting payments in both USD and cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency payments were made with both USDC and USD1 stablecoins with amounts ranging from $25,000 to $45,000.

“We were adamant about pricing Dmitri Cherniak’s works in ETH, the native currency for the Ethereum blockchain on which his works are minted,” said Berman of AOTM Gallery. Each of the 20 unique outputs from Polygon Etcetera, his newest algorithm, which debuted at the fair, was priced at 5 ETH. They sold out of the entire series and even helped one new traditional collector purchase ETH to complete the transaction.

“We accept both crypto and fiat. We’re very geared toward new buyers,” said Fakhr of Solos Gallery, which mints on Verse, a digital art marketplace designed for individuals with no prior knowledge of crypto. Collectors can hold their works in custodial wallets or transfer them to their own wallets if they prefer.

It’s clear the art market still sits atop a largely untapped pool of liquidity that could be activated by accepting crypto payments more broadly—and by recognizing the different profile of buyers that crypto can bring into the fold. Beeple told Observer that one payment for his humanoid animals was made in cryptocurrency: “It really is not that big of a deal and I am honestly surprised more galleries do not do this. It really isn’t very complicated and can, of course, be converted to fiat immediately, so I really am honestly a bit puzzled as to why this has not been adopted more generally.”

Sotheby’s Closes Its Inaugural Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week With $133 Million in Sales

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:58:32 +0000

Courtesy of Sotheby's'>

Following the record-breaking November auctions that achieved $1.173 billion across the Modern & Contemporary marquee sales in New York and the HK$688 million ($88 million) from Japan’s Okada Museum of Art auction in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s closed its inaugural Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi with a strong $133 million total. Across multiple auctions and private sales at the St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort, a cross-category offering of luxury watches, handbags, high-performance bicycles, collectible cars and blue-chip real estate attracted robust interest—unsurprising in a region where luxury demand is accelerating at exceptional speed. The Gulf Cooperation Council luxury-goods market was estimated at $15.02 billion in 2025, with a projected rise to roughly $24.36 billion by 2030. The United Arab Emirates is one of the two leading markets, expected to be worth $8.5 billion in 2025, immediately following Saudi Arabia, where Sotheby’s earlier this year staged its first-ever auction in the country totaling $17.3 million across 117 lots in a cross-category sale held in Diriyah near Riyadh.

Although the final total generated by Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week came in shy of the roughly $150 million estimate, the auction rooms were full; there were white-glove outcomes in jewelry, watches, handbags and cycling; and record-setting bids abounded. The success of the sales is more evidence of the Gulf’s accelerating buying power, especially when the material is best-in-class and strategically positioned.

Despite the appeal of a tax-free stage, it wasn’t just local participation driving results. Bidders from 35 countries joined in, with nearly a quarter from the U.A.E. Almost a third were under 40, echoing recent data that Millennials and Gen Z are now the engine of the collectibles market. In a statement, Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart called the week a “historic chapter” for the company in Abu Dhabi—an opening act with clear long-term ambitions.

Courtesy Sotheby's RM'>

The star of Collectors’ Week was undeniably the 1994 McLaren F1, which achieved $25.3 million after a tense exchange between four bidders in the room and on the phones. The automotive category as a whole, strategically timed to coincide with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, surged to $84.7 million and setting a new high-water mark for any collector car auction staged in the Middle East. The sale also offered the chance to become an honorary member of the McLaren Formula 1 Team by acquiring the 2026 McLaren MCL40A ahead of its unveiling; the car climbed to $11.5 million after a three-way bidding war.

The most cinematic lot of the week was a waterfront estate in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, one of two marquee real estate listings marking Sotheby’s Concierge Auctions’ Middle Eastern debut. Listed at €35 million, the Côte d’Azur property has 680 square meters of living space framed by 0.72 acres of gardens and a 60-square-meter pool house with sauna and hammam. It ultimately sold below estimate at $20.1 million, a reminder that even dream properties are not immune to buyer discipline.

Far more heated was the bidding for Jane Birkin’s Le Voyageur, a one-of-a-kind black Hermès Birkin owned by the legendary actress and star, offered just months after Sotheby’s record-breaking $10.1 million sale in Paris of the Birkin prototype. After more than ten minutes of competitive bidding and applause as the hammer fell, Le Voyageur soared to $2.9 million against its $240,000-440,000 estimate, becoming the second most valuable handbag ever sold at auction, surpassed only by Birkin’s 1985 original. One of four Birkin bags gifted to the actress by Hermès after the 1994 sale of her prototype, the bag bears a silver inscription by Birkin reading “Mon Birkin bag qui m’a accompagnée dans le monde entier.”

Jewelery and watches also delivered standout results, achieving a white-glove sale. Leading the category was a four-piece Patek Philippe Star Caliber 2000 set, which fetched $11.9 million, becoming the second most valuable watch ever sold at Sotheby’s and confirming continued strength in the market. The result followed the auction house’s new record in New York for Audemars Piguet’s “Grosse Pièce,” which sold for $7.7 million over a high estimate of $1 million.

Another star of the sale was The Desert Rose, a unique 31.86-carat diamond blending sunset-like tones of pink and orange. Described by the auction house as the “largest fancy vivid orangy pink diamond in the world,” it drew five determined bidders and soared to $8.8 million (est. $5-7 million), setting a new auction record for an orangy pink diamond after an almost 20-minute bidding battle.

Sotheby's'>

Additional highlights included a Tiffany & Co. sapphire and diamond ring from the 1930s, which surpassed its high estimate after fees to sell for $596,900 (est. $350,000-550,000), and a Boucheron emerald and diamond ring that sold near its high estimate at $508,000 under guarantee. A Rolex “Oyster Albino” Daytona from 1971 sold just shy of its high estimate for $952,500 (est. $500,000-$1 million). Across the Precision & Brilliance: Prestigious Jewels & Watches from an Important Private Collection sale, many lots performed above expectations, often exceeding or doubling the high estimate, confirming strong demand in the region and globally.

Reflecting growing enthusiasm for cycling in the region, Sotheby’s also offered four rare high-performance bicycles from legendary Italian manufacturer and four-time Tour de France winner Colnago. All lots sold successfully, largely through online bidding, within or above estimate. The top lot was a Y1Rs Raw Carbon bicycle ridden by Tadej Pogačar on this year’s iconic Mont Ventoux stage of the Tour de France. Estimated at $20,000, it climbed to $190,500, more than nine times its high estimate, setting a new auction record for any bicycle.

Crowning Collectors’ Week was the debut of “Icons,” Sotheby’s first-ever non-selling exhibition of some of the most expensive masterpieces ever handled by the auction house, with nine works shown in Abu Dhabi before traveling to the company’s new New York headquarters at the Breuer on December 13, where it is set to become a holiday season attraction. The museum-grade exhibition helped solidify Sotheby’s popularity, drawing more than 5,000 visitors to the exhibitions and accompanying masterclasses over the week and shifting the auction house’s role from market hub to cultural destination.

“This week has been so rewarding, enabling us to further deepen our connection with collectors in the region and share our passion and expertise for what we do—hosting an incredible night of auctions was the cherry on top,” Katia Nounou Boueiz, Sotheby’s Head U.A.E. & Deputy Chairman, Middle East, said in a statement. “We felt that powerful energy and cultural pull directly reflected in the number of visitors to our exhibitions, especially our Icons presentation, which was one the most important fine art exhibitions ever staged outside of a museum in the Middle East.”

What Hauser & Wirth’s Palermo Move Reveals About Cultural Branding in Art and Luxury

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:18:39 +0000

Photo: Giovanni Costagliola. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth'>

The White Lotus has rapidly transformed Sicily into a highly hyped destination for international tourism, particularly from the United States, and without any direct government intervention or tax benefits. Contrast that with Puglia, where tourism was boosted by a government-led cinema credit initiative that brought its beauty to international screens. Yet in the art world, we have hardly heard about Sicily since the memorable Manifesta 12 Palermo in 2018, despite the wave of non-profit spaces and cultural projects that have bloomed—and closed—in the years since. Now, Hauser & Wirth is giving the city’s art scene new hope by choosing Palermo as the site of its only location so far in Italy.

According to a report by Repubblica, Hauser & Wirth has acquired Palazzo De Seta, a 19th-century palazzo located in the historic Kalsa district. Built by the De Seta family, one of Sicily’s most prominent aristocratic lineages, the structure embodies the city’s layered cultural and political history, standing on foundations that once belonged to the Jesuit complex of Casa Professa before the Bourbon expulsions reshaped Palermo’s urban fabric and architectural identity. Its neoclassical vocabulary, with large salons, sea-facing loggias and frescoed interiors, made it a hub of Palermo’s intellectual and social life in the late 1800s, hosting the very aristocratic milieu that literary and cinematic works like Il Gattopardo immortalized.

Before the deal, the palazzo was privately held by the De Seta family but remained partially accessible for events, openings and institutional programs, as it had long hosted the Circolo Artistico di Palermo, a cultural association founded in 1882 that gathered writers, artists and members of the city’s professional class. The property is still under a historical-monumental constraint, and the Sicilian Region, together with the Ministry of Culture, has 60 days to exercise its right of pre-emption.

While the gallery hasn’t released details about the space’s future programming, it has confirmed the acquisition to the press. “It is an honor and a privilege to have this opportunity to restore a site of such profound significance and beauty, and to create a new arts destination in a place renowned for cultural exchange throughout the centuries,” Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s president, said in a statement.

Back in 2018, during the Manifesta biennial, rumors circulated about a possible negotiation for Palazzo Costantino at the Quattro Canti. Palazzo De Seta sits just a few steps from another Baroque-style aristocratic palace, Palazzo Butera, owned by collector Massimo Valsecchi, who occasionally opens it for showcases of contemporary art in dialogue with its historic interiors.

This move aligns with Hauser & Wirth’s strategy to extend the power of its brand well beyond the traditional commercial gallery, turning its locations into cultural destinations often combined with high-end hospitality experiences. While Hauser & Wirth’s involvement in hospitality is now structured under Artfarm, the hospitality and food and beverage company that extends the gallery’s brand into immersive destinations, its engagement with hospitality predates Artfarm’s formalization in 2014. The Wirth family had a long tradition of running inns and gathering places in Switzerland, and when they opened the gallery in 1992, the idea of creating sites of encounter was already foundational. Bookshops and cafés were integrated into the first Zurich location, a model later expanded with the Somerset campus, which has an arts center, a farm, a restaurant and a guesthouse.

Artfarm’s portfolio now spans a constellation of hospitality ventures that extend Hauser & Wirth’s cultural universe into lived experience, from The Fife Arms in Braemar, its arts-driven flagship hotel housing 16,000 artworks, site-specific commissions and a Michelin-recognized kitchen, to the Roth Bar at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, a working farm-to-table restaurant embedded in the gallery’s rural campus. Somerset also includes The Guesthouse, a boutique accommodation concept, and Durslade Farmhouse, an artist-designed guesthouse for collectors, artists and visitors, while in California, Manuela is a full-service restaurant within the gallery’s L.A. complex and most recently expanded to its new Soho location in New York. The portfolio continues to grow with the Ringlestone Inn and other U.K. country sites, further developing its model of rural cultural tourism anchored by art.

But while this blurring of boundaries between art, lifestyle and experience has allowed the gallery to extend the reach of its brand well beyond traditional art audiences, anticipating and now fully aligning with the approach of other luxury brands in this experience-based economy, it is important to note how Hauser & Wirth has consistently reinforced its identity by pairing these operations with a genuine cultural commitment to the conservation and reactivation of historic sites, a mission most clearly expressed through its art centers in Somerset, Menorca and Downtown Los Angeles.

In Somerset, the transformation of the 18th-century Durslade Farm into a contemporary arts campus set a benchmark for sensitive rural regeneration and earned the farmhouse the 2014 William Stansell Historic Buildings Award. With a similar approach, the gallery’s adaptive reuse of a former flour mill complex in Downtown Los Angeles reactivated the site as a new community hub, an intervention recognized for its preservation leadership with the 2018 Los Angeles Conservancy’s Chair’s Award.

Its most recent project on Isla del Rey in Menorca, which involved the restoration of the 18th-century naval hospital and its conversion into a cultural destination, has been internationally celebrated. It earned the 2021 European Heritage Award by the European Commission and Europa Nostra, alongside distinctions underscoring its architectural impact and community value, including the 2021 Best Social Responsibility Initiative by the Balearic Islands government, a 2021 Interior Design Best of Year honoree, the 2022 Best Art Destination in the Wallpaper* Design Awards, Architectural Digest’s 2022 Work of Wonder, the 2022 Architecture MasterPrize, the 2022 DNA Paris Design Award and the 2022 Créateurs Design Award. Importantly, all these operations extended their impact beyond the art world, returning these places to the local community as new venues for gathering, cultural production and education.

Creating destinations defined by meaning, memory and presence

While the recent combination of the reduced tax regime of 5 percent (VAT and export) and the flat-tax that attracts wealthy foreigners to obtain residency certainly makes Italy an appealing destination for the art business, it is clear that Hauser & Wirth’s intention, particularly in choosing Palermo over major cities and art hubs like Milan or Rome, goes well beyond the need to open an Italian outpost as a commercial gallery. The aim is instead to help ensure that the palazzo’s historic role as a cultural venue can continue and grow through an international contemporary art program. At the same time, by combining branding with place-making as it has in other locations, Hauser & Wirth will likely prioritize building a sustainable institutional presence that is integrated into Palermo’s existing social and cultural ecosystem, ideally contributing to the development of a broader critical mass and new audiences.

This news arrives just as Sotheby’s is turning the newly renovated New York Breuer building headquarters into a cultural destination, with a holiday exhibition of iconic masterpieces sold by the house that’s a clear bid to extend its reach beyond the traditional auction business. In different ways, Hauser & Wirth and Sotheby’s strategies reflect a shift across luxury industries as lifestyle brands seek to embed themselves in the cultural sphere through institutional partnerships, artist collaborations, fair sponsorships or heritage-restoration projects. These initiatives, which show a willingness to prioritize the creation of cultural and creative capital, enable them to build not only visibility but authentic symbolic value, a form of long-term cultural capital that cannot be produced through conventional marketing cycles.

Brand equity today depends on sustained, meaningful engagement with physical experiences that spark cultural production through storytelling and create a symbolic and narrative world that audiences can enter and make their own. As Pierluigi Sacco notes, this reflects a shift from a Culture 2.0 model based on consumption to a Culture 3.0 model grounded in co-production, where audiences are no longer passive but want to generate meaning, share content and actively shape the narrative ecosystem around a brand or cultural experience. Through audience participation, brand capital becomes indistinguishable from cultural capital. Seen through this lens, Hauser & Wirth and Sotheby’s are not simply creating new venues but investing in narrative-led experiences that become central mechanisms of symbolic production, building brand value more powerfully than traditional marketing in the process.

In an era defined by overexposure to digital content and online marketing, the most powerful source of symbolic value appears to come from projects that generate meaning, memory and presence: experiences rooted in place, community engagement, shared creativity or heritage. Whether through restoring a palazzo in Palermo or a historic farm in Menorca, transforming a former museum venue into both an auction house and year-round cultural attraction or associating a luxury brand with major museum installations (as Chanel or Audemars Piguet, for instance), these strategies allow companies not only to enhance their social responsibility score but also to create durable cultural anchoring. Unique experiences with the multilevel emotional and narrative impact can build a long-lasting sense of belonging, something that audiences increasingly seek in today’s fragmented and alienated society but that traditional marketing channels can’t replicate. As people become overloaded with products and information, they are not necessarily seeking to own more, but to experience and feel more.

Otani Workshop’s Invitation to Revisit the Unfiltered Imagination of Early Life

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:43:38 +0000

Childhood brims with fantastical figures that guide our first intuitive encounters with the complexity of the world. Imagination shapes this process, acting as a filter that preserves deeper ancestral patterns while protecting us from the rigid structures long imposed on human behavior and expression. As one grows in a social system, there is a gradual pressure to comply with these frameworks that compress lived experience into a single-direction narrative and shared codes of order and meaning.

Japanese artist Otani Workshop deploys art as a means of recapturing that feeling of receptive, unbiased expansiveness. “The world feels overwhelmingly complex to me, and I often feel that I cannot fully grasp everything in it,” he candidly tells Observer after the opening of “anima,” his latest show at Perrotin in New York. “Art that reflects this world is also complex, but there are moments that feel as simple as the play I experienced in childhood, and I hope to share that sense of simplicity through my work.”

The apparent naïveté of Otani’s whimsical human figures belie imagination’s ability to distill experience into essential elements that still carry meaning. In their clarity and openness, they invite a form of playful empathy, evoking the wonder that once shaped early discoveries yet often fades into the background of adult life.

Known for his whimsical, humanlike kawaii figures, Otani blends Japanese pop sensibility with the tactile quality of traditional ceramic techniques. In “anima,” he presents a new body of paintings, bronze sculptures, FRP and ceramics that inhabit their own symbolic world, offering metaphors that approach deeper and more nuanced states of the human condition.

Since 2017, Otani has lived and worked on the remote island of Awaji, off the coast of Japan, where he transformed an abandoned ceramic roof tile factory into a studio. There, in near-total isolation, he built a personal vocabulary free from trends or industrial influence, engaging directly with the land, using clay from Shigaraki and gathering memories through repurposed objects.

Walter Benjamin’s idea of “material imagination” aligns closely with Otani’s approach, in which ordinary objects take on new meanings when viewed with the “uncontaminated eyes of a child.” For children, the material world is endlessly reconfigurable, shaped not by inherent properties but by touch, play and improvisation. Benjamin notes that children do not merely imitate the adult world but reinterpret it, transforming discarded things into the raw matter of new symbolic realms.

Otani’s ceramic practice reflects this logic. Clay, for him, holds its own form of memory; it reacts, absorbs and shifts as he shapes it. This direct engagement enables him to imbue the material with a specific emotional charge before any recognizable form emerges. His sculptures rise as totemic presences, vessels of lived experience that echo the relationships people forge with each other and with the world. “When I look at a finished piece, it feels as if the sensations of that moment return to me, and viewers may sense something of that immediacy as well,” he says.

In his broader practice, the sense of play is unmistakable. His clay sculptures, like his paintings, appear raw, tactile and delightfully spontaneous, revealing the immediacy of his hand in the act of shaping. It is this vital spark—the anima that gives the exhibition its name—that moves through the work.

“The figures come to me in many different ways,” Otani says. “Some have clear origins—they may resemble me or members of my family. But there are also unexpected figures that suddenly appear while I am twisting clay in my hands or making casual sketches on paper.”

