The annual Miami Beach incarnation of Art Basel is known today as much for product launches, A-list celebrity pop-ins, and “brand-synergy,” as for gallery sales. If there is a certain undeniable glamour in this there is also a creeping fatigue for the ubiquity of lifestyle focused festival culture. This is not so much a case of identity-struggle between art fair and party as it is the dawning recognition that the idea of snacking on caviar and blinis among representatives of the New York, London, and Tokyo gallery scene contrasts only too sharply with the reality of doing so off disposable plates with few places to sit in a cavernous event center. Drinking Veuve Clicquot out of the plastic stemware might be reasonably said to characterize the spirit of the affair in 2023.

 

        Large sections of the floor were dominated by blue chip galleries and their mainstays. A cursory glance at the top sales confirms the staying power of twentieth-century stalwarts such as Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauschenberg, and, of course, Philipp Guston whose Painter at Night (1979) topped them all at a staggering $20 million. Still there was some room for genuine excitement even at the top. Tracy Emin’s Deep Feelings (2023) which sold for more than $1.6 million was among the most powerful figurative pieces in a fair where figuration loomed large. Though reiterating the artists’ most recognizable themes—the nude woman’s body tangled in sheets, the disheveled bedroom and its sparse furnishings—the canvas is positively electrified by the surety of Emin’s line and her reliance on uncomfortably angular contours. It is also, to be sure, more immediately saleable than the ambiguously but unmistakably violent canvases of her “Lover’s Grave” show which opened a month earlier at White Cube New York.

 

        The impression that the artist has settled into a once-unlikely role as a torchbearer for the formal, painterly expressionism of the previous century was made clear when contrasted with the nearby display by London’s Pillar Corias gallery. Gisela McDaniel’s canvases elicit some of the discomfort of Emin’s early works while undercutting much of the intimacy and vulnerability that My Bed relied upon. The Detroit-based McDaniel, a Pacific islander, has described her works as acts of reclamation—both of the colonizing gaze and of the autonomy of BIPOC women’s bodies from sexual violence. In Portrait in Belonging/Belongings (2023) a vibrant, even DayGlo, palette reappropriates and subverts Gaugin’s colors to celebrate the brown body. Emin’s works have often relied upon the titillation of rendering the private in public. McDaniel’s refuses to engage with that binary and its concurrent juxtaposition of shame and exhibitionism. Her painted domestic interiors, sometimes, as here, with objects belonging to her sitters affixed to the work, are instead ones that respond to our own moment in which the constant presence of the phone camera has made such distinctions meaningless and neutralized their powers to sensationalize.

 

        Mexico City’s galleries gave a strong showing in the exhibition hall. The range of works on display by Proyectos Monclova rivaled any gallery in the fair. Perhaps most viscerally exciting was the frosting-like impasto and cartoonish joy of Mexican-born but Cape Town-based Georgina Gratrix.Tears for Fears with Lilies (2022) employed thick accretions of oil on linen to blur boundaries between painting, sculpture, and illustration.Two works from Germán Venegas’s stuccoed wood Serie Tlacolan  combined the sculptural languages of modernism and the iconography of the Aztec/Mexica deities. Though rooted in tradition, their bold forms seemed to carve out a fully contemporary space within the bustling exhibition hall. On the other hand, despite a strong roster of international artists, galleria OMR of Mexico City made a somewhat less successful appeal to a market thirsty for works that immediately signaled their origins. Two examples of the Swiss Claudia Comete’s Kai (marble cactus) 2022, capable of maintaining a delicate balance between monumentality and whimsy in a different context, stood out here as heavy-handed signage alerting passersby to the gallery’s “Mexican-ness.”

 

        One welcome surprise among the labyrinthine hall was Dublin and London mainstay mother’s tankstation limited. The gallery presented a series of recent works by the American painter Matt Bollinger. These canvases depicted a single figure or small group in a quotidian rural or suburban setting. In the Clearing (2023) presents two adolescents, one with skateboard in hand, uneasily leaning against and sitting upon an abandoned sofa in landscape at dusk. The painting captures the uncertainty about—and even fear of—the future which often masquerades as teenaged boredom. Like those of McDaniel, Bollinger’s paintings refuse to engage in voyeurism and his subjects confront the viewer head on, uncomfortably returning our gaze. They rely, above all, on the painter’s confidence with the figure and his ability to render as solid, even sculptural, fleeting moments of American lives. Such latter-day genre painting has the potential to shade into caricature in less capable bands, but Bollinger’s formal precision and clear empathy elevate would-be stereotypes to works that exist somewhere in the borderlands between field recording, monument, and requiem.

 

        Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman gallery offered one last unexpected thrill in the form of Basim Al-Shaker’s cosmic psychedelia. The largest and most impressive of these canvases Ablution and Absolution (2022), exerted an undeniable visual magnetism that seemed to embody the old-fashioned value of “wall power.” Though drawn from the Iraqi-born artist’s experiences during the American invasion and its aftermath Al-Shaker’s canvases exude a sense of generation and joy. The painter has described his work as capturing the momentary elation upon recognizing that one has survived a bomb blast. For viewers fortunate not to share this experience, the vermillion flames and swirling green and yellow vapor emanating from surrounding darkness might recall instead nebulae, the birth of stars, even the first moments of the universe. The straightforward, visually arresting joy Al-Shaker wrenches from loss was a jarring but welcome shock amidst the unending sea of white temporary walls.

        With 277 galleries exhibiting this year (only slightly down from the 283 that participated in 2022), any summary of the fair is, at best, provisional. Some broad trends emerged, of course. Figurative painting was prominent both throughout the exhibition hall and at the high end of sales lists. The increasing internationalization of the Miami event was likewise on full display with 25 first-time exhibitions including galleries hailing from Egypt and Brazil. The sheer variety is, however, part of the point. For while the highest prices fell on average from the post-pandemic heights of 2022, the volume of sales ticked up markedly. This trend might speak to the growing diversity, though hardly democratization, of contemporary art. It certainly speaks to the market variegation to which the sheer scale of Art Basel Miami caters.

 

 

Sean Roberts is Senior Lecturer at the University of Tennessee and former director of Virginia Commonwealth University’s art history program in Doha, Qatar. Along with many journal articles and book chapters he is the author of Printing a Mediterranean World published by Harvard University Press. Most recently he co-edited The Environment and Ecology in Islamic Art and Culture which appeared last year with Yale University Press.