Pablo Picasso, The two children on view (1954) at Gary Nader Art Centre.
A Hidden Picasso Comes to Light: The Untold Story Behind ‘The Two Children’ (1954)
Gary Nader Art Centre presents one of Picasso’s most intimate, fiercely protected works from his 1954 Vallauris series of Claude and Paloma
During a pivotal and emotionally charged moment in his life, Pablo Picasso created a deeply personal suite of six paintings in 1954 portraying his youngest children, Claude and Paloma. These works—tender, introspective, and stylistically radical—were painted in Vallauris shortly after the end of his relationship with Françoise Gilot. Today, one of these rare canvases, The Two Children (dated 14 May 1954 on the reverse), emerges from decades of private protection to be shown at Gary Nader Art Centre.
This is not merely an artwork “never before seen.” Its significance lies in why it remained unseen.
A Father Painting Through Absence, Memory, and Love
In early 1954, after the painful separation from Françoise Gilot the previous year, Picasso was visited by Claude and Paloma in Vallauris. Their presence triggered a burst of creativity anchored in longing, affection, and the fragile balance of a family reorganizing itself.
Across six oil paintings—each approximately 116 × 89 cm—Picasso explored themes of childhood, imagination, and emotional distance. Claude, often depicted in blue, appears absorbed in drawing or play; Paloma, in green, becomes a symbol of quiet contemplation. The aesthetic language is deceptively simple: flat planes of color, linear silhouettes, and a childlike purity that recalls Matisse’s late cut-outs, completed just months before the master’s death.
Art historians have long noted Picasso’s lifelong fascination with childhood. “At eight, I was Raphael,” he famously said. “It took me a whole lifetime to paint like a child.” The 1954 series is the culmination of that pursuit.
Gary Nader during the opening gala of the Picasso to Botero exhibition at Gary Nader Art Centre.
Two Works, One Moment — Why This Canvas Matters
Among the six paintings, the most widely known is Claude dessinant, Françoise et Paloma (17 May 1954), housed in the Musée Picasso–Paris. What few people know is that just three days earlier, on 14 May 1954, Picasso painted another version of the same poetic moment—The Two Children, the work now presented in Miami.
Both paintings share striking similarities in composition, palette, and emotional vocabulary. The closeness of their dates suggests that Picasso, immersed in the fragile intimacy of reconnecting with his children, was experimenting with subtle variations on a feeling rather than on a form: capturing fleeting tenderness through repetition, like holding a breath he didn’t want to release.
A striking installation view of ‘Picasso to Botero’ at Gary Nader Art Centre, featuring rare portraits and the 1954 masterpiece The Two Children. The exhibition is on view through March 28, 2026.
Why Picasso Never Sold It
Unlike many works that circulated quickly through galleries and private collections, the 1954 series of Claude and Paloma remained in Picasso’s personal domain for decades. These paintings were not merely artistic studies—they were fragments of his inner life.
Picasso kept them. Guarded them. Protected them. They were, in a very real sense, part of his family.
Scholars such as Kirk Varnedoe, Werner Spies, and Susan Galassi interpret these works as a turning point: precursors to the later Las Meninas variations, meditations on domesticity, memory, and legacy. They are among the few works in which the public persona of Picasso recedes to reveal the private father—vulnerable, searching, profoundly human.
The Two Children was one of the canvases he never considered commercializing. Its emergence today invites not only admiration but reflection: how does one quantify a father’s affection that survived heartbreak? How does one display something the artist himself protected from the world?
Gary Nader at first sight with Picasso’s The Two Children (1954)
Gary Nader at first sight with Picasso’s The Two Children (1954)
A Rare Opportunity to Encounter an Intimate PicassoToday, The Two Children stands as a poetic testament to love, loss, and artistic reinvention. Its presence at the Gary Nader Art Centre offers an unprecedented opportunity to engage with a moment of Picasso’s life that was never meant to be public—until now. Visitors are invited to experience this extraordinary work in person and witness a side of Picasso that history often overlooks:the father, the observer, the man searching for emotional clarity through simplicity. And if you leave wondering how such a fiercely cherished canvas—long held within the private orbit of Picasso’s estate—found its way into the collection of Gary Nader… Well, perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to cross paths with Gary in the galleries. If so, ask him.Some stories deserve to be heard directly from the one who made the impossible possible.