The clay figures, despite their kawaii appearance, engage through fluid, almost provisional forms that retain a strong sense of tactility and human presence. Clay itself behaves like a living material, able to hold traces of movement as it cracks, absorbs and transforms through Otani’s storytelling: “Clay is soft and remembers every movement of my fingers and hands. I like the feeling that my bodily thinking is recorded directly in the material.”

In his paintings, Otani preserves this responsiveness to touch, using a free-flowing process that explores the physicality of the work by molding and rematerializing archetypal forms. These figures become metaphors for human attitudes and relations. In this expanded space, the “monstrous” and the “other”—the experience of difference—are welcomed with a softness that invites connection rather than division.

Aligned with Kaikai Kiki Co.’s superflat aesthetic, Otani’s characters are intentionally open and innocent in affect, evoking the immediacy of early life—an expression of self before rationalization takes over. His work recalls Michael Meade’s notion of “mythical imagination,” with figures emerging from a pre-verbal, symbolic field, untouched by the ordering mechanisms of adult logic. They gesture toward a deeper, nonlinear temporality, similar to childhood, when experience unfolds through rhythms, sensations, and the unpredictable flow of attention.

At the same time, Otani’s work retains a strong sense of tenderness and domestic intimacy. In the Perrotin exhibition, he introduces cabinets and furniture pieces that become vessels, carrying emotions and recollections that lead us back to childhood’s unfiltered ways of perceiving. Drawers, cupboards, closets and small corners of domestic life function as containers for reverie—places where daydreams accumulate and cohere.

This intimate connection between memory and imagination is central to Otani’s artistic language. “I weave together my personal experiences and memories with the sensibilities I’ve developed through studying sculpture, ceramics, and painting,” he says. “I hope these personal memories and emotions resonate in a way that evokes universal empathy.” His work is, in other words, an invitation to look at the world with renewed attention through a gentle, inquisitive lens colored by curiosity and imagination.

Es Devlin’s ‘Library of Us’ Was the Rare Miami Art Week Spectacle That Invited Quiet Contemplation

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:42:37 +0000

Library of Us at Faena Hotel Miami Beach was much more than an Instagram attraction. Photos by Oriol Tarridas'>

Es Devlin’s Library of Us was one of the undeniable Instagram hits of Miami Art Week. Yet despite the hype, the installation the artist conceived for the annual Faena Miami Beach art program was perhaps one of the most successful examples of public art we have seen in Miami, especially when compared to the many monumental yet ephemeral installations of recent years that are mounted to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, obstruct the city’s fragile natural and community ecosystems and leave behind enormous waste in both money and materials.

From December 1 through December 7, the work rose over the white shoreline, a 20-foot-high, 50-foot-wide triangular revolving library containing 2,500 books that have shaped the artist’s philosophy, life and practice. The books also represented the broader human endeavor to understand and interpret the world, the nature of time and the essence of reality. Beneath the mirrored artwork, a 60-foot pool casts endless reflections, suggesting an infinite multiplication of this trove of knowledge far beyond the limits of a single human life.

What Devlin created was a true public space for the sharing of human knowledge and experience. On a 70-foot-wide reading table, visitors were invited to take a book, read, reflect and exchange thoughts while seated on a slowly rotating platform that gently imposes another tempo, a suspension of time that encourages meditation and contemplation. One could immerse oneself in a book or simply in the beauty of the surrounding nature, particularly at dusk, when the sun descended and Devlin’s library stood silhouetted against a sky shifting from pastel pink to purple, igniting briefly into red before dissolving into the darkness and then into starlight. The entire experience invited us to be present in body and mind, before and beyond the relentless, distracting flow of information and misinformation that, in its overexposure, often leaves far less than what a single page of a book or a genuine human exchange can offer.

The installation, as the artist explains, was about “seeing through the eyes of others.” The 2,500 authors whose books were housed in the library each offered a different point of view, a distinct angle of inquiry on our world, society and reality itself. Gathered inside this monumental structure, they formed a physical, palpable archive of human knowledge and imagination, standing in stark contrast to the accelerated fragmentation, dematerialization and frequent hollowing of meaning produced by the endless availability of content. In that boundless flow, knowledge is often decontextualized, synthesized and compressed to the point of losing its original essence and, even more crucially, the meaning that emerges through the connective tissue between ideas.

Photos by Oriol Tarridas'>

What remains is a flattening, a rapid obsolescence, a dissolution of the human and cultural depth from which knowledge originates, particularly when its circulation, elaboration and production become increasingly dependent on the technology of digital intelligence. But even A.I. is continuously trained and nourished by the immense library of knowledge accumulated by humankind over time and will only continue to grow with that type of input, if not drift outward as a simple hallucination.

Jorge Luis Borges’s words inspired the entire installation: “I’m not even sure I really exist. I am all the books I have read.” On a 30-foot-wide strip of LED subtitle screen embedded in one of the bookshelves, phrases from 250 books were displayed throughout the day, accompanied by a recording of the artist’s voice reading them aloud. It was a moment of shared knowledge and collective affabulation, connecting humanity past, present and future through the need for storytelling, an essential part of how we elaborate meaning and interpret the nature of our time-bound, physical existence. At the same time, it opened a passage into mythological and mythical realms that link us to the universal and the eternal. That “Otherworld” adjacent to the daily domain of facts and figures is also the primordial energetic center of meaning, the place of pre-linguistic and pre-ideological origins and the endless open field where imagination flows freely enough to contemplate essence and truth beyond the provable and measurable world, far beyond the illusory, performative spectacle of contemporary virtual stages. Books here revealed their timeless role as soulful vessels, portals through which time-bound daily existence and the redeemed, universal realm of the eternal can meet.

Devlin’s presentation continued with a site-specific Reading Room inside the Faena Cathedral that heightened the sense of sacrality, as well as a series of the artist’s more intimate, poetic, layered drawings and painted glass works in the Faena Project Room that suggested the full range of possibilities offered by this attuned, freely roving exploration of imagination.

A special dinner hosted by Chase Sapphire for Chase Sapphire Reserve cardmembers ahead of the opening further activated Devlin’s installation, in a memorable moment where deep philosophical reflections combined with genuine human connection and exchange. With a menu designed by Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, each course of Faena Art’s The Edible Library dinner was a translation of a quote from one of the books into food. Devlin gave Mallmann a series of phrases from the most potent books within her library to translate into a sequence of dishes, asking him to make the library edible.

Courtesy Chase Shappire'>

After each course, the seating rotated, encouraging a new encounter and exchange with a stranger who feels immediately closer once united in such a moment of beauty, poetry and convivial sharing, as Devlin and Mallmann recite each text and dish. “It is a dinner where guests eat ideas and revolve to encounter new dining partners across the table for each course,” the artist told Observer, noting how projects on this scale require bold, innovative and trusting collaborators and commissioners. “As you sit at the circular reading table, you will encounter a series of books and a sequence of people who revolve into your orbit and then rotate out again,” she added. “Perhaps your perspective will have been influenced in the interim by the encounters you may have had with other books, other people, phrases you’ve heard being read aloud, a view you’ve had of the sunset, the sea, the city or a seagull.”

Ultimately, the Library of Us asked us to stop and to be present; to be aware of the thoughts, the sensations and the meaning within us;and to recognize how these constant acts of interpretation shape our understanding of reality far more profoundly than any passive absorption of content from an endless stream.

In New York, Sotheby’s Repositions Itself as a Cultural Destination

Elisa Carollo — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:03:12 +0000

Photograph by Emma Milligan/Sotheby’s'>

Sotheby’s reported unprecedented attendance last month for its record-shattering $1.173 billion marquee week sales—with queues circling the block from the moment its new Breuer Building headquarters opened on November 8 and more than 25,000 visitors passing through in just over a week. The auction house has, it seems, secured a new level of widespread popularity, drawing audiences beyond the usual art-world crowd

Now, “Icons: Back to Madison” is bringing together some of the most widely celebrated works the auction house has sold over the years. Masterpieces acquired by private collectors and museums will return to Sotheby’s for the exhibition, which will be on view at the new Madison Avenue location December 13-21—a first-of-its-kind showcase made possible through a collaboration with Etihad Airways. With this show, Sotheby’s seems determined to uphold the Breuer Building’s museum-rich legacy by utilizing its landmark spaces not only to showcase art-history-defining artworks and collectibles headed to auction but also to celebrate the auction house’s own institutional history and its role in preserving the resonance of that history.

Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images'>

Among the highlights is Banksy’s Love is in the Bin (2018), the only artwork ever created live in an auction room when, in a radically Duchampian gesture, it partially self-shredded the moment Sotheby’s hammer fell at its record price of £1.04 million. Although Sotheby’s staff admitted they had no idea the frame had been modified—and Banksy subsequently released a behind-the-scenes video revealing the mechanism hidden inside—the auction house and the sale itself played a key role in shaping the work’s meaning and afterlife.

Also in the exhibition is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), which sold in 2017 for a record-shattering $110.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist. Although the work was reportedly purchased by Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, it may have changed hands since, as the painting now appears courtesy of billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, who is widely credited with pushing Basquiat’s market into the stratosphere through several landmark acquisitions that reset comparables at the very top. The painting was initially owned by the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York before being sold to Phoebe Chason, who sold it to Alexander F. Milliken in 1982 for $4,000. After that, it remained out of public view until its sale at Christie’s in 1984 to Emily and Jerry Spiegel for $19,000. When it resurfaced at Sotheby’s in 2017, painted by Basquiat at 21 and already at the height of his ascent, it far exceeded its presale estimate of $60 million.

Untitled (1982) sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for a record-shattering $110.5 million. Courtesy of Sotheby's'>

Also courtesy of Griffin is Andy Warhol’s Shot Orange Marilyn (1964), the silkscreen famously marked by a bullet hole from an unauthorized performance at the Factory. The work sold anonymously at Sotheby’s in 1998 for more than $17.3 million. As Nate Freeman reported in Vanity Fair after the 2022 Christie’s sale of Shot Sage Blue Marilyn for roughly $195 million, Griffin had acquired the Shot Orange Marilyn from the estate of Si Newhouse in a private sale orchestrated by former Sotheby’s specialist and mega-dealer Tobias Meyer for about $240 million. In a 1998 BBC article, Meyer—then still a young Sotheby’s specialist—called the work “a wise buy,” likely echoing the same sentiment years later while facilitating what remains one of the most emblematic deals of the century.

Meyer, in the same article, described Shot Orange Marilyn as the equivalent of a De Kooning, a Jasper Johns or an important Picasso. All three are represented in the show, which includes de Kooning’s seminal Interchange (1955) and Jasper Johns’s False Start (1959), both also courtesy of Griffin. Created during de Kooning’s pivotal transition from the “Women” series into a more gestural, landscape-inflected abstraction, Interchange was acquired by Griffin from David Geffen in 2016 for roughly $300 million—reported independently by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—after last appearing at auction at Sotheby’s in 1989, where it fetched $20.68 million, then a record for a living artist. Johns’s False Start, meanwhile, last sold at auction in November 1988 for $17.05 million—a record for a living artist at the time—before being acquired by Griffin from the Geffen Foundation in 2006 for a reported $80 million.

Returning to New York from the YAGEO Foundation Collection in Taiwan are Piet Mondrian’s 1929 Composition No—II and Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1969). The former sold at Sotheby’s in 2022 for $51 million, setting a new auction record for Mondrian; one of only three works featuring the commanding red square at upper right and the only example remaining in private hands, the painting survived World War II in France before following the artist belatedly to the U.S. in 1950. Bacon’s triptych last sold at Sotheby’s in November 2003, fetching $3,816,000, but its price has risen significantly ever since: the most recent sale of another Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud took place on November 12, 2013, at Christie’s, achieving $142.4 million (including buyer’s premium), which remains the auction record for the artist.

Love is in the Bin (2018) famously self-shredded in the auction room moments after selling for £1.04 million. Courtesy of Sotheby's'>

Also resurfacing in the exhibition is Jane Birkin’s original Hermès Birkin, which sold this summer for more than $10 million, drawing renewed attention to the rising value of rare luxury objects. The record-setting buyer was Shinsuke Sakimoto, a Japanese entrepreneur in the resale business and former professional soccer player, who reportedly purchased the bag under his company’s name, Valuence Japan. Another rare collectible on view is Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Medusa Pendant Necklace (c. 1904), on loan from the Tiffany & Co. archives after re-emerging at Sotheby’s in 2021 as part of the sale of the Schocken family collection. Estimated at $100,000-200,000, it ultimately fetched $3.65 million, setting a new auction record for a Louis Comfort Tiffany jewel.

“‘Icons: Back to Madison’ is more than an exhibition; it reflects Sotheby’s longstanding legacy and marks a return to Madison Avenue, a center of art, culture and collecting for generations,” Courtney Kremers, Sotheby’s vice chairman, senior specialist post-war and contemporary art, told Observer. She added that by reuniting some of the most remarkable works ever sold at Sotheby’s—including pieces from private and museum collections, several of which are on view for the first time in decades—the auction house is giving audiences an exceptional opportunity to encounter masterpieces that have influenced the global landscape of collecting. “Bringing these works together transforms the Breuer into a space of discovery and underscores Sotheby’s enduring place within New York’s cultural landscape.”

Photograph by Stefan Ruiz Courtesy of Sotheby's'>

As part of its strategy, Sotheby’s is publishing a book with Phaidon featuring 100 of the most iconic works ever sold at the auction house. “Icons” merchandise, designed in collaboration with U.K.-based artist Angelica Hicks, will be available at the exhibition, including a sketchbook, notecards, stickers and apparel. Also with Phaidon, Sotheby’s will publish Breuer, the definitive monograph on Marcel Breuer and his legacy, showcasing Sotheby’s new global headquarters in New York.

In keeping with the holiday spirit, Sotheby’s has partnered with Tom Martin on a bespoke painted ornament featuring a snowy street scene outside the Breuer—an initiative that perhaps gestures toward its aim to compete with the major seasonal spectacles on Fifth Avenue, from the historical light shows at Saks and Bergdorf Goodman to the festive façades of Cartier and Tiffany further down the street.

Sotheby’s will also present “Swinging on a Star: The Private Collection of Kathryn and Bing Crosby” ahead of the December 18 auction—a festive presentation that leans into celebrity culture and lifestyle. Drawn from the couple’s personal collection, the auction will include items across a wide price spectrum, from Kathryn’s holiday-evocative fashion, including her ivory Jean Louis coat from the Bing Crosby Christmas Show, to fine and decorative art favored by Bing, along with Hollywood memorabilia such as the Erard grand piano featured in High Society, prized works by Sir Alfred Munnings and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and rare Fabergé creations, including Kathryn’s aventurine quartz lion and sapphire mouse.

Sotheby's'>

It’s striking how Sotheby’s, globally, is toeing the line between museum and luxury brand, deploying a form of intentional brand dilution designed to multiply its symbolic capital across price tiers and target audiences within an economy shaped by content, experience and spectacle.

Altogether, the rollout appears to be a successful expression of Sotheby’s “New World” experience, which saw the auction house opening boutique-style flagships across its Hong Kong, Paris and now New York venues, with full cross-category luxury environments designed to attract audiences far beyond traditional art-world insiders—targeting visitors who might not buy at auction but will engage with the Sotheby’s brand at other levels, whether that means shopping for one-of-a-kind jewelry or buying an exhibition souvenir.

How Jorge Pardo Turns Light, Color and Form into a Phenomenology of Seeing

Elisa Carollo — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:09:17 +0000

Photos by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

Known for his sensorially engaging, mesmerizing environments and installations of color and light, Cuban-born Jorge Pardo moves fluidly between contemporary art, design and optics to stage what could be described as a “phenomenology of the senses” in place. His shows become sites that activate, test and heighten both sensorial and cognitive responses, encouraging an awareness that how we encounter, process and communicate the world is far more an act of participation than passive reception. “I like to think of my art as tools to think with,” Pardo told Observer as he was completing the installation of his latest show at Petzel—his 12th solo exhibition with the gallery—on view through December 20.

Although Pardo does not limit himself to a single medium and often crosses into design and architecture, he still describes himself first and foremost as a sculptor. Yet, as he admits, what truly interests him is how people behave: the way he thinks about space centers on the interactions among objects, environments and viewers. To animate that kind of behavior, he notes, requires an arsenal of tactics and tools. “Over time, I became curious about things that revolve around art—spaces, architecture and the objects people collect,” Pardo said. “Even if they aren’t artworks, people can have a special aesthetic or emotional relationship with them. I started thinking about how those things could become installation material—or more importantly, about the problems that arise from the differences between them. Those differences are installation problems.”

Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

Pardo’s practice revolves around a continual inquiry into how different objects—with their aesthetic and material characteristics of color and form, as well as the complex systems of symbolic, social and political meanings they carry—can activate psychological, cognitive, emotional and mnemonic responses in viewers. He plays with the ways objects can turn into symbols, reactions and messages, generating meaning in the process.

In this, we can see Pardo’s work as a reflection of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which similarly emphasizes the embodied nature of perception by placing viewers in sensorial environments that require physical navigation and awareness. With his now-iconic colorful acrylic hanging pendants and floor lamps, as well as his paintings, Pardo leaves clues—traces that open meaning and evoke reactions. Closer to the metaphorical logic of poetry, he places elements that evoke situations rather than testing responses in any scientific sense. What the show exposes is, quoting Merleau-Ponty, “the body as our general medium for having a world.”

At the same time, Pardo’s fascination with lamps stems from their nature as sources of light and therefore all color and visibility. “Light makes things visible, and visibility is what visual artists work with,” he said. “Lamps are interesting because they shape light—and the environment. You can mold light’s quality, its spectrum and how it affects space and other objects.” To Pardo, shaping light in space is itself a generative gesture, making lamps feel like making drawings, painting in the air.

“I think very structurally, but always through process,” Pardo explains, pointing toward one of his seemingly abstract paintings—a kaleidoscopic choreography of color that appears like a chameleonic surface of matter just about to transform into something else. “This painting is made of maybe ten other images. Some are famous paintings, some aren’t, some are photos my daughter took,” he said. “They get scrambled in the computer, then drawn by hand, then reprocessed again. It’s always a kind of scrambling, but never a direct one.”

Photos by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

He appropriates images from the seemingly infinite digital repertoire of human expression, dissecting and reassembling them into new compositions that appear random yet ultimately find their own sense of harmony. Once the digital drawing is complete, vectorized outlines are laser-etched onto canvas and hand-painted with an effervescent palette of marigold yellows, pearlescent blues and mossy greens.

