There are some changes at Art Basel Miami Beach this year.
Let’s look at the map. Last year at the fair, there were four shared booths in the Nova section for young galleries; only two shared booths appeared in the main sector, with the New York–based Bortolami gallery splitting one with London’s Thomas Dane, and New York’s Franklin Parrasch splitting his with his Los Angeles project, Parrasch Heijnen.This year, the situation has flipped. The only galleries sharing a booth in Nova are Isabel Aninat and Espacio Valverde (the latter shared a Nova booth with Fabian Lang last year), and in the main sector, it’s not just Bortolami/Dane and Parrash/Parrasch Heijnen that are pairing up. It’s also New York galleries Andrew Kreps and Anton Kern, whose namesake dealers are longtime friends; New York’s March gallery and LA’s Parker; and São Paulo’s Galatea and Buenos Aires’s Isla Flotante.
Other changes to the map: the Positions sector, for solo presentations, has moved into a regular gallery booth section, right next to the Washington Street side of the fair floor, between exits A and B; in its place is the new Zero 10 initiative for digital art, announced in early November. All this adds up to a map where it looks like less space is dedicated to the main sector, perhaps in reflection of a wobbly market for the fair’s bread and butter: fresh-from-the-studio contemporary art.
On that subject, it seems only appropriate that the big news story going into art week is the birth of a new gallery, Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries. Partner Marc Glimcher told the New York Times that the gallery will solve the problem of there being “no great, great secondary market galleries.” (That the paper showed no skepticism toward such a dubious claim perhaps speaks to the quality of its market coverage. But kudos to Glimcher for getting away with that flex.) After all, the New York auctions were largely about great historical material.
So, here are a few things that are coming to the fair in the secondary market department—aside from that Warhol Muhammad Ali painting you’ve probably heard so much about. David Zwirner is bringing the Jeff Koons sculpture Balloon Venus Lespugue (Red),2013–19, from the artist’s “Antiquity” series. You may recall that Zwirner reportedly sold this sculpture in June 2020 from its online showroom for $8 million. You may also recall that Koons just returned to Gagosian gallery after a brief spell with Pace. Before that, he did a brief spell with both Gagosian and Zwirner. (It’s getting hard to keep up.) Balloon Venus Lespugue (Red) was recently on view at PM23, the newly opened cultural hub by Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giametti’s foundation, Fondazione FVG in a 17th century palazzo in Rome. Valentino told WWD that three of the pieces on view in the show belonged to him, but would not say which, so we don’t know if Balloon Venus is one of them, but it’s worth noting that Valentino was selling art in the New York auctions at Sotheby’s, including pieces by Warhol, Marilyn Minter, and Neo Rauch.
One of the fair’s smallest works may end up being one of its buzziest. Weinstein Gallery is bringing Frida Kahlo’s Autorretrato en Miniatura (Self-Portrait in Miniature), which measures just two inches tall. The piece, which was on view in 2019 at the the Napa Valley Museum Yountville as part of the two-week exhibition “Les Femmes Surréalistes,” came up for sale at Sotheby’s New York in 2011 with an estimate of $800,000–$1.2 million but failed to sell. Now it has some wind behind its sails coming from the $54.7 million brought in for a different Kahlo self-portrait, landing a new record for an artwork by a woman at auction. Weinstein also has some intriguing Surrealist pictures, including Yves Tanguy’s 1930 painting Second Message III, which last sold at auction in 2003 at Christies for £369,650, and Kay Sage’sJournal of a Conjuror (1955), which last sold at auction Sotheby’s £225,000 in February 2020, before selling again, this time at Sotheby’s Paris in 2024, for €240,000.
Speaking of the auctions, given that Lynne Drexler’s work set a new record for her 1960 painting Keller Fair II, which sold for $2.03 million at Christie’s, it’s no surprise that works by her from the same time period are coming to Miami. New York gallery Berry Campbell is bringing a large-scale Drexler painting, Blue Bay (1968), as part of its exploration of women AbEx artists like Alice Baber, Bernice Bing, Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Judith Godwin, and Ethel Schwabacher. And White Cube is bringing Drexler’s 1963 painting Tribute. (Mnuchin gallery appears to have shown this painting in its booth in Art Basel in Switzerland 2023.)
Lévy Gorvy is the gallery bringing the Warhol painting of Muhammand Ali—but it’s not the only one with works by the Pop artist at the fair. Gagosian has a 1961 painting, A Boy for Meg, that appears to have been in the collection of TV producer Bill Bell. (There’s another version of this painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The work was also in the news recently for Meghan Markle–related reasons.) Lévy Gorvy’s Muhammad Ali painting is priced at $18 million, but we hear that there will be more expensive offerings at the fair. For what it’s worth, Hauser & Wirth has a 1951 Pablo Picasso portrait of Paloma, and there will surely be a few surprises on the first VIP day tomorrow.
Art Basel Miami Beach first-timer Richard Saltoun Gallery is bringing Olga de Amaral’s Hojarasca barbas de piedra (1973). This is the piece that sold for $444,500 at Sotheby’s this past February, blasting past its pre-sale estimate of $80,000–$120,000 and making it the second-highest record for a work by de Amaral from the 1970s. In the auction cycle that just ended, de Amaral’s work was a huge hit.
And lastly, not one but at least two large artworks are taking on the subject of banned books—a hot topic in Florida. One is Es Devlin’s huge installation on the beach outside the Faena Hotel. The other is in the Meridians section of Art Basel, where New York gallery Freight+Volume is presenting Ward Shelley’s installation The Last Library IV: Written in Water (2020–25), a walk-in paper-and-wood installation filled with fabricated banned books and pseudo-documents.
See you around the fair this week.