ABOUT GARY NADER ART CENTRE:Located in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District, the Gary Nader Art Centre is one of the world’s most prestigious and dynamic galleries. With a strong focus on modern and contemporary art, it has gained international acclaim for its groundbreaking exhibitions and its pivotal role in promoting global artistic excellence, with a particular emphasis on Latin American contributions. The gallery regularly hosts solo and group shows featuring iconic artists such as Basquiat, Botero, Chagall, Cruz-Diez, Dubuffet, Kahlo, Picasso, Rivera, Lam, Warhol, and many more.As the largest gallery in the world — spanning 55,000 square feet — the Gary Nader Art Centre houses a main exhibition hall, the Nader Museum, the immersive Botero Immersed Experience (featuring the world’s largest private collection of works by the Colombian master), and the Nader Sculpture Park, located in the Miami Design District. This one-of-a-kind outdoor exhibition space features over 50 monumental sculptures by renowned international artists. In a short time, it has become a cultural must-see for both locals and tourists and a premier venue for fashion shows, musical performances, cultural events, and private gatherings. With a private collection of more than 2,000 artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries, the Centre offers an expansive and profound perspective on global modern and contemporary art. Founded by Gary Nader in 1985, the gallery has become a cornerstone of Miami’s art scene. Nader’s vision and dedication have been essential in building the Centre’s global reputation and expanding its impact on the international art world.
One-of-a-kind artworks perfect for gifting or keeping.
Focus Collections are curated selections of works by new artists, available for a limited-time only.
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Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao (CHIAOZZA) Adrian Kay Wong Agnes Walden Alex Proba Aliza Cohen Alma Charry Anastasia Greer Andrew Alba Angel Oloshove Anna Beeke Anna Koeferl Anna Moller Anton Nazarko Arantxa Solis Arielle Zamora Arlina Cai Aschely Vaughan Cone Ashely Peifer Ashok Sinha Ba Ousmane Bbblob Ben Skinner Bill Finger Blake Aaseby Britt Bass Brittany Ferns Brooke Holm Bryce Anderson Carla Weeks Carmen McNall Carmen Vela Caroline Walls Carrie Crawford Chad Kouri Chloe Fields Christian Nguyen Christina Flowers Christina Watka Clay Mahn Colleen Ho Damien Davis Dan Covert Dana Bechert Dana Bell David Rhoads Devon Reina Diana Delgado Dolly Faibyshev Eddie K Eddie Perrote Elisa Gomez Eltono Erik Barthels Erin D. Garcia Erin Lynn Welsh Erin Zhao Evan Venegas Evi O. Fay Ku Fitzhugh Karol Gabrielle Raaff Gail Tarantino Gizem Vural Hayley Sheldon Holly Addi Hyun Jung Ahn Inka Bell J.C. Fontanive Jackie Meier Jackson Joyce Jessica Haye & Clark Hsiao Jessica Simorte Jessica Sinks Jocelyn Tsaih Joe Geis John Platt Jordan Sullivan Karina Bania Kate Clements Kate Roebuck Katrine Hildebrandt-Hussey Kayla Plosz Antiel Keiko Kamata Kimmy Quillin Kit Porter Kostas Papakostas Kyle Pellet Langdon Graves Laura Berman Laura Naples Liesl Pfeffer Linda Colletta Lisa Hunt Lourenço Providência Lucha Rodríguez Lucía Rodríguez Pérez Lydia Bassis Mada Vicassiau Maria de la O Garrido Martina Lang Matt Neuman Mia Farrington Michael Moncibaiz Michael Northrup Millee Tibbs Misato Suzuki Mitch Paster Natalia Nicole Rodríguez Natalie Beall Nefertiti Jenkins Nick Meyer Nicole Anastas Nina Bellucci Olivia Botha Padma Rajendran Paola Rodriguez Arias Paulina Ho Piero Passacantando Pilar Wiley Rachel Levit Ruiz Rachel Sussman Rebeca Raney Robert Otto Epstein Roberta Gentry Roche Ruben Castillo Ruth Freeman Ryan James MacFarland Santiago Ascui Sarah Ingraham Sarah Sullivan Sherrod Saxon Quinn Scott Sueme Senem Oezdogan Sinziana Velicescu Stacey Beach Susan Simonini Teresa Christiansen Thomas Hammer Tony Sjöman Tyler Scheidt Una Ursprung Vicki Sher Ward Roberts William Luz William Storms Xochi Solis
Oil painting’s rich history stretches back centuries, and throughout that time, artists have refined their understanding of ideal painting surfaces. The canvas you choose for oil painting affects not only your immediate working experience but also the longevity and preservation of your artwork for generations to come.