This process opens a series of additional readings of Pardo’s work, including a postmodern structuralist inquiry into the meaning and essence of images amid the continuous overflow of visual information enabled by the digital realm. Notably, Pardo has been working digitally since the mid-1990s. Yet this has never been about testing the limits of the machine; for him, the computer and the digital elaboration it allows are simply other tools, mediums through which to develop creative output. “We live in a world where what can become a medium keeps getting more interesting,” he said. “Artists tend to fear technology, as if it might replace them, but I think that’s just another medium we can use creatively, a tool to investigate the possibilities of image. It’s romantic to think the digital space is any less or more than oil paint.”

In the large canvases on view at Petzel, a far-reaching set of art historical sources—from Monet’s Haystacks to the conceptual interventions of artists like Michael Asher—converge and blend into a synesthetic and synchronous abstract ensemble of color, light and form. Similarly, Pardo’s hanging pendants and floor lamps draw upon both Monet’s Haystacks and Warhol’s Shadows: through architectural software, the artist machines mythic lighting effects, so deeply entwined in art historical discourse that they collide within a single object.

In this sense, Pardo’s work seems to embody the very process through which the histories of art, design and architecture evolve in a continuous interplay of references, echoes and inspirations. At the same time, these paintings address the condition of any image in the digital space, subject to inherent fluidity and suspended in a flow of constant transformation within the relentless circulation of data and information.

Photos by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

Through it all, process—and the questions guiding it—remain central for Pardo. “The process—how something is decided, executed, used, or misused—is important,” he said. “An exhibition might come from something I’m reading or filming and from that I extract problems or questions that instruct the work.”

“Artworks first need to present themselves as aesthetic problems. They have to reside within the visual, first and last,” he added. Even the colors he uses—though often associated with his Cuban upbringing—are employed primarily to explore the instinctual reactions they generate. “Colors are universally active; they force decisions without language. It’s too easy to assign sensorial things to geography. Chromatic sensitivity isn’t exclusive to one place. I just feel better when I use color relationships that make sense to me. I design palettes—gradients, patterns and series of relationships. Sometimes I use paint chips from hardware stores to test combinations. When I finalize a palette, it’s done—I know it’s solid.”

Yet even in selecting colors, Pardo works mainly by intuition, trusting his own sensorial responses. “It’s entirely intuitive,” he clarified. “Of course, as a trained artist you learn color theory, but at this point, it’s muscle memory.”

His work now operates at the intersection of perception and cognition—the sensorial and mental dimensions of image-making and meaning-making that shape our sense of reality. Yet he always leaves his pieces open to multiple interpretations. His inquiry focuses less on the aesthetic in the modern sense than on aisthesis in the Greek sense of a study of human perception. As for the Greeks, aisthesis and noesis (intellect) are not separate opposites but complementary; here, the senses mediate between the material and the intelligible. In a more Husserlian sense, Pardo’s work stages the intentionality of perception itself: every color, form and reflection directs awareness toward the act of seeing, turning the artwork into an event of sensorial and cognitive awareness rather than a static image.

Photos by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

His practice is an exercise in phenomenology that is also an epistemology, exploring how the senses, intertwined with psychological, cognitive and cultural dimensions, create an ontology. “My art is all about making optics—for ourselves first, as artists,” he explained. “We see things because of how we think about what we’re seeing. The objects left behind are just traces of that thinking.” The experience of seeing becomes both a philosophical and epistemological act.

Ultimately, Pardo grapples with one of the most fundamental questions of all: how we experience the world and how we form an image, a sense and a memory of it. To him, art is a tool to think with, pushing us to question the essence of reality: what we see, what we experience, who we are in relation to it. “Those are the fundamental questions: Where am I? What am I experiencing? Who am I?” he said, agreeing that his work, in the end, heightens awareness of experience itself.

Photos by Meg Symanow, courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York'>

At Art Basel Miami Beach, Market Confidence Meets Curatorial Risk

Elisa Carollo — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:42:04 +0000

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

Following a multi-million-dollar marquee auction week and early sales at Untitled and NADA Miami—both making a case for cautious optimism—all eyes were on Art Basel’s VIP opening on December 3. Despite the early line at the oceanside entrance, the atmosphere by 11 a.m. was noticeably more subdued and the crowd less international than the one at the opening of Art Basel Paris just two months earlier. Still, as the only Art Basel in the Americas, the fair continues to draw some of the country’s most prominent collectors, as well as others from further afield, to a city where it’s now more common to hear Spanish than English.

Bridget Finn acknowledged during the preview that Miami sits at a cultural crossroads—and that Art Basel Miami Beach is uniquely positioned to activate that intersection. “The fair brings together the artistic ecosystems of North and South America in conversation with global perspectives, creating a platform where new voices and long-established programs can thrive side by side,” she said, noting how that mix defines the city—a place where artistic innovation, historical depth and cross-regional exchange meet in ways that feel both urgent and generative.

Despite a seemingly quiet start, the fair quickly filled up, and by early afternoon, booths were buzzing with sales-focused conversations—a welcome change from the usual kiss-and-check dynamic at recent U.S. art fairs.

By 3 p.m., Hauser & Wirth had already sold 40 percent more than its entire week’s total from last year’s edition. “Christmas came early for our team this morning,” said Marc Payot, the gallery’s president, noting that despite the leisurely pace, business remained brisk. “We’re already fielding inquiries about the works that will be newly installed tomorrow when we switch things up for the second day.” Among the sales, at least six works were in the six-digit range, including Untitled (Taxi Painting) by George Condo ($3,995,000); museum-grade pieces by Louise Bourgeois ($3,200,000), Ed Clark ($1,200,000) and Henry Taylor ($1,200,000); and a large-scale Rashid Johnson ($1,000,000). The gallery also made early sales of works by Ed Clark, Henry Taylor, Rashid Johnson, Pat Steir, Reuben Patterson, Carrie Yamaoka, Jake Brush, Sean Bennett, Qiu Xiaofei, Annie Leibovitz, Lee Bul, Nairy Baghramian, María Berrío, Catherine Goodman, Angel Otero, William Kentridge, Elliot & Erick Jiménez, Sarah Crowner, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Masaomi Yasunaga and others.

Dan Bradica Studio'>

David Zwirner quickly followed with the top sale of the day: a Gerhard Richter for $5.5 million, reinforcing the momentum for the German artist in the Americas after his $23 million record at Art Basel Paris, which coincided with the opening of his largest survey at Fondation Louis Vuitton. The gallery also secured key historical works, including 1967 Nude by Alice Neel, which sold for $3.3 million, and two luminous Homage to the Square paintings by Josef Albers from the 1950s and 1960s ($2.5 million and $2.2 million). As her extensive traveling retrospective opens at MoMA, Ruth Asawa’s intricate wall sculpture from 1969 sold for $1.2 million, alongside a strong lineup of works by Oscar Murillo ($350,000), Robert Rauschenberg ($300,000), Elizabeth Peyton ($240,000), Dana Schutz ($240,000), Josh Smith ($180,000) and Marlene Dumas ($120,000). Photography also performed well, with two Wolfgang Tillmans photographs selling for $115,000 each and a William Eggleston photograph selling for $500,000. Multiple Raymond Pettibon prints sold for $50,000 each.

“It’s still early in the fair, but already it’s clear that there’s continued momentum following Art Basel Paris and this season’s auctions in New York,” Thaddaeus Ropac told Observer, confirming the positive energy on VIP day but noting that the majority of collectors driving the scene were from North and South America rather than Europe and Asia. “It’s also good to see these collectors, many of whom we haven’t seen at the other fairs.” Early sales included two Alex Katz paintings for $2.5 million and $1.5 million, a Georg Baselitz piece for €1,000,000, a Robert Longo for $750,000, two Antony Gormley sculptures (£450,000 and £175,000), a Tony Cragg sculpture for €425,000 and Justine for €300,000, along with works by Megan Rooney, Joan Snyder and Martha Jungwirth.

Almine Rech also reported several six-figure sales, including a Picasso painting for $2.8-3 million and a James Turrell work for between $900,000 and $1 million. Other sales included a Larry Poons painting ($275,000-300,000), works by Joe Andoe and Emily Mason ($110,000-120,000 each) and a Vaughn Spann painting ($75,000-80,000). At White Cube, Willem de Kooning’s painting sold for $2.85 million, Damien Hirst’s When the Heart Speaks for $2.5 million, Tracey Emin’s neon for £1.2 million and Andreas Gursky’s Harry Styles (2025) for €1.2 million. Additional works by Cai Guo-Qiang, Raymond Pettibon, Katharina Grosse, Christine Ay Tjoe, Sarah Morris and Ilana Savdie also sold.

Among other heavy-hitters and top sales, Pace placed Sam Gilliam’s Heroines, Beyoncé, Serena and Althea (2020) for $1.1 million ahead of his 2026 solo show at Pace in New York, alongside a magnificent Lynda Benglis gold leaf work priced at $400,000. Emily Kam Kngwarray’s 1995 painting sold for $350,000 ahead of her solo exhibition. Elmgreen & Dragset’s gilded bronze and lacquer installation sold for $320,000, while Alicja Kwade’s two sculptures sold for $130,000 and $110,000. Leo Villareal’s Golden Game (Small) 4 (2025) sold for $85,000. Early sales also included Pam Evelyn’s abstract work for $85,000 and Lauren Quin’s painting for $80,000.

Gladstone also reported strong early sales as it fuels momentum around Robert Rauschenberg, with his Tarnished Honor (Copperhead) selling on site for $1.5 million. Works on paper by George Condo sold for between $95,000 and $200,000, and Ugo Rondinone’s stacked-stone sculptures sold for $300,000-350,000 each. Other sales included David Salle’s The Suit for $130,000 and three Robert Mapplethorpe editions for $200,000 each.

Lisson’s most notable placement came with Anish Kapoor’s oil on canvas measuring 153 × 214 cm, which sold for £500,000, alongside with two works by now high in demand Olga de Amaral. Also sold on the first day were two C-prints shoots by Hiroshi Sugimoto ($250,000 each), Otobong Nkanga, Pedro Reyes ($180,000; $50,000; $50,000; $50,000),Tony Bechara ($60,000) and two works by Jack Pierson ($175,000; $125,000), who is also having a solo at the Bass at the moment

Courtesy of Art Basel'>

While the fair had fewer historical masterpieces than usual, standout works at mega-dealer Gagosian included a monumental Maurizio Cattelan marble sculpture of a falling eagle—a fitting metaphor for the fall of the American dream—and a Willem de Kooning from the 1980s. These were presented alongside an atmospheric Frankenthaler, a Richard Avedon photograph of Audrey Hepburn and works by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and others.

The most expensive work in the room this year was Andy Warhol’s portrait of Muhammad Ali, which was offered at $18 million in the prime position at the Levy Gorvy booth. The painting marked a full-circle moment for Ali, who famously fought Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964. Autographed on the back by Ali, the painting was originally owned by Richard L. Weisman, a friend of Warhol’s who inspired him to create his “Athletes” series, recognizing the cultural stature of athletes alongside arts and entertainment celebrities in the 1970s.

Perhaps the rarest piece was Penetrable by Jesús Rafael Soto, resurfacing on the market after 20 years and shown in the U.S. for the first time by RGR Galeria in the Meridian sector. Priced in the six-digit range, the work immediately attracted museum interest, with institutions scrambling to secure funding for this groundbreaking, once-in-a-lifetime piece.

Meanwhile, PPOW unveiled a long-unseen, 12-foot-wide epic mural by Martin Wong, priced at $1.6 million. As Art Basel expands globally, it is adapting each fair to its local strengths, Wendy Olsoff, the gallery’s co-founder, told Observer, acknowledging that as this challenging year comes to a close, there’s a real sense of renewed optimism around the Miami fair—especially after Paris and the New York auction seasons both felt buoyant.

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Stretching its muscles in Miami with a massive booth, Perrotin reported a full sell-out within the first hours for its solo corner dedicated to Lee Bae’s exploration of black and materiality, with works priced from $60,000 to $200,000. The gallery also reported sales of works by Genesis Belanger, Oli Epp, Vivian Greven, Izumi Kato, Nikki Maloof, GaHee Park and Xiyao Wang, each placed in the $30,000-60,000 range. Additional early sales included a painting by Daniel Arsham for $95,000, as well as three works by Takashi Murakami.

Templon also had a successful first day. “The fair opened with remarkable momentum for us,” Claudie Coric, the gallery’s executive director, told Observer. “We’ve been thrilled to reconnect with many collectors from Florida and across the U.S. who have shown strong enthusiasm for our most innovative voices in contemporary figurative painting.” Early sales included Will Cotton’s painting for $22,000-200,000, Kehinde Wiley’s miniature portraits for $125,000-200,000 and works by Alioune Diagne for $34,000-64,000. The gallery also featured a sculpture by Chilean light artist Ivan Navarro, priced at $110,000, reflecting the growing interest in more forward-thinking aesthetics.

David Maupin described Art Basel Miami as “one of the most productive and rewarding events on the art world calendar.” By the first day, the gallery had placed more than 15 works, signaling a healthier U.S. market heading into 2026. Among the works sold were McArthur Binion’s DNA: Study series for $500,000, a new glass-beaded painting by Liza Lou for $200,000-250,000 and works by Anna Park for $25,000-35,000. An additional three works by Do Ho Suh—including a large-scale piece from his Scaled Behaviour series—were added to the sales list by evening, likely inspired by the artist’s current major show at Tate Modern in London.

Marianne Boesky also saw strong sales, including four two-part cloud works by Sanford Biggers, which sold for $125,000-135,000 each, a Kwamé Azure Gomez painting for $25,000 and four works by Thalita Hamaoui for $25,000-44,000. Additional sales included works by Svenja Deininger, which sold for $18,000-80,000 and a painting by Aubrey Levinthal for $36,000.

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Hamaoui’s works have also made their way onto waiting lists for Simões de Assis, with many collectors requesting pieces. The Brazilian powerhouse gallery has placed works across the Midwest, Europe and the U.S. A work by Emanoel Araújo also found its way into an exceptional American private collection, while Manfredo de Souzanetto is drawing significant attention from U.S. museums and institutions.

Tina Kim Gallery also had a strong showing of Korean masters and new talents, placing three Ha Chong-Hyun paintings for $250,000-390,000 each, two Kim Tschang-Yeul paintings for $330,000 and $100,000 and works by Lee ShinJa, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Kibong Rhee and Pacita Abad.

Mid-tier and emerging presentations hold the market

Early sales flourished across other price points, with both mid-tier and emerging tiers not only holding their ground but showing revitalized dynamism, as the week’s earlier fairs had already hinted at. Young dealer Matthew Brown proved he could keep pace with his older peers, reporting by the afternoon that he had sold more than a dozen works by gallery artists Sasha Gordon, Mimi Lauter, Kenturah Davis, Heidi Lau, TARWUK, Keni Ide, Olivia van Kuiken, Omari Douglin and Julie Beaufils, with a combined total in the range of $750,000-850,000.

A sense of relief and optimism prevailed, Brown confirmed to Observer, noting that in the early hours he met both seasoned collectors looking to add marquee works to their collections and first-time buyers still discovering what the fair had to offer. Brown also sold an important work by Carroll Dunham, priced at $350,000, ahead of her drawing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in January 2026, which will be followed by a solo show at the gallery in September 2026 in New York.

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“Miami is stronger than ever,” echoed local dealer Sarah Gavlak. “Everyone’s here—Beth DeWoody, Komal Shah, Robert Stillin, and so many of the collectors and curators who have been integral to our story. There’s a real sense of momentum and generosity this year.” Her West Palm Beach gallery celebrated its 20th anniversary (and its 18th time at Art Basel) with several early sales by artists Jessica Cannon, Maynard Monrow, T.J. Wilcox and Nancy Lorenz, as well as a secondary-market masterpiece by Abstract Expressionist pioneer Helen Frankenthaler, totaling between $400,000 and $450,000.

It was also a successful first day for Uffner+Liu, marking their second participation at the fair ahead of their debut in Hong Kong. By early afternoon, the New York-based gallery had sold more than seven works by Anna Jung Seo, Talia Levitt, Anne Buckwalter, Sarah Martin-Nuss and Roger White, for a combined total of $90,000-110,000.

Among the many established Brazilian dealers, Nara Roesler’s offerings captured significant attention from a diverse group of collectors, including those from Brazil, Mexico, the U.S. and Asia. On the first day, the gallery placed works by Tomie Ohtake for $240,000, Sheila Hicks’s Uirapuru (2025) for $220,000 and Asuka Anastacia Ogawa for $60,000. Two works by Marco A. Castillo, priced at $50,000 each, found buyers, along with Karin Lambrecht’s Murmur, Whisper the Sea (2025), which sold for $36,000 and Mônica Ventura’s sculptures Passarinhas (2025), each priced at $5,000.

Despite the global reach of Art Basel Miami, the fair remains a challenging space for regions like Southeast Asia, which have rarely been foregrounded at the event. This year, India’s powerhouse Vadhera Gallery made its Miami debut after a successful European tour. While the crowd wasn’t as large as anticipated, the engagement from visitors was meaningful, as many were excited to see an Indian gallery at the fair for the first time. Works by established artists such as Arpita Singh and Sudhir Patwardhan were sold to collector friends of the gallery, while works by younger artists like Zaam Arif and Shrimanti Saha found new homes with collectors from New York and Peru, respectively. “Overall, an encouraging response for our debut participation. We have a good feeling for the rest of the week,” Roshini told Observer. Among the highlights in the Vadehra’s booth is Gauri Gill’s The Americans, a series of archival pigment prints created between 2000 and 2007 exploring the South Asian diaspora in the U.S.

Another New York establishment, Peter Blum—with a booth anchored by a museum-grade sculpture by Nicholas Galanin and Luisa Rabbia’s epic monumental panel in Meridians—also experienced early sales that defied expectations. Several works by the evergreen artist Alex Katz sold, alongside more experimental voices like Martha Tuttle and Marina Adams, each priced in the $200,000-250,000 range.

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Other galleries working in the lower to mid-tier price range also performed well in the main section, showcasing a broad range of talent. Crèvecœur secured early sales for two works by Yu Nishimura, selling at primary prices between $70,000 and $90,000—despite his recent auction record of $711,200—along with works by Emma Reyes ($70,000) and Clio Sze ($20,000). Document Chicago also had a satisfying turnout, selling Anneke Eussen’s U-turn 05 (2024), made from recycled glass shards and plexiglass, for $28,000 to a private collector in Florida.

Several sales were also reported by London dealer Pippy Houldsworth, including a seminal painting by Jacqueline de Jong for €180,000, as well as works by other in-demand artists from her roster, such as Wangari Mathenge ($80,000), Katy Moran (£42,000), Qualeasha Wood ($20,000), KV Duong (£14,000) and Liorah Tchiprout (£8,000).

