The soaring overhead costs of participating in art fairs for emerging and small galleries is hardly an industry secret, and the recent market precariousness only contributes to the risk of taking on stand fees and logistical costs for unpredictable returns in sales. Art Basel Miami Beach (6-8 December) has responded to the turbulent market by introducing a range of reduced stand sizes for its main Galleries section. This new offering by the fair has led to the record number of 34 first-time exhibitors across all of its sections in the fair’s 22-year history.
“Smaller booth scales made a lot of sense,” Bridget Finn, the Miami fair’s new director, tells The Art Newspaper. “It has been a challenging year for galleries.”
The new stand scale, which spans 30 to 41 square metres, has allowed 20 new exhibitors to make their debut in Galleries, the main section that traditionally features global heavy-hitters and upper-middle size exhibitors, almost all of which typically are returning participants.
Of the 229 exhibitors in Galleries, 13 have graduated from the fair’s smaller sections: Survey, Positions and Nova. Those include New York’s Meredith Rosen Gallery, Instituto de Visión from Bogotá, Afriart Gallery from Kampala in Uganda, London-based Edel Assanti and Miami’s own Central Fine. This has been encouraged by the fair also offering previous special section exhibitors a two-year discounted rate for taking part in Galleries. This discount makes the upgrade comparable to participating in Nova, the section dedicated to ultra-contemporary work created in the past three years.
Stability from a reduced scale
“The idea came out of conversations with galleries asking for the opportunity to grow at a smaller footprint,” says Finn, who also draws from her own exhibitor experience in the Positions section with her former gallery in Detroit, Reyes Finn. “Smaller galleries think through each and every cost before applying, and this reduced scale will help them with some stability.”
Additionally, the main section will welcome seven galleries making their first Art Basel Miami Beach appearance, including Hong Kong’s Pearl Lam Galleries, Gallery Wendi Norris from San Francisco and New York’s Martos Gallery.
The fair’s other special sections will also welcome international newcomers. The nine galleries debuting in Nova include Espacio Valverde from Madrid, Gallery Vacancy from Shanghai and Charles Moffett from New York. In Positions, the section dedicated to focused solo presentations, the eight first-time galleries include Bucharest-based Catinca Tabacaru and New York gallery Gordon Robichaux. Of this year’s Positions participants, 70% hail from Central and South America, including the newcomers Carmo Johnson Projects from São Paulo and Piedras from Buenos Aires.
The idea has come out of conversations with galleries asking for the opportunity to grow at a smaller footprint
Bridget Finn, director, Art Basel Miami Beach
The largest cohort of first-time galleries is in Survey, which showcases work created before the year 2000 with an emphasis on solo stands. Warsaw’s Gunia Nowik Gallery, Gajah Gallery from Singapore, Portland-based ILY2 and New York’s Sapar Contemporary are among the ten galleries new to the fair. Sapar Contemporary, a gallery focused on artists from Central Asia, Caucasus and Mongolia, makes its fair debut in the Survey section with a stand dedicated to the fibre work of American artist Yvonne Pacanovsky Bobrowicz. The gallery programme’s focus on parts of the world that are underrepresented in the global commercial art market makes fair participation “very important”, says founder Nina Levent, adding that the gallery aims to “prioritise art fairs that draw international collectors and museum curators”.
A broader global reach
Art Basel is seeing a wider collector base, Finn says, perhaps tied to the fair’s inclusion of galleries from a broader European map, such as Bucharest, Lisbon and Warsaw, as well as new cities from major markets, such as Madrid and Antwerp. The Cologne gallery Jan Kaps, for example, makes its Miami debut in Galleries with a group stand of key roster names, such as German abstract painter Melike Kara, Mexican sculptor Berenice Olmedo and the emerging Syrian painter Rasha Omar.
Beloved for championing intergenerational queer artists, New York gallery Gordon Robichaux will take part in Positions this year with a solo presentation of Agosto Machado’s mixed media sculptures. The Chinese-Spanish-Filipino artist and activist—who was instrumental in the Stonewall uprising and posed for Peter Hujar and Andy Warhol—creates captivating shrines about celebration and loss. Co-owner Sam Gordon, who organised Machado’s first solo show at the gallery two years ago, says he appreciates the fair’s “peer-driven perspective” and hopes to participate in next year’s Paris edition. “When fairs work, they really work,” he says.
Another first-time gallerist, Charles Moffett, is hopeful about participating in Nova and the chance to offer collectors and curators access to work by artists that they may never have heard of before, he says. The gallerist’s materially rich debut pairs Kim Dacres’s totemic recycled tyre sculptures with needle-felted wool portraits by Melissa Joseph and includes a collaborative mixed-media sculpture by the two artists. As a gallery with a single location, Moffett invests in fair participation to reach new audiences: “Nothing fully replaces the experience of looking at, experiencing and talking about art, and art fairs can play that critical role for us in markets where we may not have a consistent presence otherwise,” he says.
Agosto Machado’s Untitled (Altar) (2022) at Gordon Robichaux, showing for the first time in Positions
Courtesy Gordon Robichaux
Finn sees a parallel between carving out room for newcomers and the fair’s commitment to face the future of the industry. “We have to deliver a certain quality level, but also be flexible enough to usher in what is next,” she says.
- Art Basel Miami Beach, 6-8 December