Linen Canvas: The Traditional Gold Standard
Why Linen Remains Supreme for Oil Painting
Linen canvas has earned its reputation as the premier surface for oil painting through centuries of proven performance. Made from flax fibers, linen possesses qualities that align perfectly with oil paint’s unique characteristics and archival requirements.
The dimensional stability of linen proves crucial for oil paintings, which can take months or even years to fully cure. As oil paint oxidizes and hardens, the substrate must remain stable to prevent cracking. Linen’s minimal response to humidity and temperature fluctuations provides the steady foundation oil paintings need throughout their lengthy drying process and beyond.
Linen’s natural strength supports the weight of oil paint layers beautifully. Oil painters often build up substantial impasto, apply multiple glazes, or work wet-into-wet for extended periods. Linen’s robust fibers withstand this physical manipulation without stretching, sagging, or deteriorating under the paint’s weight and the artist’s repeated brushwork.
The texture of quality linen offers an ideal tooth for oil paint. The irregular weave creates a surface that grips paint effectively while allowing brushes to glide smoothly. This tactile quality provides feedback to the painter’s hand, making the physical act of painting more responsive and satisfying. Many artists describe linen as feeling “alive” under the brush in ways other surfaces don’t match.
Linen contains natural oils that provide inherent protection against moisture and contribute to the material’s longevity. These same properties help prevent the canvas from absorbing too much oil from the paint, which can lead to underlayer brittleness over time—a phenomenon known as “sinking in.”
Working with Linen’s Characteristics
Quality linen does require investment, with premium grades costing significantly more than alternatives. However, this expense reflects genuine material superiority rather than mere tradition. For serious oil paintings intended to last, linen’s cost amortizes over the artwork’s potentially centuries-long lifespan.
The preparation of linen demands more skill than cotton. Stretching linen evenly requires experience, and the material can be less forgiving of mistakes. However, these challenges diminish with practice, and many artists find the process rewarding, connecting them to centuries of painting tradition.
Not all linen is created equal. Belgian and Irish linen are often considered the finest, with long, strong flax fibers creating superior weaves. Avoid cheap linen that may contain excessive slubs, irregular thickness, or inferior fiber quality. These defects can telegraph through paint layers and create conservation problems down the line.
Cotton Canvas: The Practical Alternative
Cotton’s Role in Oil Painting
Cotton canvas has become increasingly popular among oil painters, particularly those working at large scales, creating studies, or managing budget constraints. While traditionalists may insist on linen, cotton performs admirably for oil painting when properly prepared and used appropriately.
The affordability of cotton allows oil painters to work larger and experiment more freely. Oil painting already involves significant material costs—quality paints, mediums, brushes—so economizing on canvas can make the medium more accessible without drastically compromising results.
Cotton’s uniform texture appeals to artists seeking smoother surfaces or those whose style doesn’t benefit from pronounced canvas texture. Portrait painters and artists working with fine detail often appreciate cotton’s consistent weave, which interferes less with precise brushwork.
Modern cotton canvases, when properly primed with multiple coats of quality primer, can provide adequate longevity for contemporary oil paintings. While they may not match linen’s centuries-proven track record, properly prepared cotton supports can last many decades with appropriate care.
Cotton’s Limitations for Oil
Cotton’s greater sensitivity to environmental changes presents challenges for oil painting. The material expands and contracts more than linen with humidity fluctuations, potentially stressing paint layers as they cure. This movement increases the risk of cracking, particularly in paintings with heavy impasto or multiple layers.