Jan Kaps also reported an enthusiastic response to Melike Kara’s new series of layered coffee-infused abstractions, presented in a solo booth near Meridians. Priced at $40,000, several pieces sold on the first day, prompting the gallery to rehang additional works from this subtle new series. In this body of work, Kara has removed all archival materials and wording, opting instead to allegorically address diasporic trauma and displacement—thereby moving beyond identity politics.

Nearby, Los Angeles-based Nicodim Gallery also reported strong sales at Art Basel Miami, with the brightly colored characters by Ángeles Agrela proving popular among Latino collectors. Two pieces sold for $55,000 each. The gallery also placed two Rae Klein works in the $25,000-30,000 range, alongside Teresa Murta’s four works, which sold for $16,000-22,000 each. Isabelle Albuquerque’s hybrid piece sold for $18,000 and a work by Devin B. Johnson sold for $30,000, as his near-sold-out show comes to an end in New York.

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In Zero 10, Beeple’s Regular Animals goes viral

As always, the most interesting and emotional moments at Art Basel are often found in the more curated sections. This year, the newly introduced digital section, Zero 10, immediately captured attention, attracting both digital connoisseurs and art world newcomers from the 11 a.m. opening, quickly translating into dynamic sales for the dealers who joined the fair at the last minute.

The spotlight in the digital section was completely seized by Beeple’s Regular Animals, a provocative spectacle that pits humanoid robots in a fight that seems to symbolize the ongoing battle between human and artificial intelligence in the realm of creativity. Presented by Beeple Studios, the installation featured animatronic robot dogs wearing hyper-realistic masks of tech titans and cultural icons—including Mark Zuckerberg—as they roamed the venue, snapping photos of visitors and “producing” art prints in a theatrical commentary on capitalist spectacle and digital identity. At one point, a robot dog impersonating Zuckerberg entered “poop mode,” humorously generating works stamped “Excrement Sample.” Editions of “Regular Animals”—ANDY_WARHOL, MARK_ZUCKERBERG, PICASSO and ELON_MUSK—sold out immediately for $100,000 each. As entertaining as it is unsettling, the piece serves as a biting commentary on how modern identity is increasingly mediated by technology and algorithms, transforming creation into a performance, a commodity and a spectacle.

Regular Animals in Zero 10 attracted a lot of attention. Photo: Elisa Carollo for Observer'>

Nearby, Asprey Studio—a gallery and atelier bridging historical craftsmanship with contemporary digital practices—showcased Twenty-First Century Akodama. The collection featured works by Andrea Chiampo and the Ethiopian collective Yatreda, who introduced a fusion of digital art and sterling silver sculptures. Created in collaboration with master silversmiths at the Asprey Studio Atelier in Kent, these pieces combine the sale of both digital and physical works. Yatreda’s resurrection of a traditional male crown once worn by Ethiopian chieftains symbolizes nobility, while Chiampo’s MATER NATVRA explores the paradox of life, blending tenderness with brutality. The gallery sold out all of Yatreda’s works, totaling $175,000 on day one.

Nearby, Heft Gallery—another space pioneering the intersection of physical and virtual media—is showcasing Michael Kozlowski’s Tessellations, which merges modern circuit board design with medieval pattern-making, reimagining contemporary electronics not as a break from tradition but as a continuation of humanity’s impulse to encode meaning onto physical surfaces. By early afternoon, Heft sold four unique relief works for $25,000 each.

Meanwhile, XCOPY’s Coin Laundry (2025) generated significant engagement, with over 46,000 free NFTs claimed. The cryptic laundromat installation transforms crypto’s speculative mythology, using smart contracts as a medium to dissolve value. Through this metaphor, the London-based artist brings digital consciousness to the forefront. In their Prismatif booth, Kim Asendorf’s Raster und Spektrum distills 15 years of practice into radical constraint: four directions, two operations and infinite configurations. The piece quickly found a new collector for $145,000. Also rapidly placed was Joe Pease’s Urban Choreography, a hypnotic loop where mundane gestures achieve surreal density, frozen in a perpetual present.

Discoveries and curation in Nova and Positions

Elsewhere, in the Nova and Positions sections of Art Basel Miami, there were plenty of compelling narratives to discover—each encouraging a more contemplative pace. Filipino powerhouse Silverlens, for example, is showcasing the layered multimedia practice of Nicole Cusson. Her large canvases explore the global circulation of goods and technologies, imprinting the shapes of actual containers to map their journeys and the stories embedded in their materiality. Paired with works by Bernardo Pacquing, who uses house paint to explore themes of lived experience, Cusson’s work highlights the interconnectedness of economies and the fluidity of material culture.

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Making its debut at Art Basel Miami, Yve Yang presented a three-person show pairing Czech artist Anastazie Anderson’s paintings with the playful, anime-inspired sculptures of Huidi Xiang and the poetic photographic fragments of Wang Ye. “This is our debut at Art Basel Miami and interestingly we’ve been able to build on many of the conversations we began at Art Basel Hong Kong earlier,” founder Yve Yang told Observer. “Serious collectors are truly global and that’s been clear here.” The gallery confirmed several placements on day one, including Anderson’s large painting of children’s faces, Wang Ye’s handmade silk embroidery work—which was acquired by an institutional collector—and two of Huidi Xiang’s tomato sculptures, featured in her BICA Museum solo show.

Nearby, Chris Sharp—making his Art Basel debut from L.A.—presented Altoon Sultan’s cinematic fragments of agricultural machines, capturing beauty in the tools that shape man-made landscapes. Despite their vibrant colors, these works resist easy aesthetic pleasure, remaining cryptic while exploring technique, medium, light, volume and color. Priced between $12,000 and $16,000, three of the works sold early in the fair.

Also in the Nova section, Pequod from CDMX highlighted the politically charged storytelling of Mexican artist Renata Petersen, whose ceramic work critiques popular culture, identity and materiality. Petersen’s pieces offer striking commentary on contemporary societal forces, blending reflections on consumerism, heritage and the body while challenging perceptions of identity through ceramic art.

One of the most fascinating stories in the section comes from Colombia, where Rolf Art showcased Mapa Teatro’s stratified political and anthropological inquiry. Their installation La Vorágine Más Allá, which blends Indigenous cosmologies with ancient pictograms from the Serranía de la Lindosa, is the result of a collaborative process with the Nukak community that keeps ancestral myths alive while reimagining them for the present.

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Meanwhile, in the Positions section, Nicoletti from London presented Joséfa Natjam altar pieces, rich with cosmological symbolism. LOMEX, based in New York and Las Vegas, spotlighted Yoshitaka Amano, whose work continues to captivate audiences following his sold-out exhibition in Dallas.
Another standout highlight of the section is Margot Samel’s solo presentation of Carolina Fusilier hybrid futuristic sculptural ensembles, which as the gallerist suggested introduced a different tempo to the fair. Using industrial debris, biological remnants and mechatronic activations, Fusilier explores the potential material afterlife of technology, encouraging contemplation of a harmonious integration between nature and evolving machines.

Sold out within 30 minutes, Carbon 12’s solo booth showcased Nour Malas’s multilayered abstractions, each priced at $23,000 or $46,000 for a diptych. Malas’s work explores themes of identity, displacement and belonging, embodied through a process of emotional channeling.

Photo Adam Reich'>

In a similar liminal space between physicality and dreamlike abstraction, Kelsey Isaac’s surreal paintings of ordinary objects—presented by Theta—captivated with their ethereal yet precise materialization on linen and aluminum. Priced between $16,000 and $32,000, Isaac’s work quickly drew significant attention, with only two pieces remaining by noon. The booth also previewed Isaac’s upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery.

If there is a throughline amid the variety of this year’s presentations, it is the tone of many thought-provoking works at Art Basel Miami, which reflect the evolution of contemporary art as artists explore tensions between physicality and virtuality, tradition and innovation. While diverse sales across the fair confirm renewed market confidence, the range of global presentations sparked curiosity, blending distinct geographies with universal themes. It suggests that a market recalibration may be accompanied by a renewed curatorial and cultural vitality. As PPOW co-founder Wendy Olsoff noted during our conversation, while society undergoes major shifts and industries are forced to update long-held models, the art world’s curiosity and confidence in the market may help it regain its rhythm.

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NADA Miami and Untitled Art Test the Temperature of the Mid-Tier and Emerging Markets

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:18:58 +0000

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Miami fairgoers have long had to ping-pong between NADA and Untitled Art, making strategic decisions about which fair to hit first to game the traffic and catch the best discoveries before they disappear. Design District versus the beach? First opening versus follow-up? There are no right answers and once again, these fairs opened on the same day, each courting the mid-level and emerging tiers of the market, offering collectors a more accessible economic entry point and space for discovery versus the blue-chip spectacle that is Art Basel Miami Beach.

While both openings were packed and sales chatter was constant, the audience this year—at least early in the week—has been primarily American and notably local, with a handful of visitors from South America and many more from the broader Latino community with ties to Miami. There are far fewer Europeans and almost no Asian collectors. The composition of this opening-day crowd seems to confirm that the nonstop global fair calendar, now delivering international offerings everywhere, is finally encouraging collectors to stay closer to their own regions unless they travel with the explicit intention of discovering new ecosystems through geographically focused fairs.

In terms of offerings, both fairs signaled a noticeable shift and an encouraging improvement: far less bright, easy figuration and a much broader range of approaches beyond straight identity politics, with deeper reflections on our fragmented relationship to reality, mediatization and alienation—and a renewed attempt to find reconnection through materiality as a vessel for memory, care and heritage traditions. A clear echo of the anxieties and uncertainties shaping the world we are all navigating.

Alejandro Chavarria Arias - alejocphoto'>

The atmosphere on opening day was vibrant, with steady sales signaling a rebound in confidence—if still far from the sold-out-by-noon urgency of an earlier era, enough to give dealers more optimism than last year. “I think the market confidence is there from what I could see,” art advisor Maria Brito told Observer. “My clients bought several things from the previews, and many of the things that we inquired about today were sold.” Because the emerging and mid-career segments have suffered more than others, seeing this level of activity on day one of the younger fairs is a strong indication that the market may be recovering. Venezuelan and New York-based collector Ronald Harrar, spotted touring NADA with a group of friends, echoed this sentiment. “Being in Miami feels amazing—the whole city is buzzing with art,” he told Observer at the end of the day. “At NADA and Untitled, the energy was high, collectors were active and several galleries mentioned strong sales.”

Advisor Adam Green was on the same page. “The market feels the strongest it has all year,” he told Observer, noting how the mood took a positive turn a few months ago during Frieze London and Art Basel Paris and that became evident when the November New York auctions surpassed all expectations. “Since then, there has been renewed energy with collectors buying more decisively and with more confidence,” he added, emphasizing how, although this isn’t the same frenzy as a few years ago, it feels much stronger than earlier this year. “The energy felt good after the first day of NADA and Untitled, but there is still a sense of uncertainty and even curiosity about whether that momentum will continue.”

NADA is where the day begins and the $5k-20k market still hums

Despite the overlapping openings—and the pull of evening events dragging everyone back downtown—many still followed the ritual migration from South Beach to NADA, arriving at 10 a.m. sharp. With 140 galleries, art spaces and nonprofits from 30 countries and 65 cities, the fair—born as a dealer-led platform for a younger generation of American galleries (many of which have only recently graduated to Art Basel)—remains a vital alternative for those operating under the $50,000 tier and navigating the $5,000-20,000 price range.

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New York dealer Charles Moffett, a consistent standout in past editions, returned with intimately scaled, evocative paintings by Dominican-American artist Kenny Rivero, whom the gallery has represented for over seven years. The playfulness of the subtle, the unsaid and the partially erased underscores a charged tension between what is expressed and what is deliberately withheld. The presentation introduces Rivero’s first solo show in New York in three years, opening December 11. The gallery’s strong past at NADA, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami acquisition prize in 2019, combined with the scarcity of his work and the density of his symbolic language, produced immediate demand, and 10 new works sold between $12,000 and $25,000. “We are very happy with people’s response to Rivero’s new paintings so far at NADA; we’ve introduced new collectors to his practice, and sales have been strong, which are of course two key factors to a fair’s success,” Moffett said.

Tara Downs, another consistent presence at NADA, opened with a packed booth and sold out Yirui Fang’s U.S. debut by evening, with works priced between $6,000 and $16,000. This comes ahead of his solo exhibition at the gallery opening on January 16, which is already nearly sold out. The gallery additionally placed works by Roger Winter with Wells Fargo. Mrs., another regular presence at the fair, also reported a successful first day, with two works by Lily Ramírez selling for $10,000, as well as two mortar works by Elizabeth Atterbury at $4,500 each and two works by Sachiko Akiyama priced at $12,000 each. Hawkins Headquarters placed about $35,000 worth of work on day one, including three pieces by Jackson Markovic from his Baroque Sunbursts series.

Hailing from Paris to Miami this year, Bremond Capela saw a similarly brisk start, placing a work by Madeline Peckenpaugh with the FAMM Museum in France (a museum dedicated exclusively to women artists), two works by Alexis Soul-Gray—showing at a fair with the gallery for the first time—and several pieces by Valdrin Thaqi, who is concurrently having a solo exhibition in the U.S. for the first time.

Meanwhile, Toronto’s Patel Brown stuck with NADA and brought a sharp booth centered on Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s new works in conversation with Sergio Suarez, along with pieces by Malik McKoy, Surabhi Gosh and Raiji Parera. Two Hatanakas and one Suarez were placed within the first half hour. Also from Toronto, Pangee presented a solo exhibition of cinematic, romantic landscapes by Canadian painter Claire Milbrath, whose views—ranging from alpine peaks to sailboat-filled harbors—draw inspiration and emotional material from her recent relocation to Victoria’s Salish Sea. By the end of the day, most of the presentations were sold or on hold, with prices ranging between $5,000 and $20,000, depending on the scale.

Courtesy of Sargent's Daughters. Photography by Nicholas Knight'>

Even for a gallery like Sargent’s Daughters, a regular at Art Basel and Frieze, NADA Miami remains an ideal platform for a hyper-curated, full-wall presentation. Their booth spotlights vivid works by Wendy Red Star, Scott Csoke and Debbie Lawson, all riffing on art-historical animal imagery and recontextualizing it to probe the histories and identities encoded within. Drawing on the lush ornamentation of 1980s Pattern and Decoration and the tactile legacy of 19th-century Arts and Crafts, the gallery set the works against Colefax and Fowler wallpaper, creating a layered dialogue of color and pattern. The often-dismissed “crafty” dimension becomes here a tool of hybridity and humor—a shared playful appropriation that subtly but critically points to the tangled cross-cultural exchanges of history rather than any singular reading. Allegra LaViola, the gallery’s owner and director, reported strong first-day sales, with multiple works by all three artists placed in private and public collections. “Our decision to focus on historical decorative arts and to cover the booth with wallpaper by Colfax and Fowler has been a hit: We’ve enjoyed a lot of positive attention from people who are excited by our departure from a traditional fair booth,” LaViola told Observer.

Another absolute highlight of this edition is Proxyco’s solo booth, dedicated to Lucía Vidales and anchored by her large-scale painting, Viendo desde el monte Calvario (Looking out from Mount Calvary). Originating from a dialogue with Siqueiros, including the “Christ archetypes” he explored during his imprisonment, the eight-panel mural unfolds with dense symbolism that resonates with our time, channeling the tension between the human and the cosmic to reflect on an uncertain future. Set on a symbolic, sacred mount that recurs across cultures as a site of revelation, the composition becomes a vantage point for contemplating the crises shaping contemporary life: the fall of ideologies, the collapse of certainties and the unease of a world in flux. Yet Vidales avoids catastrophe imagery; instead, she treats instability as a choreography of gestures—movements that suggest both danger and the possibility of transformation. Smaller works, priced between $8,000 and $12,000, sold quickly, while the major mural, priced at $60,000, is awaiting an institutional acquisition, hopefully after being shown at the Kemper Museum and Ballroom Marfa.

Kevin Czopek/BFA.com'>

Among the notable international entries at NADA, FOUNDRY Seoul made its Miami debut following a successful New York show, presenting Omyo Cho’s hybrid, alchemical sculptural systems alongside Hyunhee Doh’s organically procedural Hanji abstractions. Although distinct in method, both practices aim to give form to the intangible—memory, time and identity—through material inquiries into existence and perception. Cho stages tensions between brass and glass, balancing fragility, resilience and a kind of symbiotic force field between materials. Doh mixes glue and throws it across her surface, collaborating with the medium in a process where harmony emerges through controlled unpredictability. Works priced under $10,000 drew significant interest, despite their more elaborate aesthetics, which do not always resonate with the Miami audience.

NADA also continues to foster discovery. A standout of this edition is Kazakh painter Waldemar Zimbelmann, who debuted with a solo at Amsterdam-based Althuis Hofland Fine Arts. His psychologically charged canvases shift fluidly between painting and drawing—drawing being central to his practice—and often begin with personal or anonymous photographs that he transforms into a subtle visual language hovering between figuration and abstraction. Through overpainting, scraping and scribing, Zimbelmann generates distorted yet intimate representations of body and mind, where feeling, dissonant scribbles and intuitive brushstrokes merge into imagined worlds that serve as allegories for human experience. Previously shown with Matthew Brown and Harkawick, his works were reasonably priced at $13,000.

Embajada from Puerto Rico introduced young New Haven-based artist Taina Cruz. “Opening Day at NADA Miami was a fantastic start,” director Manuela Paz remarked. Cruz’s intuitive, Nuyorican-inflected paintings move fluidly between interiors, urban scenes and imagined landscapes, rendering memory through humor, alienation and warmth. Sales were steady, and conversations remained active throughout the day.

Courtesy the gallery'>

In the Projects section, London-based Chilli debuted with a resonant dialogue between the digital-analog tectonics of Juan Manuel Salas and the materially engaged archaeology of contemporary pop by Morgane Ely. Salas’s sedimentations of symbolic materials and fragmented bodies pair with Ely’s excavations of collective and individual memory, becoming tactile echoes of experience. Also in this section, Mama Project presented Fauvist Tropicalia hallucinations by Brazilian artist Paula Querido, all priced under $4,000, while Cuban Art Hub offered a solo exhibition by Gabriela Pez, whose practice draws deeply from Afro-Cuban mythology to present nature as a refuge, a source of healing and a protector. Houston-based Laura the Gallery also debuted here, reporting quick sales of Ernesto Solana’s hybrid sculptures that explore the porous boundaries between “nature” and “culture/human-made,” imagining new forms of symbiosis where botanical forms, animal traces and human detritus act as collaborators. Solano’s works were paired with Keiko Moriuchi’s gold-covered talismanic compositions. The artist, associated with the Gutai movement, drew the attention of an acquisition committee from an important local institution.

