The latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach sees exhibitors return with a fresh selection of works, providing a momentary distraction from concerns surrounding the state of the art market.
On the cusp of the inaugural Art Basel Qatar in two months’ time, this year’s edition of the over half-century-old Art Basel Miami Beach has more than 250 exhibitors on view at the city’s Convention Center. Although only a handful of MENA-based galleries are present, there are many artists from the region delivering a noticeable statement.
Art Basel Miami Beach anchors what is without doubt the most ambitious art week in the Americas. Besides the dominant European, American and Latin American presence, the fair also offers a number of Arab voices available for exploration. Among those, Nairy Baghramian is a standout. Her enigmatic sculpture of a sleek garbage bin, entitled Waste Basket (bin for rejected ideas) (2017), is hung on a wall at Marian Goodman Gallery’s booth as an homage to fleeting mental sparks. The Iran-born German artist – who makes bodily sculptures that allude both to architectural restraints and corporal possibilities – has also been announced as the winner of the Established Artist prize at the inaugural Art Basel Awards.
Back at the fair, numerous female voices are cutting through the aisles with inviting materials and layered narratives. Ghada Amer at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s booth has a group of applied canvases which radiate with their textured surfaces – punctured with cotton and laden with feminist messages, the energetic works weave together joy and resistance. Hayv Kahraman with Jack Shainman Gallery exhibits the large linen painting, Rain Ritual (2024), on which a quartet of women form a cyclic force through grabbing each others’ hair. Innate to the Iraqi-born artist’s particular visual universe, the subjects appear both alluringly mythical and brutally real, with their disarming expressions and complex flexibilities, while in the work on view a sense of lunar rhythm feels both haunting and freeing.
Fresh from unveiling her permanent 12-metre-wide installation, The Ziggurat Splits the Sky, at the expanded Princeton University Museum, Diana Al-Hadid shows with Olney Gleason a panel of an oozing landscape, conveyed in her signature material alchemy of polymer gypsum, fibreglass, steel, plaster, metal leaf and pigment. Both grand and grotesque, the semi-abstracted work, entitled Mid-October (2025), stands as an exploration of history’s linearity and of humanity’s perpetual urge to progress – and regress.
Following the placement of her monumental sculpture, First Sun, at the southeast entrance of Central Park with Public Art Fund, Monira Al Qadiri continues her US presence with a work at Perrotin (where she also had a solo show recently). Three sculptures from her Spectrum series complete beauty, desire and value with a look at the history of the pearl trade. 3D-printed and coated with car paint, forms inspired by oil drills have iridescent tones and sharply ornate silhouettes, which remove their extractive purposes and present them as jewels.
New York gallery Uffner & Liu’s group presentation includes Arghavan Khosravi’s three-dimensional structurally precise painting, A Conversation (2025), in which two cubic portraits are joined by thin chains. Sheree Hovsepian’s two mixed-media prints, on the other hand, possess architectural rhythms slicing through her subjective approach to lines and gentle materials, such as ceramic and strings. Another group presentation at Alexander Gray Associates includes Untitled (ArabesqueComposition) (2022–23), an abstract painting by Kamrooz Aram, whose non-figurative gestures make bold references to ornamentation and beauty in defiance of Western modernism’s rigid framework for colour and visual exuberance.
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