Cotton absorbs oil more readily than linen, which can lead to problems if the canvas isn’t properly sealed. When oil from the paint soaks into cotton fibers, it can cause the material to become brittle and yellow over time, eventually compromising the painting’s structural integrity.
The archival concerns with cotton become more significant with oil paint than with acrylics. Oil paintings are expected to last indefinitely, and cotton’s relative fragility compared to linen means that works on cotton may require more careful environmental control and may not age as gracefully over extremely long periods.
Canvas Weight and Weave for Oil Painting
Understanding Weight Specifications
For oil painting, canvas weight carries particular importance due to the medium’s physical demands. Lightweight canvases (7-8 oz) generally prove inadequate for oil painting except in very small formats. The material lacks sufficient body to support oil paint’s weight and the physical manipulation involved in oil painting techniques.
Medium-weight canvases (10-12 oz) serve most oil painting applications well, providing good balance between cost, handling characteristics, and durability. These weights offer sufficient strength for paintings up to moderate sizes and can support reasonable impasto without excessive sagging.
Heavyweight canvas (15+ oz) becomes preferable for large-scale works, paintings with substantial impasto, or pieces where maximum longevity is paramount. The additional weight provides reassuring substance and reduces the likelihood of canvas movement affecting paint layers.
Weave Considerations
The tightness of the weave affects both the painting experience and the finished appearance. Fine, tight weaves (often called portrait grade) create smooth surfaces ideal for detailed work, though they may feel less substantial and can be more prone to movement.
Medium weaves offer versatility, providing noticeable texture without being overly pronounced. This weave grade suits most oil painting styles and provides good balance between texture and workability.
Coarse, open weaves create pronounced texture that becomes part of the painting’s character. These surfaces work beautifully for expressive, gestural painting but can overwhelm fine detail. The open weave also requires more careful priming to ensure adequate sealing.
Proper Priming: The Critical Foundation
Oil Priming vs. Acrylic Gesso
The preparation of canvas for oil painting deserves careful attention, as proper priming protects both the canvas and the paint layers. Traditional oil ground—made from rabbit skin glue and lead white or titanium white in oil—creates the most archivally sound surface for oil painting. This ground remains flexible while providing an ideal surface for oil paint adhesion.
Oil-primed linen, available commercially, offers convenience while maintaining traditional advantages. The oil ground creates a surface many painters find superior for brushwork, with paint gliding smoothly and colors appearing particularly luminous. Oil-primed surfaces require extended drying time before use but reward patience with exceptional painting qualities.
Acrylic gesso, while convenient and widely used, isn’t technically gesso at all but rather acrylic polymer primer. It works adequately for oil painting on canvas, particularly when applied in multiple thin coats rather than one thick layer. However, some painters find acrylic gesso creates a slightly more absorbent, less sympathetic surface compared to oil grounds.
Multi-Layer Priming Technique
Regardless of primer choice, multiple thin coats prove superior to single thick applications. Each layer should dry completely before applying the next. Between coats, light sanding creates smoother surfaces and better adhesion for subsequent layers.
For canvas intended for oil painting, ensure complete sealing of the fabric. Any exposed fibers risk contact with oil from the paint, leading to long-term deterioration. Pay particular attention to the edges and back of stretched canvas, areas often inadequately sealed on commercial products.
Canvas Panels and Rigid Supports
Advantages for Oil Painting
Rigid supports—canvas mounted to panels or boards—offer distinct benefits for oil painting. The elimination of bounce creates stability that many painters prefer, particularly for detailed work or techniques involving significant pressure or scraping.
Mounted canvas avoids the tension issues that can develop in stretched canvas over time. Oil paintings on rigid supports don’t require periodic re-stretching and won’t develop slack areas that can stress paint films.
The flat storage and shipping advantages of panels prove valuable for artists producing numerous works or those shipping paintings frequently. Panels also eliminate concerns about paintings being damaged by impacts to the back of stretched canvas.
Panel Considerations
Weight becomes significant with panels, particularly in larger formats. The rigid support also lacks the traditional aesthetic quality and slight give that many painters associate with “proper” oil paintings.
For certain techniques—particularly those involving extensive wet-into-wet work or where artists rest their hand on the painting surface—the rigidity of panels offers practical advantages that may outweigh aesthetic considerations.