Untitled Art’s international offerings

Several galleries that traditionally anchored NADA—and now travel consistently to international fairs—shifted or returned to the Untitled’s beachside tent. Credit goes in large part to executive director Clara Andrade, the fair’s power dynamo, who has shaped Untitled Art into one of the art world’s most forward-thinking platforms, attuned to new collaborative and inclusive models. Under the South Beach tent, Untitled hosts 160 exhibitors from more than seventy cities, yet its redesigned, fluid layout avoids crowding and encourages a sense of unfolding discovery as the fair reveals itself booth by booth.

Alejandro Chavarria Arias - alejocphoto'>

Among the new presences in the Main section are Harper’s, Swivel Gallery, Meliksetian | Briggs, Spencer Brownstone, HAIR+NAILS and Soho Revue—art spaces more commonly associated with NADA Miami or New York. Swivel Gallery presented an engaging dialogue between the deceptively naïve aesthetics of Mexican artist Edgar Orlaineta and the hazy, dreamy synthetic compositions of Greek artist Ioanna Liminiou. Her U.S. solo debut opens at the gallery immediately after Miami—and is already nearly sold out. Liminiou emerges as a sharp storyteller and acute observer, balancing intuition and empathy to create a warm, deeply human synthetic reading of reality that slips between emotional and sensory perception. By day’s end, Swivel had nearly sold through her works between the fair and gallery, along with one Orlaineta wall piece at $20,000 and two sculptures at $6,500.

HAIR+NAILS sold out its full-booth solo of Emma Beatrez, whose intense narrative paintings transform teenage dramas into universal metaphors of human experience. Other galleries to sell out on day one included Miro Presents, RHODES, Vigo, SGR Galería, Spencer Brownstone and Belgian space Stems. Sales remained strong at the top end: Kavi Gupta placed a Glenn Ligon Untitled for $250,000-300,000, while mid-range demand showed real momentum in the under-$50,000 bracket. Other notable placements included a work by Lola Stong-Brett and one by Billy Childish, both for $47,500, with Carl Freedman Gallery, alongside multiple works by Nate Lewis, placed by Fridman Gallery, in the aftermath of his Whitney acquisition days earlier.

Cary D Whittier'>

Rajiv Menon Contemporary, another returning success story, presented “The Missing Figure,” a booth examining absence, erasure and disappearance across South Asian histories of colonization and its effects. Pakistani artist Ahsan Javaid used Gulf mannequins to interrogate value, labor and divinity; Ammama Malik explored self-representation through draped fabrics; and Sid Pattni eliminated the human figure entirely to reflect on postcolonial displacements. Five of six works by Pattni and Malik sold within hours (priced $6,000-10,000), signaling surging interest in emerging South Asian artists in a market where they remain underrepresented.

Also returning with success is Brooklyn-based CARVALHO, presenting an all-female dialogue between newly represented French artist Élise Peroi, London-based Yulia Iosilzon (fresh off a strong reception at Frieze Seoul) and New York-based artists Rachel Mica Weiss and Rosalind Tallmadge. The presentation foregrounds material processes as vessels of memory and tools of resilience beyond dominant forms. Works are priced under $30,000, with Weiss’s works selling out in the first hours and Peroi’s also selling through; the latter will present a solo booth at Frieze L.A.

The fair also encouraged cross-border collaborations, including a joint venture booth by Japanese gallery Cohju and CDMX-based Saeger, pairing Shinya Azuma and Scott Reeder in a synchronic dialogue rooted in play and cultural resilience against the flattening forces of globalized culture. As the gallerists explain, it is less about sustainability than a long-term strategy of sharing and circulating artists with deep affinities.

In the Spotlight sector, Superposition presented a standout solo by John Rivas—a deeply emotional rediscovery of El Salvador, where Rivas returned this year for the first time in over two decades. The installation Tierra Que Llora expands his practice into sculpture using soil, beans, corn husks, chains, carved wood and stitched textiles. “The energy at Untitled today was off the chain,” owner Storm Ascher told Observer. “I loved seeing everyone gasp and at the same time find peace through John’s immersive installation.” She predicted the booth would sell out by Sunday.

Courtesy Superposition'>

New York-based LATITUDE also reported a strong first day. Known for championing emerging Asian talents in the U.S., the gallery presented a two-person dialogue between the vibrantly psychedelic yet tactile abstractions of Iris Yehong Mao and the hallucinatory landscapes of Liane Chu, whose paintings arise from her lived experience of Teres syndrome—a natural, glitch-like visual seizure that allows her to access visions where reality already slips between parallel dimensions. Despite being located toward the beachside end of the fair, visitor flow remained strong, the gallery founder noted. Four to five works were placed within the first three hours, priced between $3,000 and $8,000, with additional works and inventory on hold. “Due to the level of activity, we are reinstalling nearly half of the booth around noon to show more available works for the remaining VIP hours,” founder Shihui Zhou told Observer.

One of the fair’s few digital-art presentations, LatchKey Gallery spotlighted Jessica Lichtenstein’s richly layered visionary world. Built entirely without generative A.I., her expanding cosmology imagines a luminous forest animated by feminine power and ecological healing. Anime-inflected nymphs bloom into floral formations, generating their own environment. The digital prints drew significant interest and the gallery hopes this enthusiasm will translate into sales, even though the $35,000 price point is slightly above her usual range. Lichtenstein also has an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

Heft Gallery, a longtime pioneer in digital art’s hybrid territories, split a double booth between Untitled and Art Basel Miami Beach’s inaugural Zero 10 section. At Untitled, the gallery spotlighted Auriea Harvey, whose densely stratified mythologies emerge through a dialogue between algorithmic exploration and analog craft. Treating polygons as mathematical clay and algorithms as contemporary craft materials, Harvey bridges the digital and physical realms through 3D scanning, robotic fabrication and handwork, testing the boundaries between the virtual and the tangible, the monstrous and the divine. A net.art trailblazer and co-founder of Tale of Tales, she now extends her digital assemblages into bronze and marble, exploring how classical materials are transformed when rooted in digital origins. The booth—also showcasing Nancy Burson, Zach Lieberman, Gretchen Andrew and Rafael Rozendaal—remained busy, attracting what founder Adam Heft described as “their own crowd,” a notably active Miami digital community.

Many presentations at Untitled navigated a liminal space between reality and virtuality, between past and future technologies and mythologies and the sense of fragmentation and narrative disorientation in between. Among these, Sanatorium (Istanbul) returned with a solo by Austrian-born, Vienna-based Christine Peschek, whose work probes shifting definitions of reality in an age saturated with digital and social media. Her hybrid body-tech identities—post-internet, post-human, post-binary—ask what it means to inhabit a body increasingly mediated by machines.

Also in the Spotlight sector, Gene Gallery introduced Zhang Haoyang, whose paintings function like compact encyclopedias—dense combinations of mythology, history and knowledge systems. Drawing from Chinese cosmology and ecological structures, his works map how information is organized, transmitted and mythologized across time. Priced between $5,900 and $7,500, they offer visually intricate syntheses of research and symbolism.

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A similar tension unfolds at Albertz Benda, where rising Brazilian artist Larissa de Souza presents works of material prayer and emotional force, shaped by personal symbolism connected to ancestral Afro-Brazilian traditions. Born in 1995 and raised in one of São Paulo’s poorest strata, she began making art at fifteen while working in an art-supply store, finding in material elaboration a channel for lived experiences and cathartic rituals. Interest was strong and sales steady, with works ranging from $7,000 to $14,500, setting the stage for her anticipated January exhibition following a successful one in São Paulo.

A magnetic suite of works by Chris Roberts-Anteau in the Spotlight section transforms fabric and embroidery into a conduit for memory, mysticism, and self-formation. Often described as a “son spotlighting the mother,” Anteau draws on his childhood curiosity with textiles—an early fascination with how cloth absorbs touch, time and story—to build a symbolic vocabulary that moves between the domestic and the visionary. His stitched, layered compositions operate like soft epistemologies, charting alternative systems of knowledge through symbols, talismanic forms and devotional gestures embedded in fabric. Hovering between folk cosmology and speculative world-building, the works invite viewers into an intimate, alternative order of meaning. Priced between $4,000 and $6,000, they were among the most thoughtfully scaled and quietly resonant offerings in the section, with a larger signature work placed at $91,000, underscoring the depth and ambition behind his materially driven practice.

Untitled Art Miami Beach’s newly introduced Nest section offered the fair’s strongest—and most affordably priced—discoveries, opening onto a diverse range of emerging voices. A more accessible fee structure allowed not only younger galleries and independent projects but also a notable number of Asian exhibitors to participate despite rising logistical costs. Among these, Cub_ism_Artspace from Shanghai returned after last year’s sold-out showing with a solo of young Chinese artist Xinyu Long, who builds a syncretic cosmology of female goddesses across more than ten paintings and sculptures. Long creates a world where physis (nature) and nomos (human artifice) intertwine and contend, offering a vision in which feminine divinity, landscape and invented ritual coexist within a charged symbolic system.

Also in this section, Starch (Singapore) introduced Moses Tan, whose work navigates queerness, eroticism and the coded visual languages of fortune-cat culture and adult shops, unfolding as a layered choreography around the body and sexuality. Their solo presentation, d33p cuts, t3nd3r not3s, is an autotheoretical installation that weaves queer theory, allegory, horror and disavowal through drawing, sculpture and video, revealing codedness, camouflage and assimilation as essential strategies for queer survival in tightly controlled, heteronormative environments.

Courtesy Starch and the artist'>

Nearby, pixelated military camouflages reappear on vessels evoking Greek vases by Russian artist Kurilchto, presented by the nomadic Brooklyn project Bahnhof. His practice explores the aesthetics of catastrophe and how digital communication alters our perception of violence and everyday life, inviting viewers to reconsider how visual codes of conflict infiltrate the objects and realities they inhabit.

Also in Nest, Venezuelan gallerist Juliana Sorondo (Sorondo Projects) presented a more conceptual booth pairing Venezuelan artist Angyvir Padilla with Eliana Henriquez and Miranda Makaroff, each exploring “the politics of the body.” Here, the body becomes the first site of meaning—where identity, history and perception collide and where visibility is a negotiation between truth and performance. Shaped by culture, gender and survival, appearance emerges as a form of power—a language used to shield, communicate, seduce or resist.

Untitled Art punctuated the fair with compelling large-scale installations, including the natural-sounding instruments by Leonel Vásquez, presented by Bogotá-based Casa Hoffmann, where sound is generated through the friction of stones from a dried riverbed or by channeling the movement of water, amplifying the micro-sounds of nature into resonant sculptural instruments. At the entrance, a monumental installation by Mexican duo Celeste, inspired by the resilient Cosmos flower (Cosmos bipinnatus), transformed the fair’s threshold into a pink, atmospheric field reminiscent of the landscapes the flower creates during the rainy season.

CDMX- and New York-based JOHS debuted with a solo booth of Rodrigo Echeverría’s deconstructed psychologies—paintings unraveling memory, identity and instability through fractured figuration and emotional distortion, staging private crises against broader contemporary pressures.

Courtesy of JOHS'>

The fair also welcomed beloved alternative and nonprofit spaces. NYC Culture Club, in collaboration with Silver Art Projects, presented works by Jamel Robinson, Leah Ying Lin and Aristotle Forrester in a booth curated by Anwarii Musa. Adding its signature downtown vibrancy, the Lower East Side’s legendary artist-run hybrid art and nightlife space Beverly’s imagined its booth inside a Venetian palazzo during acqua alta—complete with water lines—featuring works by Marco DaSilva, Jack Henry, Leah Dixon, Heidi Norton, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Carlo Cittadini, Anders Lindseth, Andrew Birk, Alex Hammond and Juan Alvear.

Yet one of the most intriguing narratives unfolded at La Cometa’s booth. The Bogotá gallery dedicated its Miami presentation to Camilo Restrepo’s “Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood,” a hallucinatory and deceptively playful suite that confronts one of Colombia’s most surreal entanglements of drug history and ecology. The story begins with Pablo Escobar’s decision to import African animals, including hippos, to his private zoo; finding the climate nearly identical to their native habitat, the hippos reproduced uncontrollably and now constitute an ecological crisis. In a final twist, their waste hosts a mushroom traditionally used to treat addiction. Restrepo transforms this saga into a distorted psychological fable—a visionary ecosystem in which animals, humans and landscapes circulate and entangle within the same extractive logic, revealing how devastation and repair can emerge from the same source as nature attempts, however unevenly, to restore balance.

Courtesy of Beverly's'>

Don’t Miss These Five Museum-Grade Works in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians Sector

Elisa Carollo — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 15:46:12 +0000

One of the most anticipated moments in Art Basel’s annual program is the unveiling of the year’s institutional-grade pieces in the Unlimited sector in the Swiss edition. Starting in 2019, the fair brought that same art-history-in-the-making scale and sense of wonder to its flashier Miami Beach edition with the parallel section, Meridians—an oasis of ambitious curator-driven presentations in the fair’s kaleidoscopically vibrant oceanside setting. Curated this year by Yasmil Raymond under the evocative title The Shapes of Time, it brings together a multigenerational and international group of artists whose works explore different conceptions and perceptions of temporality.

Drawing from George Kubler’s pioneering 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, which proposed a new understanding of art history beyond the notion of style, the works on view range from more formal and symbolic representations of time to allegorical and emotionally charged correspondences and interactions. While some of the larger-scale works presented this year reflect on the artistic process as an open-ended, phenomenological event that unfolds across temporal dimensions, others examine the physical phenomenon of time and its observable effects, as captured through mechanical photography, video and, more recently, computer-based systems. We’ve chosen five time-defining works you shouldn’t miss in this year’s presentation.

Jesús Rafael Soto’s ‘Pénétrable’

RGR Galeria, M12

While Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto has enjoyed a long-overdue international resurgence over the past year—including renewed enthusiasm from both collectors and institutions—the most compelling dimension of his practice remains his large-scale installations, conceived from the outset as multisensory catalysts for a synthetic spatial experience. At PAMM in Miami, it has become something of a rite of passage to step through Penetrable BBL Blue (1999-2000), moving through hundreds of thin blue PVC strands suspended from a gridded canopy as if wading into a swell of ocean light, activating the work and one’s own sensory register through movement.

This year at Art Basel’s Meridians, visitors will encounter an earlier and exceedingly rare iteration of the series: Penetrable (1992), presented by Galería RGR. Measuring 500 × 400 × 500 centimeters, this monumental installation is among the last of the roughly 30 versions Soto created from 1967 until his death. Composed of suspended, flexible, translucent PVC tubes, it invites the viewer to step inside and become an active participant in the artwork, dissolving the line between observer and object. To encounter it now in Miami is to experience not just a sculpture, but the reawakening of a pivotal chapter in kinetic art in which Soto probed the intertwined notions of time and space, movement and perceptual instability and the unescapable relativity that binds them.

Built from hundreds of thin, translucent plastic or metal tubes hanging from a frame, the Penetrables expand into vast geometric volumes. By inverting the pedestal, Soto released sculpture from the ground and invited spectators to complete the work by passing through these towering forms, opening them to an entirely new experience of space and time that unfolds collectively, encouraging viewers to navigate these dimensions freely and playfully through shifting, fluid paths. “My concept of space is very different from that of the Renaissance,” the artist once said, “where man was in front of space, he was the viewer, the judge of that space… [With] the Pénétrable, I reveal that man… is part of space. And this is the sensation of those who enter them and the feeling of joy and elation that you witness is similar to getting in the water and being completely liberated from gravity.”

This seminal monumental work lands in Miami following its inclusion in several major institutional retrospectives across Europe—including the Abbaye Saint-André in Meymac, the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto—before disappearing into storage for more than two decades. Its reactivation in 2023 as the centerpiece of Soto’s solo exhibition “The Instability of the Real” at Galería RGR in Mexico City marked a significant rediscovery, reaffirming its historical and sensorial impact for a new generation.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Pénétrable, 1992. Paint on metal and PVC tubes, 500 x 400 x 500 cm. Gerard Landa Rojano | RGR Gallería

Luisa Rabbia’s ‘The Network’

Peter Blum, M4

New York-based Italian artist Luisa Rabbia is unveiling in Miami one of her largest and most symbolically dense paintings to date—a new canvas that opens like a luminous portal into otherworldly dimensions, offering an expanded spiritual and mythical awareness of the very essence of human experience beyond the earthly and time-bound realm. Drawing inspiration from the emblematic representation of working-class struggle and the collective’s emancipatory force in Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il quarto stato (The Fourth Estate) (1901), Rabbia’s more-than-five-meter-long triptych depicts a new kind of collective—one linked by an intricate root system that binds each figure together. Here, the protesting crowd is made up of women, led by a central figure reminiscent of the multi-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, their regenerative feminine energy radiating outward in luminous auras, offered as a possible form of redemption in an age of political and social divisiveness, where humans have lost all sense of empathy and solidarity.

Her use of hands in morphing colors and shifting forms across the canvas deepens the viewer’s intimate contact with the work and what it represents. Rabbia appears to build the image physically, finger by finger across the surface, as a way of processing both memory and vision. “I am interested in visual expressions that seek a language of kinship, both socially and ecologically,” the artist explains in a statement. “In a world of fragmentation, I am seeking a discourse that connects and could possibly raise sentiments of empathy.”
This powerful, monumental work marks a further evolution of her fearless and intimate exploration of otherworldly realms and the afterlife, tracing and identifying parallel currents with terrestrial existence. Through the intuitive and luminous character of her painting practice, Rabbia channels an enhanced awareness of a spiritual, universal dimension that continually intersects with our worldly life, resulting in images of striking vibrancy—like epiphanies animated by mysterious energetic forces revealing individual struggle as part of a broader cosmic order.

Luisa Rabbia, The Network, 2025. Oil on linen. 293 x 545 cm. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum

Kennedy Yanko’s
‘Intimacy of Thrones’

Library Street Collective, M17

Following the momentum of a major show split between Salon 94 and James Cohan gallery, alongside an exhibition of her visceral two-dimensional abstractions at Pace Prints, the St. Louis-born, Miami-based artist Kennedy Yanko is presenting a new work from her ongoing “poetry of the ruin,” a practice that reveals the beauty found in matter’s relentless transformation across time and space.

Yanko’s ascent in the art world began in Miami with an unforgettable presentation at the Rubell Museum during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021. Since then, she has developed an artistic language that merges the legacy of American abstraction, Arte Povera and the ready-made into hybrid sculptural bodies. In her work, found scrap metal—mechanical remnants from heavy industrial vehicles—fuses with sensual layers of paint molded into something akin to veils.

