Miami Art Week · Miami Beach
Reading time: 5 minBack on the white sands of South Beach for its 13th edition, Untitled Art once again made the case for a fair built on collaboration and generosity, and the galleries that filled its booths proved the point.
There is a reason Untitled Art has become one of the quietly essential fixtures of Miami Art Week. Returning to the white sands of South Beach for its 13th edition, the fair continues to distinguish itself through intent: a genuine dedication to strengthening the wider art ecosystem, and an inclusive, collaborative spirit that runs through the whole event. It is a fair that is as interested in who gets to participate as in what sells.
That ethos is written into its structure. Each year, Untitled’s curatorial team selects a deliberately broad range of exhibitors, new and established alike, on the basis of artistic merit and global reach, making a point of including galleries from well beyond the traditional art-world centres. The fair’s ‘Nest’ sector goes further still, supporting emerging artists, younger galleries and non-profit organisations with subsidised booths that open the room to smaller operations. The result is a floor plan with a texture all its own, where a Florentine palazzo gallery might sit within sight of a Savannah newcomer. Here are a handful of the presentations that stood out.
Carl Freedman Gallery
Founded in London in 2003 by Carl Freedman, the gallery earned its reputation early for critical, curatorially driven programming, championing emerging British and international talent — among them Nel Aerts, Billy Childish, Bianca Fields, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Jon Key, Studio Lenca, Lindsey Mendick, Navot Miller, Vanessa Raw, Benjamin Senior and Tori Wrånes. Since 2019 it has operated from the cultural hub of Margate, occupying the historic Thanet Press building on Union Crescent, on the edge of the town’s Old Town.
For its inaugural showing at Untitled, the gallery brought vibrant, uplifting new work by Studio Lenca and Vanessa Raw. Studio Lenca builds from personal memory, driven by social activism; his autobiographical paintings move across borders and identities shaped, invented and erased by colonisation and conflict. The portraits — the artist and his community rendered in hats and vivid colour — stand deliberately, boldly, against dominant Western narratives around migration. Vanessa Raw, working in an intensified palette, captures the intensity of a moment while setting it in an imaginative register. The dreamlike passages in her work hint at an altered state of awareness and a deep human connection playing out on physical and spiritual planes; she draws on photographs taken during therapeutic daily runs through local nature spots for her background landscapes, threading the paintings with a nostalgic sense of unity with the natural world.
Secci
Founded in Florence in 2013, Secci has built an international profile on a high-quality, curatorially driven programme. Housed in the 15th-century Palazzo Ricasoli, the gallery has long nurtured artistic experiment, its rigorous approach opening doors to international collaboration and drawing critics and curators into the conversation.
At the fair, Secci presented a deep roster including Alin Bozbiciu, Chris Soal, Chico da Silva, Didier William, Etsu Egami, Giuseppe Stampone, Jeremy Lawson, Kevin Francis Gray, Levi van Veluw, Lotte Wieringa, Michael Staniak, Sebastiano Sofia and Alfredo Pirri. Among the standouts were recent clay works by Levi van Veluw, their marbled, muted palette carrying explicitly religious themes, and paintings by Daria Dmytrenko, who mines the subconscious — following intuitive impulses to summon deep memory and translate it into composition.
Nino Mier Gallery
With spaces in Los Angeles, New York and Brussels, Nino Mier Gallery moves fluidly between established and emerging names across painting, sculpture and photography. Mier opened his first location in Los Angeles in 2015, initially focused on artists from his native Rhineland.
The gallery’s presentation drew on a roster including Andrew Dadson, Jorge Galindo, Lola Gil, Joanne Greenbaum, Pieter Jennes, Otis Jones, Marin Majić, Jansson Stegner, Mònica Subidé, Nicola Tyson, Ana Villagomez, Thomas Wachholz and Jonathan Watering. Two names lingered longest. José Lerma, a multimedia artist best known for portraiture, showed a recent series that unsettles conventional character psychology through sheer tactility, built up from a custom acrylic mix that yields his signature impasto. Liliane Tomasko, by contrast, offered canvases of sweeping, curvilinear strokes that blur into one another like movement or apparition — works that engage the senses by evoking the feel, scent and atmosphere of a scene without ever depicting it directly.
C O U N T Y
Based in Palm Beach, Florida, C O U N T Y has since 2016 shown contemporary work by emerging and mid-career artists from America, Europe and Africa, moving comfortably across VR, sculpture, new media and painting. This year’s booth spotlighted sculpture, new media and painting from Petra Cortright, Rachel Lee Hovnanian, Liz Markus, Enoc Perez, Boo Saville, Carolyn Salas, Adam Parker Smith and Wendy White — a concise survey of the gallery’s transatlantic sensibility.
Room 57 Gallery
Room 57 operates on a disarmingly simple principle: that discovering art and design should feel natural. Collectors are invited to live with pieces before committing to them, and the booth is staged to feel like a home, an eclectic and streamlined mix of painting, photography, furniture and décor.
At Untitled, the gallery presented ‘The Resting Place’ by Alexander James, a series that asks viewers to sit with intimacy and solitude, to attend to the private moments that usually pass unnoticed. In ‘Room Service,’ James explores the gap between the ordinary and the refined, folding glamour together with the starker realities that follow indulgence; he works in thick layers of oil, obscuring earlier narratives while leaving a trace with each new pass. For ‘The Swamp In Your Dressing Room,’ he reached back to J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, both of whom used swamp imagery to conjure the sublime — the play of light and shadow, the atmosphere of awe and reflection.
Laney Contemporary
Established in 2017 in Savannah, Georgia, Laney Contemporary provides a platform for emerging and established artists alike, with a strong commitment to Savannah’s diverse arts community through talks, collaborations and thoughtful curatorial projects. At the fair, the gallery showed a curated pairing of Jiha Moon, of Tallahassee, and James Benjamin Franklin, of Detroit — a presentation squarely aligned with Untitled’s 2024 mission of building a sustainable arts ecosystem through the exchange of ideas and practice between East and West.
Taken together, the presentations captured exactly what makes Untitled worth the trip. This is a fair that rewards curiosity at every turn, and one that treats geographic breadth as the whole point. Thirteen editions in, it remains one of the most generous rooms in Miami during the busiest week of the art calendar.
Untitled Art returned to Miami Beach for its 13th edition. Visit the Untitled Art website for more.
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