Aluminum and Synthetic Supports
Modern Alternatives
Aluminum composite panels have gained acceptance among some contemporary oil painters. These supports offer perfect flatness, complete dimensional stability, and imperviousness to environmental factors. Properly prepared aluminum creates a perfectly archival surface for oil paint.
Polyester canvas and other synthetic fabrics provide alternatives to natural fibers. These materials resist moisture and maintain tension reliably, though many painters find them lacking in character and tactile quality compared to natural fibers.
Traditional Concerns
Conservative painters and collectors remain skeptical of non-traditional supports, questioning their long-term behavior and archival properties. While modern materials may prove durable, they lack the centuries of real-world testing that linen enjoys.
The feel of painting on synthetic supports differs from natural materials in ways some artists find unsatisfying. The slight absorption, texture, and responsiveness of natural fibers contribute to the painting experience in subtle but meaningful ways.
Making Your Selection
For oil paintings you intend to last, that represent your best work, or that you plan to sell or exhibit, linen canvas remains the wisest choice. Invest in quality linen—medium to heavyweight, properly primed—and you provide your paintings with the best possible foundation for longevity.
Use cotton canvas judiciously for studies, practice work, experimental pieces, or situations where budget constraints make linen prohibitive. Choose heavier weights and ensure thorough priming to maximize cotton’s performance with oils.
Consider canvas panels or mounted canvas for works where rigidity benefits your process, for pieces requiring flat storage or shipping, or when creating smaller works where panel weight remains manageable.
Whatever surface you choose, proper preparation proves essential. Whether working with linen or cotton, oil ground or acrylic primer, invest time in thorough, multi-layer priming that completely seals the canvas and creates an ideal painting surface.
The best canvas for oil painting ultimately supports your artistic vision while providing your work with the longevity it deserves. For most serious oil painters, that means linen for important work and cotton for everything else, always properly prepared and matched thoughtfully to each painting’s requirements.
The Essential Guide to Palette Knives in Acrylic Painting
Palette knives are versatile tools that deserve a prominent place in every acrylic painter’s studio. While brushes often steal the spotlight, these flat, flexible metal blades offer unique possibilities for creating texture, mixing colors, and applying paint in ways that brushes simply cannot match.
What Makes Palette Knives Special?
Unlike brushes, palette knives excel at working with heavy body and medium body acrylics. Their rigid yet flexible blades allow artists to load generous amounts of paint and apply it in thick, sculptural layers known as impasto. This technique creates dramatic surface texture and catches light in compelling ways, adding dimensional interest to your work.
The versatility of palette knives extends beyond application. They’re equally valuable for scraping away wet paint to correct mistakes or create specific effects, and for efficiently mixing colors on your palette. One of their most practical advantages is cleanliness: a single swipe across a rag removes all traces of paint, leaving your knife ready for the next color. This makes color mixing far more organized and efficient compared to the thorough cleaning brushes require between uses.
Techniques and Effects
Palette knives open up a world of textural possibilities. You can create perfectly smooth, glass-like surfaces by carefully dragging the blade across your canvas, or build up rough, expressive textures by dabbing and scraping with varied pressure. The edge of the knife creates crisp, clean lines impossible to achieve with a brush, while the flat surface allows you to blend colors directly on the canvas with bold, confident strokes.
Many artists use palette knives in combination with brushes, laying down initial washes with brushes and adding textured highlights and details with knives. This mixed-media approach combines the strengths of both tools.
Choosing Your First Palette Knives
Palette knives come in numerous shapes and sizes, each suited to different tasks. Beginners don’t need an extensive collection—starting with two or three knives in different shapes will serve you well. Look for knives with offset cranked handles, which lift your hand away from the canvas and prevent smudging wet paint as you work.
Quality matters when selecting palette knives. Well-made knives from ranges like Extra Crank Offset Painting Knives or RGM Palette Knives feature durable construction and blades with the ideal balance of flexibility and strength. A blade that’s too stiff won’t allow for nuanced control, while one that’s too flexible will buckle under the pressure of thick paint application.
Consider starting with a medium-sized trowel shape for general painting and mixing, and a smaller diamond or pear-shaped knife for detail work. As you become comfortable with these tools, you’ll naturally discover which additional shapes would benefit your particular style.