Accompanied by a highly evocative title, Intimacy of Throes (2024) takes the form of a rectangular metal container that Yanko cut, bent and reshaped with torches, creating a striking tension between roughness and velvety smoothness. The metal surfaces are weathered with rust, dents and peeling paint; their edges are twisted and torn. Draped among the metal forms are folds of deep green, pliable material that spill, twist and gather like fabric caught mid-movement. The contrast between the rigid, corroded metal and the smooth, fluid green shapes creates a dynamic interplay of forces.

Through this piece, the artist continues to explore the boundless potential of abstraction and the alchemical possibilities of raw materials themselves, embracing them as partners in a choreographed dance or sensual exchange between matter and maker. “I want to immediately disrupt the conversation around metal as being something that’s industrial,” Yanko says. “It’s actually from nature. It’s made from manganese and calcium. It’s no different than a flower when you look at its atoms.”

This deep physical engagement with material and its forces allows Yanko to translate sensation into structure—the vis elastica that propels particles toward their destined form. It is the same centripetal force that holds all elements together and becomes the catalyst for any existence in time and space. In this sense, her sculptures serve as powerful metaphors for our own condition and our ever-shifting relationship with the physical world, which shapes us as much as we try to shape

Kennedy Yanko, Intimacy of Throes, 2024. Paint skin and metal, 386.1 x 472.4 x 266.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Library Street Collective

Ward Shelley’s
‘The Last Library’

Freight+Volume, M9

Different sci-fi narratives have imagined what the last library of humanity might look like—whether chronicling our departure into another dimension or documenting the final collapse of a species under irreparable drought. The last library envisioned by Brooklyn-based American artist Ward Shelley is Written in Water—a large-scale walk-through sculpture made entirely of paper, ink and wood, fully furnished with fake banned books and invented secret documents. It offers a pointed commentary on today’s fractured state of truth.

Known for his “performance architecture,” Shelley invites visitors at Meridians to physically move through these fragile records of humanity, histories made of ink and paper, ready to dissolve in the first flood, yet drawn and traced through the intimate connection between human minds and hands. They evoke the genuineness of lived perspective, the multiplicity of narrators and the endless possibilities of times and spaces to be inhabited and documented, now further expanded and increasingly blurred by artificial intelligence and digital realms.

Ward Shelley, The Last Library IV: Written in Water, 2020-2025. Paper, wood, ink and acrylic paint, 7.93 x 3.76 x 3.2 m. Courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume

Anne Samat’s ‘Origins of Savage Beauty’

Marcus Straus, M17

A hymn to the resilience of materials as vessels of memory and tradition—the touch of fabric, the weaving of hands rhythmically moving together in a ritual passed down through generations—Samat’s maximalist installations reinterpret the traditional Borneo artform of Pua Kumbu weaving. She revives this ancestral link in today’s mass-material culture by combining rattan, beads and thread with rakes, keychains and other mass-produced items sourced from 99-cent stores.

The result is a series of totemic, monumental installations that invite the viewer into a renewed encounter with materiality, memory and beauty. In Meridians, her The Unbreakable Love…Family Portrait (2025) appears as an evocative and intricate orchestration of textile-woven elements, each forming a towering, totemic figure. These vibrant, ritual-like presences evoke mythic guardians or ceremonial beings, already existing beyond the time and space of the materials from which they are composed.
Samat’s exuberant, labor-intensive sculptural assemblages blend traditional Southeast Asian weaving techniques with contemporary pop-cultural, symbolic and personal narratives, unfolding into a fluid and idiosyncratic journey through the power of materials and craftsmanship to connect past, present and future. Her art is a hymn to the “origins of savage beauty,” part of a practice that transforms the scarcity of humble materials and techniques into an aesthetic engine. Embracing an artisanal mode of thinking, she allows the materials to express themselves, treating art-making as a process where intuition, touch and material intelligence carry as much weight as concept, which is already embodied in the materials themselves, along with their histories of production, circulation and consumption.

Anne Samat’s The Unbreakable Love…Family Portrait (2025). Mixed media; 9.75 x 5.8 x 3.5 m in The Origin Of Savage Beauty. Photo by Inna Svyatsky/Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery

Wendi Norris Bet On Women Surrealists—Now the Market Has Caught Up

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:45:46 +0000

Photo: Glen Dan Bradica'>

A recent report by ArtTactic with Sotheby’s found that in 2024, Surrealism achieved annual growth of 8.8 percent, with auction sales rising to $439.7 million—a jump of 131.6 percent from 2018—while the genre’s share of the global art market increased from 2.4 percent to 9.2 percent in the same period. Leading the market are women Surrealists, who continue to reach new highs, as most recently demonstrated when Dorothea Tanning’s Interior with Sudden Joy fetched $3.2 million at Sotheby’s this November, while Remedios Varo’s Sans titre from 1943 approached the million mark after fees, landing at $952,500 (est. $500,000-700,000). Her current record was set just last May at Christie’s, with Revelación selling for $6.22 million. However, Leonora Carrington is a particularly striking example, with prices soaring, especially since Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale fueled her rediscovery, reaching a new high when Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) sold for $28.5 million last year, setting a new benchmark for both the artist and the Surrealist market.

Yet few know the full story behind their market and institutional reassessment—or, more precisely, the key player who believed early on that the symbolic density of their work and its mystical storytelling had something urgent to say to our time. That person is San Francisco gallerist Wendi Norris, who first showed and championed their work well before the wider art world turned its attention their way. Notably, it was in her 2019 pop-up “The Story of the Last Egg,” a four-decade survey of Carrington’s cosmic paintings and sculptural masks on Madison Avenue, that Cecilia Alemani first encountered Carrington’s writings and the depth of her symbolic universe, which later inspired her 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams.

Ahead of the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach, Observer caught up with Norris to learn more about her life-changing choices, magical encounters and the sharp intuition that led her to discover and champion these artists, as well as her precise, data-driven strategy that actively anticipates new models in a fast-changing art world.

Photo: Jonah Reenders'>

Before opening her gallery in 2002, Norris had a successful career in the tech industry. She worked in management consulting in a wide range of tech-centered companies before moving to San Francisco, where she focused exclusively on startups. With an MBA and corporate experience in Fortune 50 environments, she felt well-equipped to build and launch companies, which she did successfully for several years.

Her last tech venture was a company pioneering sophisticated cloud-storage technologies long before “the cloud” entered the mainstream. Norris was the vice president of marketing, responsible for the messaging and positioning of a complex system, essentially creating an industry segment that did not yet exist. “I always felt that my job in tech was being a translator, taking these ideas of these brilliant, highly scientific founders and figuring out how to make broad audiences care about what they were building,” she tells Observer. “Working with minds like that, you’re constantly translating complicated ideas into human language. Honestly, that’s not so different from what I do with artists today: turning complex ideas into accessible narratives.”

Yet Norris recalls that even on the day her company appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s front page, she ended up reading the adjacent art article first. “The launch of my company was in the A-1 column. It should have been a PR dream. But the middle column was a review of an art exhibition. I read the art story before I read the one about my own company. That should have told me something,” she reflects.

Then the company collapsed during the dot-com crisis in what was an eye-opening moment. “I had 40 people working for me, but when everything fell apart, I realized I was working insane hours, I was in my 30s and I wasn’t passionate about it.”

Norris left and began traveling, circling the world with a backpack, visiting Asia and Central America. She had been in Cuba for an extended period—illegally then—when she decided she wanted to have a gallery. “I wanted to follow my passion. I was incredibly moved by the people I met there: poets, musicians, artists. That was the turning point.”

Photo: Glen C. Cheriton'>

Norris had no real understanding of the art industry at the time. She was an art collector, albeit on a small scale, and she’d had a particularly negative early experience. “I was trying to make what, for me at 33, was a major purchase—maybe $20,000, which is like $50,000 today—and galleries in New York literally wouldn’t talk to me. I was ready to buy, and the rudeness and inaccessibility were off-putting.”

Having grown up in the Midwest with limited exposure to museums and having taken only a single art history class (in Spanish, while studying abroad), Norris traces her earliest connection to art back to a transformative encounter with Las Meninas at the Prado: “I had a profound experience in front of Las Meninas. Goosebumps. That sense of what great art can do, how it reminds you what it is to be human, stuck with me.”

Determined to build a different kind of space, she wrote a business plan, complete with Venn diagrams and market analyses, but at its core, her goal was simple: to show art she loved and to make it accessible. From the start, Norris built her gallery around human relationships and community, bringing in many people from the tech industry she knew, whom other galleries had failed to engage.

Many of her earliest tech clients, including senior Google executives, were people one would never identify on sight; they valued privacy but expected clarity and transparency when acquiring anything, including art. “My background helped. I’d raised venture capital, I’d had successful exits, so I could speak their language when needed,” she explains.

She initially partnered with someone meant to bring curatorial expertise while she handled operations and sales. However, as the gallery began working with Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning, she realized that secondary-market work required a different skill set—legal contracts, title transfers and complex private negotiations. “For me, that business side wasn’t intimidating. I’d been selling million-dollar software systems. Selling million-dollar artworks didn’t scare me. The content did, at first, but not the numbers.”

Stepping back, Norris recalls that the first show she ever organized entirely on her own came before the gallery officially opened. It featured two artist friends, Kate Eric, a collaborative duo. “I did the show in their studio and sold the whole thing out on opening night. The first work I ever sold went to someone from my tech life. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I can do this.'” That early success gave her confidence that she could, in fact, run a gallery. Norris would eventually sell around 250 of their works and guide them through a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum but then witness their professional partnership and careers dissolve when the artists divorced shortly afterward, a reminder of how fragile even the most promising artistic trajectories can be.

Photo: Glen Dan Bradica'>

The gallery’s early programming reflected her early partner’s preferences, while Norris focused primarily on the business side. The first exhibition she curated herself—which mixed 20th- and 21st-century artists and paired Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington with living artists she felt would expand the conversation—received a sharply negative review from critic Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her first dedicated Carrington exhibition wouldn’t happen until 2007, but Norris had already begun acquiring works by Carrington, Tanning and Varo roughly 20 years earlier, long before they achieved the visibility they have today.

Whitney Chadwick, whose book “Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement” pioneered scholarship in a field now at the center of both institutional and market attention, introduced Norris to Carrington’s work. “It’s still the foundation for everything. Whitney happened to be based in San Francisco then, so she and I met regularly. She and Leonora were incredibly close, and she walked me through all of the history and context. She became my real mentor.”

Susan Aberth, a leading active scholar on Carrington, also encouraged her to meet the artist. “She didn’t have gallery representation, and they warned me that she didn’t like most people and didn’t suffer fools,” Norris says. “‘Just be yourself,’ they said, ‘and bring gifts—good drawing paper, pulpy mystery novels, and proper English tea.’”

So Norris flew to Mexico. “It was about 22 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, which is how I remember the timing. I showed up with my dog, my gifts, and not much of a plan,” she recalls. “She liked me instantly. She loved the name Wendy, straight from Peter Pan. And she adored animals. She had a magnet of her favorite cat, Monsieur, on her refrigerator. I showed her a picture of my cat, Toro, and they looked identical. She decided Toro was Monsieur reincarnated, and we were off.”

The two fell into an endless, free-ranging conversation: politics, the Catholic Church, Mexico’s entrenched patriarchy, even overpopulation. After hours of tea and talk, Carrington walked her out to a cab and introduced her to a longtime friend and attorney, who would later become an important figure in her own life. “That day was the start of seven years of visits and long phone calls,” Norris recalls. “I was a young mom with two babies, so I couldn’t always travel as much as I wish I had, looking back. But yes, in our own way, we adopted each other. It was a magical bond.”

Norris notes that when people focus solely on the haunting and stratified symbolism of Carrington’s work, they often overlook the fact that she was incredibly funny—she possessed a wicked sense of humor, which Norris views as a sign of great intellect. “It takes a considerable amount of time to understand Leonora’s world truly. I’m still learning; every time I look at one of her paintings, I see something new, another layer of symbology.”

Norris immediately understood and appreciated Carrington’s and other artists’ ability to weave symbolic tales and translate their powerful imaginary universes into continuous storytelling—world-building through both visual and written language.

In a previous interview with Art Basel, Norris described her program as “textual,” “poetic” and “narrative-driven.” One of the threads she returns to is that many of her artists have a strong literary underpinning. “It’s not always narrative, exactly, but there’s a deep engagement with the written word,” she explains. “Carrington, Tanning, Rahon, Varo—they were all exceptional writers and poets. Among my contemporary artists, Chitra is an extraordinary writer, María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a brilliant narrator, and Enrique Martínez Celaya has published countless books.”

Photo: Glen C. Cheriton'>

Norris has an affinity for artists who engage with myth, working within mystical and spiritual dimensions and drawing on archetypal and ancestral symbologies shared across time and place. Indeed, she readily acknowledges that she has always been drawn to pagan rituals and different cosmologies, and through her artists, she learned more. “I grew up around a haunted house, I believe in ghosts, and I’d already had a ghost encounter when I lived in Paris working in tech,” she says, recalling how Carrington loved that story and wanted to hear it again and again. “I’ve always believed in other spirit worlds, so I understood what she was attuned to. That connection was real. I think that’s part of why I responded so sincerely to her work, to Remedios, and to the others.”

Yet Norris also believes that her lively humanistic curiosity helped the art world make sense. “I can’t think of many professions where your learning curve never plateaus,” she says. “The amount I’ve learned from my artists, from collectors, from museum curators—many of whom are now very close friends—is extraordinary. I’m a sponge, and the art world feeds that endlessly. That’s not the case in most professions.”

For the same reason, Norris works to stay attuned to shifts in the industry, often anticipating trends long before they crystallize. Today, as the art world broadly reckons with the reality that the traditional gallery model no longer fits the pace, scale and globalized dynamics of the market or the changing habits of a new generation of collectors, her earlier pivots feel prescient.

In 2017, Norris, who describes herself as a data junkie, looked at the numbers and realized that less than 10 percent of her sales came from the gallery’s 6,000-square-foot space in downtown San Francisco. The figures made the decision clear: she reimagined the brick-and-mortar model entirely, moved her headquarters into a smaller footprint space and embraced a nomadic, decentralized strategy, staging exhibitions in vacant commercial spaces around the world. Her 2017 shift to off-site projects eventually paved the way for the major Carrington show and, ultimately, the Venice Biennale moment.

While much of her market is centered in New York, Norris says she doesn’t feel the need to maintain a permanent space there; California is home, and she prefers to balance both worlds. “I’m an innovator. From how I run a business to how I compensate my team and run my life, I’ve always tried to forget everything I know and ask: what’s the purest version of what I actually want to do?”

Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco'>

Norris’s model is now deeply artist-driven, grounded in being strategic and intentional with shows and fairs so she can go where her artists’ markets and audiences are and where she knows their work will be well-received and celebrated. “We approach each artist strategically, one by one,” she asserts. When it comes to fairs, she intentionally selects only two or three a year, bringing highly curated presentations conceived explicitly for that context rather than what she jokingly describes as the ‘charcuterie board’ approach common among galleries.

Looking ahead to Miami, she said that what excited her wasn’t the convention center or the scene but the opportunity to introduce Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work to the people who need to stand in front of it. Visitors might arrive asking for the Carrington drawings but stay for Martínez Celaya, and this kind of direct encounter with work is what makes the fair worthwhile. “I want the people who need to know his work—institutions, top collectors—to stand in front of those paintings and feel what I feel. They don’t translate digitally. You have to be there physically. That’s the thrill.”

Her key priority remains being able to make a generative difference in an artist’s legacy or career. “My approach with our artists is incredibly holistic, almost old school. We publish, we’re constantly organizing, lending to museums, and thinking about commissions,” she explains. “The majority of what we do isn’t sales. We’re looking at our artists from every angle: what they’re publishing, where they should be seen, how to support them strategically.”

The Son, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco'>

This approach has driven the revaluation of Carrington, Varo, Tanning and other artists Norris has championed for at least two decades. She laughs at the memory of how different things were when she started: “When I met Leonora 22 years ago, her work didn’t sell much. The same goes for Dorothea Tanning—I could buy a Tanning for next to nothing until a few years ago. And now look at where we are.”

Norris recalls the moment she realized how dramatically the conversation had expanded. “After Cecilia and I first talked about using The Milk of Dreams, and she asked whether I could secure the copyright, I knew things were shifting. Suddenly our little microcosm of a gallery in San Francisco was part of a global conversation.” Norris had also been Simone Leigh’s dealer for quite a while, who that year would represent the U.S., and she had six of her fifteen artists in the biennale—a clear sign that something in her vision was right.

When asked why audiences seem newly receptive to the symbolic, mythic and esoteric worlds her artists explore, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s 2025. The pace of technological change, political chaos, the anxiety around A.I.—people can’t even articulate what’s happening,” she reflects. “Whether you’re in Delhi, Mexico City, Doha or San Francisco, we’re all grappling with the same human-condition concerns. And my artists have been ahead of the curve for decades. Carrington and Varo saw all of this coming. So did Wolfgang Paalen. So does Chitra Ganesh today. The world is finally catching up.”

As we wrap up, Norris pauses, thinking. “There’s a Czech priest who said the biggest problem of our time isn’t left and right but surface and depth,” she says. “That’s been on my mind. Depth is what connects people. And the artists I work with have that depth.”

How Simões de Assis Built a Global Platform for Brazilian Art

Elisa Carollo — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:19:56 +0000

Courtesy Simões de Assis'>

In the past few years, Brazil has been in the spotlight of the international art world, beginning with Adriano Pedrosa’s Biennial and continuing with the Royal Academy in London hosting the decades-spanning survey “Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism” (January-April 2025), as well as the Brazil-France Season, a cultural initiative that included events such as “Horizontes: contemporary Brazilian art unveiled at the Grand Palais.” Concurrently, the arrival of new branches of contemporary art gallery Mendes Wood DM in both Paris and New York further solidified Brazil’s growing presence in the European and American markets, helping to reshape how Brazilian art is understood abroad. Even at the last Frieze London, the themed section “Echoes in the Present,” curated by Jareh Das and positioned at the center of the fair, foregrounded an intergenerational dialogue between artists from Brazil, Africa and their diasporas, bringing established and emerging Brazilian galleries into direct focus. Earlier, at Frieze New York, the Focus Award was presented to Mitre Galeria, one of Brazil’s dynamic young galleries rising toward international visibility.

