HOLIDAY ART FAIR HIGHLIGHTS
DECEMBER 2023
Closing out a year of art-market slowdown, Miami did not disappoint in its fair presentations this year. Celebrating its 21st anniversary, Art Basel Miami Beach returned with plenty of great work to be found for serious collectors who know where to look. 277 galleries exhibited at the fair, a slight reduction from 283 at last year’s venture, but an abundant selection of large-scale paintings, sculpture and photography were on view. The other satellite fairs, including Untitled and NADA, also presented interesting works, with textiles and tactile surfaces noticed as a theme throughout all the fairs.
Works tended to be on the more conservative side, image-wise, and collectors asked many questions pertaining to an artist's politics given the environment and atmosphere of the world in which we are currently living. Miami did not escape a few protests outside one of the fairs, just beyond the monumental-sized milk cartons showing the faces of hostages that had been kidnapped in Gaza.
Read on for some of our favorite picks from the fairs…
CALEB HAHNE QUINTANA
Caleb Hahne Quintana is a documenter of light. Across portraiture, landscape, and still life paintings his nuanced, meditative observations reveal that our environments encapsulate specific states of mind. His approach to these familiar subjects is tender, showing a sense of care in capturing the familiar. He begins with drawing—a step he describes as “liberating” and will often repeat subjects across media including, colored pencil, ink, and gouache before moving to “the more arduous act of painting.” Hahne Quintana’s paintings elevate the mundane to the profound and the overlooked to the monumental through his emotional responses to place and memory.
Caleb Hahne Quintana was born in 1993 in Denver, CO and received a BFA in Fine Arts from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. His work was recently acquired by the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami); and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Hahne Quintana currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
MAIA CRUZ PALILEO
Maia Cruz Palileo is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings navigate themes of migration and the concept of home. Influenced by the oral history of their family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Palileo infuses these narratives using both memory and imagination. They produce paintings of dream-like quality that hover between fact and fiction. Palileo’s works offer a panoramic lens through which to investigate the larger questions pertaining to forgotten histories and how best to honor these stories in perpetuity.
Their work is in the collections of The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; and The Fredriksen Collection at the National Museum of Oslo, Norway. Palileo was born in 1979 in Chicago, IL and received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY in 2008) and BA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA in 2001. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
NATE LEWIS
Nate Lewis was born and raised outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the town of Beaver Falls. Prior to pursuing a career in art, he earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University and practiced critical-care nursing in Washington, D.C.–area hospitals for nine years.
Lewis is best known for his intricate works on paper, which combine elements of drawing, photography, printmaking, and sculpture, and explore connections among visualizations, anatomy and physical movement, medical diagnostics, and healing. His most recent works, shown here and exhibited at ABMB, capture dancers in motions with limbs intertwined against richly textured backgrounds, which not only envelop the figures but also accentuate their curvilinear body movements. Lewis aims to challenge people’s perspectives on race and history through distortion and illusion. Treating the paper like an organism itself, he sculpts patterns using a picotage technique, akin to cellular tissue and anatomical elements. By virtue of his medical training, he is interested in the tensions that exist within and without us. Ultimately, the work embraces humanistic ideas of human connection and understanding.
Lewis’s work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.
SOUMYA NETRABILE
Soumya Netrabile’s works emerge from memories from her daily walks. Within forests of green, amber, and peach, occasional animals or figures appear from scrawled yet intentional flickering brushwork - dwarfed by their swirling surroundings. Netrabile is a painter who thinks like a poet, using paint to suggest something larger. Formal choices, light, color, and gesture emerge from internalized locations beyond logic and justification.
Soumya Netrabile was born in 1966 in Bangalore, India and received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University. Netrabile’s work has been acquired by public collections including Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and University Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Netrabile lives and works in Chicago, IL.
OLIVER BEER
Oliver Beer trained in musical composition before attending the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. This musical background is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of vessels, bodies, and architectural environments. In his work, Beer explores the unifying potential of music that resonates across history, generations and cultures.
Oliver Beer’s Resonance Painting series visualizes the harmonies that the artist cultivates through his sculptural, painting and performance practices. He explains that 'people don’t realize that music has physical form: if you could see music vibrating air around us, you would see beautiful geometries in three dimensions.’ Works such as Resonance Painting (Inhale) (featured here) allow the artist to capture these geometric patterns on canvas. Each painting is named after a song that Beer was listening to while making the work - in this example, ‘Inhale’ by Yazz Ahmed. The painting is created by positioning a speaker beneath a horizontally-oriented canvas upon which dry, powdered pigment has been scattered. Beer plays musical notes that cause the canvas to vibrate, moving and shaping the pigment into visual representations of the sound waves. These appear on the surface of the works in undulating patterns and are subsequently frozen in place using a unique fixing technique developed by the artist. In this way, he produces a visual record of the music, freezing the intangible medium in time and space. In Resonance Painting (Inhale), the pigment forms gently curved lines and rounded shapes which resemble the crests of waves.
Carefully composing notes with his musical ear, Beer builds a vocabulary of precise abstract forms that reveal the ‘shape of sound’, allowing him to develop a unique method of painting on canvas.
Beer lives and works in London and Paris. His work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Met Breuer and MoMA PS1 in New York; Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Palace of Versailles in Paris; and the Venice, Sydney and Istanbul biennials.