Care and Maintenance
Palette knives require minimal maintenance but will last for years with proper care. Clean them thoroughly after each painting session, ensuring no dried paint accumulates along the blade edges or where the blade meets the handle. Dried acrylic is difficult to remove and can affect the knife’s flexibility over time.
Store your knives flat or hanging to prevent bending, and avoid using them as scrapers for dried paint on your palette—this can damage the blade edge and reduce their effectiveness for painting.
Expanding Your Technique
Once you’ve mastered basic palette knife application, experiment with more advanced techniques. Try sgraffito, scratching through wet paint layers to reveal colors beneath. Use the knife edge to create precise architectural elements or define sharp horizons. Layer multiple colors without blending them completely to achieve rich, complex color relationships.
The beauty of palette knife painting lies in its immediacy and boldness. Each stroke is decisive and visible, encouraging a confident, expressive approach to painting. Whether you’re creating smooth color fields or building up dramatic impasto peaks, palette knives offer a direct, tactile connection to your work that every acrylic painter should explore.
James Ensor: The Visionary Master of Masks and Modernity
In the shadowy attic studio above a seaside souvenir shop in Ostend, Belgium, James Sidney Edouard Ensor created some of the most provocative and influential artworks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born on April 13, 1860, and living until November 19, 1949, this Belgian painter and printmaker would become a pivotal figure in the development of modern art, profoundly influencing movements from Expressionism to Surrealism with his grotesque fantasies, carnival masks, and biting social commentary.
Early Life and Artistic Formation
Ensor’s unconventional artistic vision was shaped by his unusual childhood environment. His father, James Frederic Ensor, was an Englishman born in Brussels who studied engineering, while his mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was Belgian. Together they operated a souvenir and curio shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, shells, and other curiosities. These masks would become the defining motif of Ensor’s career, symbols he returned to repeatedly to explore themes of identity, hypocrisy, and the grotesque nature of human society.
A poor student with little interest in academic study, Ensor left school at fifteen to pursue artistic training with local painters. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where fellow student Fernand Khnopff was among his classmates. Upon his return to Ostend in 1879, Ensor established his studio in the attic of his parents’ home, where he would work from 1880 until 1917. Remarkably reclusive, he traveled little throughout his life—just three brief trips to France, two to the Netherlands in the 1880s, and a four-day journey to London in 1892.
Les XX and Early Rebellion
When the Brussels Salon rejected Ensor’s works in 1883, he joined a group of progressive Belgian artists known as Les Vingt (The Twenty) or Les XX. This avant-garde collective aimed to transform European art by promoting Post-Impressionism and Symbolism in Belgium. Ensor was instrumental in establishing the group, which sought to challenge the conservatism of official art establishments and introduce innovative artistic ideas throughout Europe.
During this period, Ensor began developing his signature style. Works like Scandalized Masks (1883) marked his shift toward depicting grotesque fantasy—skeletons, phantoms, and hideous masks that would become his trademark. Initially influenced by Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, and the French Impressionists, Ensor quickly moved beyond these traditions to forge his own radical path.
The Revolutionary Years: 1888-1892
The four years between 1888 and 1892 represent the pinnacle of Ensor’s creative output and his most significant contribution to art history. In 1888 alone, he produced forty-five etchings alongside his most ambitious painting, Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (also known as Entry of Christ into Brussels). This monumental work is now recognized as a forerunner of twentieth-century Expressionism.
The painting depicts a vast carnival mob advancing toward the viewer, their faces hidden behind grotesque masks. Within this teeming throng, Belgian politicians, historical figures, and members of Ensor’s own family can be identified. Nearly lost amid the chaos is Christ on his donkey—a figure with whom the atheist Ensor identified as a fellow victim of mockery and persecution. The work elaborated on themes he had explored in his 1885 drawing Les Aureoles du Christ, presenting religious imagery not as devotion but as personal commentary on the inhumanity of the world.