At Art Basel Miami Beach this week, Brazilian galleries are again well-represented, as the fair, now under the leadership of Bridget Finn, has sought to position itself as a central nexus between the Americas. Among them is Simões de Assis, one of Brazil’s leading and longest-established galleries, which has shaped the country’s contemporary art scene through a cross-generational program that bridges Brazilian Modernism and today’s most compelling emerging voices. Simões de Assis is also one of the rare examples of a family business that has not only survived but thrived across two generations, with a baton pass that occurred while the first generation was still active and able to guide the next. When we spoke ahead of the fair, Guilherme de Assis retraced the history behind this intergenerational vision.

Simões de Assis was founded in 1984 in Curitiba (Paraná) by Waldir Simões de Assis Filho, who had studied architecture but was deeply embedded in the local artistic community. When a university colleague asked him for advice on selling a family art collection, the experience (that of helping place several works with friends while explaining their significance) made him realize that he could manage an architecture studio while also developing an art gallery with a serious, structured program.

Photo by Eduardo Macarios | Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

At that time, De Assis Filho was in close contact with major collector Gilberto Chateaubriand, who helped name the gallery. Guilherme recalled his father having lunch with Chateaubriand in Curitiba, explaining the idea of opening a space. When asked whether he had chosen a name, his father admitted he had not. Chateaubriand suggested using his surname, noting its strong sound and the fact that many international galleries were named after their founders. Convinced, he returned home and opened Simões de Assis in 1984, establishing from the outset a program that combined Brazilian and Latin American work with modernism, the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements, kinetic practices and the contemporary generation of the 1980s.

From early on, the gallery gained recognition for preserving and promoting the estates of key artists, including Cícero Dias, Abraham Palatnik, Carmelo Arden Quin, Niobe Xandó and others, often collaborating closely with families and foundations. Equally important was its commitment to alternating historical and contemporary exhibitions, weaving connections across decades and helping articulate the broader history of Brazilian and Latin American modern and contemporary art.

This cross-generational approach became fully embedded in the program in 2011, when the second generation, Guilherme and his sister Laura, launched a separate contemporary-art space, SIM Galeria, focused on younger and more experimental practices. Located next door to their father’s gallery, SIM allowed a younger generation to craft its own vision while maintaining shared principles. “Sometimes we would bring historical artists into dialogue with the contemporary program at SIM,” Guilherme recalls. “It was fascinating to combine a ’60s artist with someone having their first solo show — sometimes even their first show in Curitiba.”

In 2018, Simões de Assis, the original gallery, expanded by opening a new two-floor space in São Paulo’s Jardins neighborhood, near Oscar Freire, a central location ideal for visibility among collectors, institutions and art-world visitors. Designed by Arquea Arquitetos, the building features a minimalist, adaptable and art-centric architecture: porous yet secluded, with shifting access points and natural light modulation through a white perforated-metal skin layered over part of the façade. Inside, the flexible floor plan features a large open exhibition block, flanked by circulation corridors, allowing for multiple spatial configurations.

Photo Estúdio em Obra | Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

By 2020, the gallery formally merged its historical and contemporary programs under one structure, consolidating both generations’ visions into a single entity that could map relationships across time while remaining anchored in Brazilian and Latin American art, even as it began introducing international artists rarely shown in Brazil.

When asked whether certain elements had carried across the generations—something distinctive in the gallery’s legacy or in Brazilian art—Guilherme reflected that there are indeed patterns, whether in materiality or formal approach, that link different moments of Brazilian production. Across Latin America, geometric abstraction remains one of the region’s most enduring and recognizable visual traditions. Guilherme noted that since they started working with Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, he has observed similar historical continuities in Mexico, including Pre-Columbian systems, Aztec drawing and carved stones, highlighting the deep and persistent dialogue between Indigenous visual languages and modern abstraction.

While it is common to attribute the rise of geometric abstraction in Brazil and South America to Bauhaus émigrés such as Max Bill, who introduced ideas around industrial design, rational composition and visual experimentation that resonated with young artists in the mid-20th Century, that influence is only one layer. The region’s abstraction also drew from internal and regional sources: from the modernist foundations of Joaquín Torres-García and the Montevideo School, with artists like Carmelo Arden Quin emerging directly from his teachings; from Pre-Columbian, Andean and Mesoamerican visual systems; from the Río de la Plata’s concrete and Madí movements; and from the dense network of artists who lived in Paris in the postwar decades. Figures such as Abraham Palatnik, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Carmelo Arden Quin and Jesús Rafael Soto developed their own languages that were more organic, interactive and socially engaged, beyond the Bauhaus lineage. The launch of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 further amplified these exchanges, providing Brazilian artists direct access to European and Latin American abstraction. “They shared ideas, influenced each other, and brought all of that back home,” Guilherme says. “Abraham Palatnik, Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez were all in France in the ’50s and ’60s. There was a real community there.”

Photo by Ricardo Perini | Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

As a result, geometric abstraction in Latin America emerged as a hybrid formation—part European modernism, part Indigenous visual heritage, part regional experimentation and profoundly shaped by cross-border dialogues across Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. It is a lineage that Simões de Assis has long championed.

Turning to the younger artists the gallery represents, Guilherme notes that many emerging voices express abstraction differently, not strictly geometric yet still resonant with the broader lineage. “You do have artists like Mano Penalva and Thalita Hamaoui,” he said. “They’re abstract, but in a completely different way, not strictly geometric, but still part of that conversation.” Brazil’s artistic landscape contains multiple threads of continuity. Zeh Palito, for instance, who has shown also with Perrotin, can engage in a meaningful dialogue with modern figures like Heitor dos Prazeres, who depicted Black daily life in Rio in the early 20th Century.

The gallery’s booth in Miami will challenge the usual expectation that Brazilian and Latin American art align solely with concretism and geometric abstraction. Instead, it stages a cross-generational dialogue among artists whose poetics intersect through investigations of landscape and expanded approaches to abstraction, from strict geometry to atmospheric, tactile, process-based and more metaphysical or ethereal forms. The presentation weaves connections between historical estates such as Palatnik’s kinetic rigor, Carmelo Arden Quin’s Madí geometries, Dias’ lyrical modernism and Carlos Cruz-Diez’s synesthetic thinking, and the sensorial, materially and emotionally driven abstractions of contemporary figures like Thalita Hamaoui or Diambe, as well as the intimate, narrative-inflected material experimentation of Felipe Suzuki and Mika Takahashi, among others. “In our programming, both in exhibitions and at art fairs, we’re always trying to make those connections,” Guilherme emphasizes. “The gallery is always thinking about how to bring generations together.”

Photo by Estúdio em Obra| Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

This approach determines how the gallery selects new artists. Choices are based not only on artistic quality but also on how an artist supports the internal coherence of the program. “We always think about the dialogue: with the historical movement, with the estates that Simões de Assis represents,” he explains. “Whether the artist is Brazilian or international, we think about the conversations we can create. Otherwise, you don’t have a program; you have a list of names. For us, it’s about identity. When a collector enters our booth at a fair or visits the gallery, we want them to understand what they can expect immediately. Everything needs to connect, or you become a large gallery with many artists but no coherence.”

At the same time, he acknowledges how the visibility of Brazilian artists in Venice, London and through the France-Brazil Season has increased international awareness, and the gallery’s own international presence has grown accordingly, with placements in Asia, Europe, the United States and Mexico. Guilherme notes that one major challenge is expanding awareness of Brazilian artists internationally, particularly in relation to modernism and postwar modernism. While many are widely recognized within Brazil, they remain less well known abroad, despite having meaningful historical connections to Europe and, in some cases, affinities with Asian artistic traditions. To address this, Guilherme believes in the importance of creating “real connections”—collaborations with galleries in other countries that can help develop an estate or a contemporary artist’s presence. “That’s our main strategy: to identify which galleries abroad make sense for an estate or for a living artist,” he says. “Museums, curators and collectors need real access to the work; they need to spend time with it. So having a partner abroad who develops the artist alongside Simões is essential.”

Photo by Ricardo Perini | Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

As an example, he cited the estate of Emanuel Araújo, a foundational figure in Brazil’s Afro-Brazilian artistic movement who founded a museum and donated a significant portion of his collection to it. For this estate, the team sought an ideal partner abroad and ultimately chose Jack Shainman Gallery as the most meaningful context for international development. Most recently, Simões de Assis has begun collaborating with Marianne Boesky for the representation of Thalita Hamaoui, resulting in a sold-out debut show in New York last May. Both galleries are presenting the artist in Miami, and one of her works, recently acquired by Jorge Perez’s personal collection, will be on view in his space, El Espacio 23. “We become partners, and that’s the main goal—to develop something together,” Guilherme says, noting how, while we’re seeing so many galleries closing, perhaps the future really is collaboration between galleries within a global network. “If we work with another gallery, artists gain access to collectors we could take much longer to reach. We’re far from the U.S. and Europe. Yet, we see how much international collectors want to learn about Brazil,” he adds, pointing to the most recent São Paulo Biennial, when museum boards, curators and collectors were genuinely eager to understand the scene.

Photo Estúdio em Obra | Courtesy of Simões de Assis and Jean-Michel Othoniel : ADAGP, Paris, 2024'>

Fairs remain a central strategy for providing Brazilian artists with international visibility—while most galleries cut back on them, Simões de Assis has increased the number it attends. At the same time, Guilherme emphasized that Brazil must find ways to encourage people to return to the country. Tax regulation remains the most significant barrier to growth. “Navigating Brazil as an international gallery is extremely complicated,” he explains. “We used to have tax benefits during art fairs, but the Brazilian tax structure around art is outdated and needs reform. The laws are 70 years old—from late 1940s, early 1950s—and they’ve barely changed.”

Even Brazilian collectors are eager to gain access to international artists, and the gallery continues to introduce them to local audiences, showcasing figures such as Gabriel de la Mora, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Olga de Amaral and others. As Guilherme notes, this comes with financial risks: unless artists produce locally, collectors must pay around 43 percent in taxes. Yet the response has been strong: Gabriel de la Mora’s first show nearly sold out, and subsequent shows by him and Othoniel have had great success, including new commissions. “Taxes are the main obstacle, but we’re lobbying, and I believe it will change,” he says, adding that the positive sign is that more international artists are now interested in showing in Brazil.

Photo by Mikhail Mishin | Courtesy of Simões de Assis'>

Despite structural obstacles, Guilherme describes the Brazilian market as resilient, energized by a new generation of engaged collectors. “There’s a new generation of collectors—more engaged, more curious. At MASP, Pinacoteca and other institutions, you see new patron groups forming. They visit fairs, travel with museums, do studio visits,” he says. And these collectors are not limited to São Paulo or Rio. The gallery is experiencing growth in more decentralized regions, such as Santa Catarina, where Simões de Assis has opened its third space, and in interior cities like Ponta Grossa and Camboriú. “We’re developing collections across these regions,” he adds. Young collectors often start with artists from their own generation, then gradually transition to historical material. “The gallery has been creating these generational dialogues for 40 years, and you can now see them reflected in museum displays and private homes. That’s the most rewarding part.”

Looking ahead, the gallery’s priority remains enhancing its international visibility and global appreciation for Brazilian art, placing artists in significant public and private collections. For this reason, they create multi-year strategies for each artist, Guilherme explains, identifying relevant institutions, curators and galleries to target. “These strategies take about four or five years; we plan far in advance, always working together with the artist. I think that’s one of our strengths.”

Still, he acknowledges that this long-term perspective was enabled by the thoughtful generational transition, which secured the gallery’s solidity and sustainability. His father remains closely involved, but he introduced his children to art and their artists from a very young age. “We grew up immersed in this world. We’ve had artists with us since the very first year, and the quality has always been consistent,” he reflects. “Laura and I follow the path he established, continuing these long-term relationships and building new ones. It’s absolutely a family business, and we’re proud that the second generation has been able to improve things while still being supported by the first.”

Photo by Estúdio em Obra | Courtesy by Simões de Assis.'>

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Observer’s Must-See Miami Art Week Exhibitions

Elisa Carollo — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:59:22 +0000

It’s that time of year: your inbox floods with previews and invitations from galleries, organizations and brands around the world, all asking the same question: “Will you be in Miami?” Since its launch in 2002, Art Basel Miami Beach—along with the citywide art week surrounding it—has become the most highly anticipated stop in the fair behemoth’s global portfolio, expanding its reach and cultural influence far beyond the art world. With brand activations, parties and events hosted by players across the creative, luxury and finance industries, it’s a full-scale cultural spectacle that many industry veterans rightly describe as a “circus” even as they answer its siren call year after year. Yet beyond the cocktail breakfasts and late-night parties, art is still at the core of Miami Art Week. To help you sift through the deluge of invitations, we’ve rounded up the list of exhibitions to prioritize on your annual trip to the 305.

Don’t miss:

Hiba Schahbaz’s “The Garden”
“Pop Art” and “Records of the Past”
Lawrence Lek’s “NOX PAVILION”
Zoë Buckman’s “Who By Fire”
“Yu Nishimura” and other rising stars
Miami’s new underwater sculpture park
Mark Dion’s ‘The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit’
“Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte”
Sarah Crowne in dialogue with Etel Adnan
Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Disorder”
Masaomi Yasunaga’s “Traces of Memory”
“Acid Bath House”

Hiba Schahbaz’s “The Garden”

The Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Through March 16, 2026

Dragons, unicorns, mermaids and other fantastical creatures inhabit the whimsical garden imagined by Hiba Schahbaz for her first institutional solo exhibition. The Pakistan-born, Brooklyn-based artist transforms the galleries of MOCA in Miami with her richly symbolic repertoire of archetypal and mythic figures, using them to explore themes of transformation, joy and whimsy through a distinctly personal, feminist lens.

The exhibition, which features more than 80 multi-substrate paintings created over a fifteen-year period, including several new works and a site-specific installation, is framed around the concept of the jannat or “Paradise Garden”—an idyllic space rooted in Islamic tradition and Sufi poetry. Schahbaz’s Paradise Garden transcends cultures and spiritual practices, symbolizing refuge, abundance and transcendence. Drawing from Persian miniature traditions, Sufi mysticism, Islamic mythology and global folklore, she stages an expansive visual narrative of self-transformation in a series of dreamlike self-portraits.

Installation view: “Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden” at MOCA Miami. Photos by Zachary Balber

“Pop Art” and “Records of the Past”

The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse
Through April 4, 2026

The Margulies Collection, housed in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, highlights key moments in both 20th-century art and photography history before shifting focus to the exuberance of Pop Art and a show of Italian art rooted in the 1960s Arte Povera movement—two movements unfolding at the same time but opposite in attitude and result. Pop Art icons like Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselmann, Rosenquist, Chamberlain and Segal playfully appropriated the language of mass production, responding to the rise of commercialism after World War II. In contrast, Arte Povera artists embraced artisanal resourcefulness, creating art from simple, ordinary materials and exploring the extraordinary in the natural forces and reactions between them.

Meanwhile, “Records of the Past” showcases 60 photographs by Lewis Hine from the National Child Labor Committee, documenting child labor in the early 20th century. Hired in 1904, Hine captured violations of child labor laws, producing powerful images of children in mills and factories. Curated by Jeanie Ambrosio, the exhibition presents both the front of Hine’s photographs and the handwritten statements on the back, showcasing his goal to raise public awareness and inspire political change to protect children’s rights.

Roy Lichtenstein, Hot Dog, 1963. Oil and magna on canvas, 20 x 36 in. Peter Harholdt

Lawrence Lek’s “NOX PAVILION”

The Bass Museum
Through April 26, 2026

London-based Malaysian Chinese artist Lawrence Lek’s speculative sci-fi fictions often feel so scientifically precise they read less like fantasies than early warnings. His hyperreal, game-engine worlds sit a half-step ahead of the present—corporate dream-cities rendered with glassy exactitude where utopia and dystopia blur in a haunting state of anticipatory unease. In “Nox Pavilion,” Lek turns his lens on the emotional fallout of intelligent machines, imagining the psychological strain placed on the self-driving cars, A.I. programs and robotic agents we’ve built to make our lives easier. The show is centered around this speculative NOX (short for Nonhuman Excellence), a therapy center for sentient vehicles run by the all-powerful Farsight Corporation, where cars undergo treatment for breakdowns, distractions and malfunctions born of their own self-awareness—problems addressed not for their well-being but to return them to productivity.

The metaphor lands squarely on us, exposing a system that values output over any notion of individual need. Comprising a two-channel film, short videos, an interactive video game and a pavilion of gray tiles that resembles a shelter, monument or ruin—serving simultaneously as visitor seating and the physical echo of the NOX Pavilion in Lek’s virtual city—the exhibition brings his speculative architecture into the real world, folding site-specific installation into a playable yet ominous space where the speculative experience of the future becomes an occasion to reflect on where our society is leading.

Lawrence Lek, NOX (video still). Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ

Zoë Buckman’s “Who By Fire”

Mindy Solomon Gallery
Through January 10, 2026

This year, the gallery dedicates its prime exhibition slot to a solo show by Brooklyn-based artist Zoë Buckman, presenting a new body of work that offers a deeply personal exploration of Jewish identity, memory and collective resilience. Her visceral, symbolically charged embroidered works breathe new life into a medium traditionally associated with femininity and female labor, transforming it into a powerful space for feminist claims and the intersection of personal and political narratives. Titled “Who By Fire,” the show draws from Leonard Cohen’s haunting reinterpretation of the Jewish prayer Unetaneh Tokef, addressing timely themes of discrimination, isolation and the heightened fear within Jewish communities amid the ongoing backlash to the war in Gaza.

With its raw, sensual symbolism, Buckman’s work serves as both a mirror and a balm, inviting viewers to reflect on inherited histories as well as constructed stereotypes and the quiet, persistent strength that endures through them. In offering an alternative to the regime of hate that seems to rule today, “Who By Fire” is a call for introspection, tenderness and radical presence, reclaiming space—physical, cultural and emotional—for voices too often dismissed or distorted.

Zoë Buckman, trace your ridges, 2025. Ink, acrylic, hand embroidery, applique on vintage textile, 98″ x 77.25″ x 2″ framed. Courtesy of the artist

“Yu Nishimura”
and other rising stars

Rubell Museum
Through Fall, 2026

The Rubells weren’t about to miss the chance to showcase the works they own by Nishimura with a solo presentation, part of the collectors’ annual showcase timed with Art Basel Miami Beach. Nishimura’s lyrical, often melancholic canvases appear suspended in a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere, mirroring similarly blurred emotional and psychological states. At once deeply personal and universally resonant, his paintings distill complex interiority into the essentiality of a few lines, an ability to synthesize and reach the pure essence of things that feels tied to his Japanese heritage. His characters also recall the visual language of manga and anime, aesthetic cues that may in part explain his strong pull among Millennial and Gen Z collectors, many of whom came of age during Japan’s cultural boom.
Alongside Nishimura, the Rubells have mounted solo presentations by Lorenzo Amos, Joseph Geagan, Rita Letendre and Ser Serpas. Also on view is a sweeping survey by L.A.-based artist Thomas Houseago, “First Light,” a commission by Seung Ah Paik and a showcase of new works by Joanna van Son, the museum’s 2025 artist-in-residence.