HIBA KALACHE
In 2020, an explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon marked one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history. In the chaos that descended upon Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion, Hiba Kalache made the decision to leave her family home for the fourth time. Returning to San Francisco, where she earned her Masters of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2005, she set up a studio and returned to work, insistent upon processing this latest chapter of violence through her paintings.
The paintings are abstract, but they attempt to depict something of the moment we find ourselves in today. They are both an act of protest and an attempt at escape. They look for beauty and rebirth in the explosion of blossoms spilling over a casket. They are grasping for answers to unanswerable questions, and challenging us to move forward with empathy and find connection through our shared humanity.
RUGIYATOU JALLOW
Jallow hails from Sweden and is of mixed heritage: her mother is Swedish and her father, who was her primary caregiver, is from the Gambia. She comes from a matrilineal line of creatives: her mother and grandmother both painted, which instilled in her a love for the medium since she was a child.
Her paintings explore the representation of women like herself, who identify with different races and who struggle to fit into either milieu. Her canvases tell stories about these women, who are underrepresented in the history of art as well as contemporary practice. In her latest series, female subjects are seen at rest or doing leisure activities.
The paintings are notable for their innovative technique: Jallow likes to begin with an acrylic base as she prefers the brushstrokes that are created. She then sketches the composition onto the canvas and paints the flesh colors and additional background areas in oil. The hairstyles are done freehand, and she always tries different styles that represent the many variations of mixed-race women. In the final layer the artist incorporates thread into her canvases, which acts as another form of pigment and represents familial bloodlines. While the artist has used red fiber to represent the ancestries, in the new work she uses thread that ranges in color and corresponds to light and shadow on the skin tones of her female characters.
The artist has an abiding interest in depicting hands, which for her are signifiers of the ancestors of her female subjects. In And Her Eyes Were Held By The Sun, seen above, a hand floats in space, connecting a thread to her reclining woman, perhaps a metaphor for the artist as creator and muse.
ISHI GLINSKY
Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Ishi Glinsky grounds his multidisciplinary practice in an exploration of the traditions of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, as well as other North American First Nations. Working in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, and sculpture, Glinsky honors Indigenous histories by creating contemporary tributes to sacred practices, subsequently integrating the past with the present. Moving fluidly from painting to sculpture, abstraction to representation, Glinsky unifies his practice through an interest in scale, often disproportionately enlarging smaller objects to both amplify indigenous practices and stories and memorialize them in the form of monuments to survival. Glinsky’s sculptures, one of which was exhibited at ABMB, seen here, transform found and repurposed materials into monumental homages to craft traditions.
Ishi lives and works in Los Angeles, California. In 2022, Glinsky presented his first institutional survey at The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, CA. His work was recently included in Made in LA, 2023: Acts of Living, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
TODD GRAY
Best known for photography, performance, and sculpture that address race, class, and power, Todd Gray explores the legacies of colonialism in Africa and strives to dismantle the visual conditions that pervade art and culture today.
Gray’s three-dimensional photocollages contest anti-Black narratives through the artist’s deconstruction of images from his archive. Compiled over the past fifty years and including pictures of individuals, historic sites, rural scenes, and slave fortresses and trails in West Africa and Ghana (where he has a studio); formal gardens of imperial Europe; stars and galaxies; images of musicians (taken by Gray as a professional photographer for album covers and international magazines), his work aims to rupture the traditions of photography.
Gray’s visual language serves to build and rebuild identity while highlighting a multiplicity of perspectives. His photographs shift between different conceptual iterations, defying historical specificity or literal translation and refusing erasure as the racialized and gendered critiques remain open-ended. The frames in his work also multiply, building upon the surfaces of those preceding. Ultimately, Gray urges the viewer to be more aware of how we are active partners in constructing meaning—the complex layering of images provides multiple lenses through which one can explore and create such new perspectives.
Gray received both his B.F.A and M.F.A from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, in 1979 and 1989, respectively. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Getty Center, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; University of Connecticut, Hartford, CT; University of Parma, Parma, Italy; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2018 LA Metro commissioned Gray to create artwork for the Wilshire/La Cienega station and in 2007, Gray was commissioned to create a public artwork for the Los Angeles International Airport.
LORIEL BELTRAN
Loriel Beltran was born in 1985 in Caracas, Venezuela but currently lives and works in Miami, FL. He creates sculptural accumulations of paint and color that defy traditional notions of artistic media.
To create his works, Beltrán produces custom molds and pours paint into them, allowing the paint to harden and dry over time. The artist sometimes integrates objects into his molds–such as leftover materials or detritus from his studio–to introduce “interruptions” into his compositions. He repeats this process for months or even years, as layers of paint coagulate and accumulate. The artist then removes the mold and slices the resulting object–a hardened block with swirls and layers of color–into strips using a custom-built machine. The strips are arranged into bold, planar compositions, which he adheres to a wooden substrate.
Beltrán earned his B.F.A from the New World School of the Arts, Miami, FL. His work is included in a number of notable private and public collections, including the de la Cruz Collection, Miami FL; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; and Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, among others.
CARLOS VEGA
Carlos Vega is a painter inspired by history, mythology and religion, which he uses as a point of departure to explore questions around humanity. His work often incorporates historical documents—such as antique ledgers, typed cards from library catalogs, postage stamps, newspapers and labels—into paintings on canvas and sometimes lead, which he then punctures, etches, and paints over. Vega also often uses allegorical iconography, such as trees, with their implicit references to family trees or trees of life, and animals, particularly elephants and donkeys.
Vega was born in Melilla, Spain and currently lives and works between New York and Granada.