Overwhelming, glorious, excessive, fun, art-filled : Miami Art Basel 2015 was all this and much more.
The fair’s 2015 edition was probably the biggest to date, featuring over 260 international galleries and over 4000 works of art from the great masters to contemporary raising talents. As Miami Art Week has grown into a global multi-headed creature featuring parties, countless special exhibitions, satellite fairs and thausands of other cultural / social activities, getting lost in the noise and forget about the art couldn’t be easier. In this context, once you get to past the bling there are plenty of gems to be discovered, mainly hailing from Latino America. Our highlights from Overseas include the Brazilian gallery Mendes Wood DM, showcasing the works of up-and-coming artist Solange Pessoa, who uses earthen materials to reference the primordial earth-animal kigndom connection, and Casa Triangulo, presenting sculptures by Flavio Cerqueira and works by Eduardo Berliner. In the fair’s Nova sector, dedicated to recent artistic production, Labor Gallery from Mexico City, Meyer Riegger from Berlin and Galleryske from Bangalore stood out among others, together with Cherry and Martin Gallery from Los-Angeles, presenting new colorful sculptures by Nathan Mabry. Among the best curated booths there were New-York based Paul Kasmin Gallery, which featured an outstanding selection of pieces ranging from Motherwell to Frank Stella and Brancusi, Parisian gallery Kamel Mennour, presenting a wide selection of new works by French artist Camille Henrot, Galleria Continua showcasing an interesting installation by Carlos Garaioca entitled “Cuba“, and Hauser & Wirth, which set a spotlight on the gallery’s American artists and estates, featuring works by the late giants such as Philip Guston, Mike Kelley, and David Smith.
Simultaneously a playground for the rich and famous, and a viable opportunity to discover new talents, Miami Art Basel proved, once again, that art is an essential cultural enterprise as well as one of the many 21-st century market commodities.