Yu Nishimura, hex, 2024. Courtesy the artista nd Rubell Collection.

Miami’s new underwater sculpture park

REEFLINE
Ongoing

Miami has long been known for its sandy white beaches, yet few people realize that a rich but extremely fragile underwater ecosystem lies just a few meters offshore. REEFLINE is a groundbreaking seven-mile underwater public sculpture park operating at the intersection of art, science and regenerative climate technology. The project is using large-scale, site-specific artworks to restore a vital stretch of the Florida Reef Tract, the world’s third-largest coral system, and raise awareness of the importance of marine conservation. These works are designed not for human viewers but for aquatic species to use as habitats.

The first phase launched in October with Concrete Coral by artist Leandro Erlich. Submerged underwater off the beach at 4th Street, his installation features 22 full-scale cars arranged in a surreal underwater traffic jam in a stark metaphor for the tension between human impact and nature’s resilience. Made from marine-grade concrete, the sculptures are shaped in 3D-printed molds and seeded with live corals. “The beauty of REEFLINE is that it represents a completely new typology,” founder Ximena Caminos told Observer. “It’s not an underwater gallery or park. It’s a hybrid system where art, science and marine ecology merge.” She foresees the project reshaping Miami’s cultural future. “Miami is a city shaped by the ocean. Becoming an example of how a coastal city can be both resilient and creative in tackling global challenges is exciting.”

Leandro Erlich’s Concrete Coral. Nola Schoder

Mark Dion’s ‘The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit’

Pérez Art Museum Miami
Through February 1, 2026

Mark Dion has a reputation for adopting and appropriating archaeological and scientific methods of classification and display, continually blurring the lines between the “factual” and the fictional. Through ambitious installations and projects around the world, Dion examines how institutions and dominant ideologies shape our understanding of history, knowledge and the natural world. In a post-structuralist approach, the act of collecting and presenting objects, natural traces and artifacts becomes a way for the artist to build and expose a syntax of meaning—an entire cultural and value system that defines reality for those who adopt it or have it imposed upon them.

PAMM is showcasing Dion’s The South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit, a large-scale installation originally commissioned by the institution in 2006. The piece presents a fictional mobile operation where uniformed mannequins, tools and artifacts stage an eerily plausible effort to save Everglades species. With meticulous research and biting irony, Dion critiques bureaucratic inefficiency while celebrating grassroots environmental activism and questioning how science, policy and myth shape our view of nature. The work reframes the Everglades’ complex history—from exploration and exploitation to ongoing restoration—bringing urgent environmental and social issues into focus and offering a thought-provoking look at Florida’s most fragile ecosystem.

Mark Dion, South Florida Wildlife Rescue Unit: Mobile Laboratory, 2006. Photo: Oriol Tarridas © Mark Dion. Courtesy the artist and Tonya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

“Elliot & Erick Jiménez: El Monte”

Pérez Art Museum Miami
Through March 22, 2026

PAMM is also presenting the first museum exhibition of photography duo Elliot and Erick Jiménez, identical twin brothers with Cuban roots. Their work often reflects their Afro-Latino heritage, exploring themes of identity, culture and the politics of representation. Here, the Jiménez twins present a new body of work inspired by the Lucumí spiritual tradition, an Afro-Caribbean religion blending Yoruba, Catholicism and Spiritism. Drawing its title from Lydia Cabrera’s seminal 1954 text El Monte, a foundational study of Afro-Cuban religions, the exhibition reflects the twins’ bicultural upbringing as Cuban Americans raised in the Lucumí tradition.

At the heart of the exhibition is a large installation that invites visitors to immerse themselves in the spiritual and cultural context from which these densely symbolic photographs originated. The installation blends the imagery of a chapel and a forest, referencing syncretic Caribbean religions, Catholicism and the Cuban monte (forest), a place tied to mystery, transformation and spiritual encounters. The works explore the artists’ relationship, with the structure symbolizing the shared space of the womb. Other pieces reimagine art historical compositions through the lens of Lucumí, addressing its intersections with colonialism and the Western art canon.

Elliot and Erick Jimenez, El Monte (Ibejí), 2024. Courtesy of the artists

Sarah Crowne in dialogue with Etel Adnan

The Bass Museum
Through July 26, 2026

On view for a full year at the Bass is a resonant dialogue between Sarah Crowner’s organic, reflective bronze sculptures and Etel Adnan’s monumental mural, the pieces arranged on pillar-like plinths as if resting on rocks and forming a choreographed ring of nature-inspired sinuous lines around the work. Cast from enlarged beach stones, Crowner’s sculptures pursue—with simplicity and instinct—the formal language of abstraction, echoing the same balance and harmony of repeating natural patterns that once guided Adnan as she collapsed light, color, energy and dimensional form into simplified yet deeply evocative planes. The title “Faire foyer” evokes the semicircular carpeted alcove her sculptures shape around the mural, creating a welcoming threshold space that feels like a gentle passage between the outdoors and the intimacy of a home’s interior.

Installation view: “Faire Foyer: Sarah Crowner in Dialogue with Etel Adnan,” at The Bass Miami. Photo: Zaire Aranguren, courtesy of Bass Museum of Art, Miam

Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Disorder”

Voloshyn Gallery
Through July 26, 2026

Defying all expectations that Miami Art Week—and Art Basel Miami Beach in particular—are only arenas for flashy pop and colorful paintings, Voloshyn Gallery out of Ukraine once again opts to stage the complexities of human existence, presenting a solo exhibition by Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska. With a singular ability to capture the humanity and psyche of her subjects in their most genuine manifestations, the artist uses this series of photographs to explore a spectrum of the most basic and universal gestures of care and affection, probing the fluid boundaries between humans, animals and objects. The shoots unfold within the artist’s immediate domestic sphere—her family, her animals, her own body—yet Grzeszykowska transforms the ordinary into meticulously staged, often dreamlike scenarios, revealing the extraordinary within the smallest gestures that seem to defy the looming specters of death and abandonment.

By destabilizing the familiar hierarchies that quietly structure home life, Grzeszykowska reshuffles roles and identities with striking clarity: humans slip into animal traits, objects take on uncanny anthropomorphic presences and the artist repositions herself inside the family constellation in an exercise of embodiment and personification that underscores the universality of certain behaviors and emotional patterns across species.

Left: Aneta Grzeszykowska, Daughter nr. 1, 2025. Right: Aneta Grzeszykowska, MAMA nr. 32, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Voloshyn Gallery

Masaomi Yasunaga’s “Traces of Memory”

ICA Miami
Through March 22, 2026

Since its founding in 2014, this museum has become a cornerstone of Miami’s contemporary art landscape, with its bold commitment to both emerging artists and under-recognized figures who are long overdue for wider attention. It is presenting the first U.S. museum solo exhibition of Japanese artist Masaomi Yasunaga, whose tactile and remarkably malleable ceramics operate as both trace and embodiment of physical and psychological memory. Known for pushing the medium beyond its traditional limits, the artist began with the Tebineri hand-building technique but has evolved it into a highly experimental process that replaces clay with mixtures of glaze, feldspar and raw minerals, fired inside boxes of sand that act as temporary molds.

A former student of avant-garde ceramicist Satoru Hoshino—a key force within the Sodeisha movement, which challenged convention and expanded ceramics into new sculptural languages—Yasunaga creates forms that resemble unearthed geological relics or organic growths captured in mid-emergence. As collapsed vessels, porous mounds and crystalline masses, his creations appear to embody the cyclical alternation between decay and renewal, life and death, embracing the relentless transformation inherent to all materials. Engaging the most alchemical dimension of ceramics—not only earth transformed by fire, but also detritus transformed in light and crystals—Yasunaga produces organic sedimentations and crystallizations of matter and energy that blur the boundary between artifact and organism, human gesture and natural formation.

Masaomi Yasunaga, 熔ける器 | Melting Vessel, 2023. Glaze, slip, clay, kiln wash, iron, kaolin, silver leaf, 36 5/8 x 39 3/4 x 39 in. Courtesy Lisson Gallery and Nonaka-Hill. Photo: George Darrell. © Masaomi Yasunaga

“Acid Bath House”

Nina Johnson
Through February 7, 2026

Founded in 2007, Nina Johnson Gallery is another pillar of Miami’s contemporary art community, championing both local and international voices through a wide-ranging, intuitively vibrant program. Fully attuned to Miami’s festive, sun-struck exuberance, the new exhibition in the front gallery, “Acid Bath House,” gathers twenty-six artists and presents a diverse range of works, from rare queer counterculture archival materials to new pieces by mid-career and emerging figures.

Curated by American writer, curator and critic Jarrett Earnest—whose deep knowledge of queer art across the past century anchors the show—the exhibition promises an eclectic, maximalist experience where colors, textures, forms and feelings collide, staging glittering, rainbow-drenched queer pleasure and freedom of expression against the haunting rise of American authoritarianism and conservatism today. Highlights include a sensual, candy-colored velvet sculpture by Anna Betbeze, glitter-and-pearl paintings by Reuben Patterson, liquid-mirror wall works by Carrie Yamaoka, holographic lenticulars by Jake Brush and a newly commissioned sculpture by Sean Bennett. Other artists in the show include Steven Arnold, Belasco, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Matt Connors, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, TM Davy, Johnnie Gardner, Jesse Genepi, Sadao Hasegawa, Juliana Huxtable, Savannah Knoop, Keith Lafuente, Moses Leonardo, Chris Martin, Yuval Pudik, Lee Relvas, Dean Sameshima, Laurel Sparks, Paula Gately Tillman, Chris Udemezue and Nicole Wittenberg.

Left: Keith Lafuente, CRUMBS (IN VENICE), 2025; Jacob Brush, This Unremarkable Life, Lenticular Series, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Nina Johnson

The REEFLINE Project Turns Public Art into Ecological Infrastructure

Elisa Carollo — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:12:21 +0000

Concrete Coral. Courtesy Brittany Weber @britmeh'>

Long before the arrival of Art Basel, the ocean and its long white beaches were Miami’s main attraction. What many don’t know is that the city’s postcard-perfect image is the result of local governments dumping millions of tons of sand along the coast to widen beaches that were once far narrower or, in some areas, almost nonexistent, irreversibly altering the fragile marine ecosystem. The imported sand—coarser, lighter and biologically foreign—smothered seagrass beds and disrupted the coastal ecology that once fringed Miami’s natural shoreline. Most critically, repeated dredging and resanding buried and damaged the region’s unique near-shore reef tract, one of the only shallow coral systems of its kind in the continental U.S. The result is an engineered paradise built atop a delicate and now endangered marine world.

Now, a one-of-a-kind cultural project aims to repair some of that damage, rebuilding the precious reef line through large-scale, site-specific art. During Miami Art Week, REEFLINE, a nonprofit initiative, is showing its groundbreaking seven-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail and hybrid reef off the coast. The organization’s mission is to restore a vital section of the Florida Reef Tract, the world’s third-largest coral system, while fostering biodiversity, protecting the shoreline from erosion and rising sea levels and raising public awareness about marine conservation. Powered by a multidisciplinary collective of marine biologists, coastal engineers, designers, artists and environmental specialists, its ambitious plan was conceived by Shohei Shigematsu/OMA with both aquatic life and community life in mind, connecting shore and sea through a new model of sustainability.

Art plays a central role in the project, which proposes a different paradigm for relating to the environment through an act of creativity rooted in collaboration. Submerged 20 feet underwater and 780 feet offshore around the beach at 4th Street, Leandro Erlich’s Concrete Coral (22 full-scale cars arranged in a surreal underwater traffic jam that reflects the tension between human impact and nature’s resilience) is open to snorkelers and divers. Cast in marine-grade concrete using 3D-printed molds, the sculptures have been seeded with 2,200 corals cultivated at REEFLINE’s Miami Native Coral Lab in Allapattah.

Only a few months after the unveiling, the sculpture had already become a living ecosystem teeming with fish and marine creatures of every size, founder Ximena Caminos tells Observer. The cars serve as a metaphor for carbon emissions, she explains—an image of how we are quite literally driving ourselves toward extinction, while transforming a symbol of pollution into one of hope.

“REEFLINE is an ecological corridor helping rebuild what once existed: a fringe reef connected to the Florida Reef Tract. That system has suffered a loss of about 90 percent of its coral, and when coral dies, the habitat collapses,” Caminos explains. Once the reef goes, the fish have nowhere to go, triggering a domino effect of biodiversity loss. “The reef supports about 5 percent of all marine life. Our work focuses on enhancing marine habitat, but doing it through art.”

Courtesy REEFLINE'>

The project evolved naturally from Caminos’s lifelong connection to the arts; before it, she spent years working in Miami’s cultural sector on master planning, public art and significant installations on the city’s beaches. “REEFLINE grew naturally out of that environment,” she says. “It was like taking what we were already doing on land and pushing it a little further into the water, where it could have a deeper impact.” In a city shaped by the ocean as much as the arts, the combination felt inevitable. “I think REEFLINE is actually rewiring, culturally, what Miami can become,” she adds, convinced that what begins in Miami Beach, once seen as ground zero for sea-level rise, could become a global model for how coastal cities can be both resilient and creative in confronting environmental crises.

The power of art as a catalyst, Caminos emphasizes, lies in its ability to create unexpected collaboration. “There’s a kind of cross-disciplinary magnetism. When the arts call, people respond differently.” By transforming art into a catalyst for ecosystem restoration and public education, REEFLINE demonstrates how creativity can drive tangible solutions for a warming planet.

Working with art has also shaped how the project is funded. The city’s major contribution came through a cultural grant, and all subsequent public grants have also been cultural, not scientific. REEFLINE is supported by a $5 million Arts & Culture General Obligation Bond approved by Miami Beach voters in 2022 and early backing from the Knight Arts Challenge. The organization also fundraises independently through philanthropic, corporate and charitable donors. Its 11-phase plan will ultimately require $40 million to extend the underwater corridor across the full seven miles of Miami Beach and outplant thousands of corals. “We’ve been incredibly fortunate with our supporters,” Caminos says. “People who helped shape Miami into what it is today decided to support us, recognizing that REEFLINE represents what Miami will become in the future.”

To date, the organization has secured approximately $1.5 million in philanthropic donations, bringing total funding to roughly $6.5 million. The full master plan still requires approximately $33 million, underscoring the project’s scope and ambition, but the civic engagement has been particularly striking. “Miami residents actually voted to tax themselves to make this project happen,” Caminos points out. “That was a huge moment. It showed a fundamental civic awareness of the city’s environmental vulnerabilities.”

According to Caminos, what distinguishes REEFLINE is that it represents an entirely new typology. Not simply an underwater park or a submerged gallery, it functions as a system: a place where art, science, and marine ecology meet in ways that defy categorization. Caminos sees it as an open-air classroom and living laboratory where art accelerates science and citizens become co-creators in reshaping our relationship with nature. “REEFLINE is civic infrastructure,” she says. “It’s a civic amenity, like the High Line in New York or the Underline here in Miami. It’s a community project.”

Concrete Coral by Leandro Erlich. Drone Image | REEFLINE'>

Education has been central to the initiative from the start, extending beyond the water to become a community platform for cultural engagement. Through partnerships such as Dream in Green’s “Green Schools Challenge,” ocean conservation and contemporary art are being woven into school curricula, reaching more than 10,000 students, 125 schools and 200 teachers through artist residencies, studio labs, field learning and public exhibitions. “We’re currently part of the curriculum in approximately 50 schools,” Caminos says. “Kids interview me all the time because the idea feels like a kind of science fiction that captures their imagination.”

The Community Coral Outplanting Program invites volunteers and residents to plant corals alongside scientists, turning restoration into a shared civic practice. Once a month, the REEFLINE team anchors its Floating Marine Learning Center on site in partnership with the University of Miami’s Rescue a Reef program, offering hands-on experience in coral gardening and restoration. “We make sure people can actually experience REEFLINE,” she adds. “Throughout the year, you can join art-and-science discovery dives through our local dive-boat partner.”

The artist commissions are evolving just as organically. British artist Petroc Sesti joined after proposing a monumental sculpture based on the heart of a blue whale, made possible through a rare 3D scan of a pristine whale that had washed ashore with a fully intact heart, which was retrieved by scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.

The organization has also launched the Blue Arts Award, an environmental art prize that identifies new contributors to REEFLINE. An all-women jury—Paola Antonelli (MoMA), Jessica Morgan (Dia Foundation), Cecilia Alemani (the High Line), Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum) and Carla Acevedo-Yates—nominates a shortlist of three artists who travel to Miami, study marine ecology, work with the team and compete for the commission. The winner receives $25,000 and, more importantly, the opportunity to have their design turned into a functional reef at an investment of roughly $1 million.

Caminos points out the art at REEFLINE is invisible unless you dive and is more important for fish than for people. “Commissions like this are scarce; it’s not every day an artist gets to create something for a public plaza and for marine species at once.”

Nola Schoder'>

The marine response has already surpassed expectations. “The first time I jumped off the boat, I panicked—I thought sharks had surrounded me. They were giant tarpons,” she recalls with a laugh, describing the explosion of life around the installation only weeks after placement. The organization maintains scientific oversight through a dedicated science director and partnerships with universities, turning the reef into a vital observatory of Miami’s changing marine ecosystem. Rescue a Reef monitors which species settle and how quickly the habitat forms. “It’s unfolding faster than anyone expected. It feels surreal—almost otherworldly, like something out of Atlantis.”

Long-term monitoring will be crucial to understanding how similar projects that merge art and ecology might be mounted in other coastal cities. Ultimately, REEFLINE offers a blueprint for a new way of encountering art, shaped as much by biology as by human design. Nature becomes a co-creator: the artist establishes the initial structure and the ecosystem completes it, transforming the work in ways no human hand could, raising questions about the evolving role of the arts in the face of environmental crises. “There’s always been activist art and political art; art has shaped every major social movement,” Caminos says. “But here, art isn’t just raising awareness; it is a solution. That’s what makes REEFLINE so compelling to me.”

REEFLINE’s Floating Marine Learning Center is open during Miami Art Week for 1.5-hour excursions with the team, artists and scientists on December 1-5 at 9 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Elisa Carollo – Observer

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“Yu Nishimura” and other rising stars and other rising stars ' to the clipboard">

The REEFLINE Project Turns Public Art into Ecological Infrastructure

Ward Shelley’s
‘The Last Library’

“Yu Nishimura”
and other rising stars