The painting’s chaotic imagery and garish colors provoked such indignation that Ensor was expelled from Les XX. Critics were scandalized by what they perceived as blasphemy and artistic madness. One contemporaneous etching, Le Pisseur (1887), shows Ensor’s sardonic response to such criticism: the artist depicted himself urinating on a graffitied wall declaring “Ensor est un fou” (“Ensor is a madman”).
During this intensely productive period, Ensor also created highly political etchings. Doctrinal Nourishment (1889) depicted key Belgian figures—bishops, the king, and others—defecating on the masses. Another 1889 etching, Belgium in the XIXth Century or King Dindon, showed King Leopold II watching as military figures violently suppressed protest. These works demonstrated Ensor’s willingness to use his art as a weapon of social criticism.
Printmaking and Technical Innovation
Ensor was not only a groundbreaking painter but also an accomplished and prolific printmaker. Over his career, he created 133 etchings and drypoints, with 86 of them produced between 1886 and 1891 during his most creative period. He recognized the importance of printmaking to his artistic legacy, writing in 1934 that he thought of prints as a means to ensure his survival: “I think of the solid copper plate, the unalterable ink, easy reproduction, faithful prints, and I adopt etching as a means of expression.”
Artistic Style and Philosophy
Michael Govan, CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has described Ensor’s signature approach as featuring “radical distortion of form, ambiguous space, riotous color, muddled surfaces, and a proclivity for the bizarre.” This distinctive style both anticipated and influenced modernist movements from Symbolism and German Expressionism to Dada and Surrealism.
Ensor’s use of masks served multiple symbolic purposes. Growing up surrounded by carnival masks in his parents’ shop, he transformed these objects into metaphors for the superficiality, hypocrisy, and hidden evil within society. The masks allowed him to explore the deceptive roles people play and the gap between public personas and private realities.
His approach to color was equally revolutionary. Ensor employed bold, expressionistic colors that adhered to the surface of the canvas, refusing to recede in traditional spatial relationships. This technique affected later artists including Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and the German Expressionists. His willingness to break with reality and traditional representation placed him in a category of his own, paving the way for numerous avant-garde movements.
Recognition and Later Years
Despite—or perhaps because of—the shocking nature of his work, Ensor gradually gained recognition. In 1895, his painting The Lamp Boy (1880) was acquired by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and he held his first solo exhibition. By 1920, he was the subject of major exhibitions. In 1929, King Albert of Belgium conferred a barony upon him, making him Baron Ensor. That same year, Belgian composer Flor Alpaerts created the James Ensor Suite in his honor. In 1933, he received the band of the Légion d’honneur.
Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, declared Ensor the boldest painter of his time after considering his 1887 painting Tribulations of Saint Anthony (now in MoMA’s collection). Despite this acclaim, Ensor’s production of new works diminished significantly after 1900. He increasingly devoted his time to music, becoming a gifted improviser on the harmonium despite having no formal musical training, and spending much time performing for visitors.
As criticism of his work had grown more abusive in earlier years, Ensor became increasingly cynical and misanthropic, feelings expressed in works like Portrait of the Artist Surrounded by Masks. He became something of a recluse, appearing in public so seldom that rumors of his death circulated during his lifetime.
Influence and Legacy
Ensor’s impact on modern art cannot be overstated. His explorations, independence from tradition, and purposeful break with reality influenced a remarkable range of artistic movements and individual artists. The Symbolists, Fauves, Expressionists, Dadaists, and Surrealists all drew inspiration from different aspects of his work.
His willingness to critique society influenced artists including André Derain, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. His use of distorted forms and vivid colors profoundly impacted German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Alfred Kubin, and Felix Nussbaum. Later, the COBRA group would also find inspiration in his fantastic, symbolist, and satirical imagery.
When Ensor died in 1949, his funeral became a spectacle throughout Belgium. Cabinet ministers, generals, judges, bishops, and artists came to pay their respects to a man who had spent much of his life as an outsider and provocateur. He was buried in the cemetery of Notre-Dame des Dunes in Mariakerke.
Collections and Museums
Today, Ensor’s works are held in major public collections worldwide. Notable repositories include the Modern Art Museum of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and Mu.ZEE in Ostend. International collections housing his works include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. The Flemish fine art museums’ Ensor collections can be viewed online at the James Ensor Online Museum.
Conclusion
James Ensor remains a singular figure in art history—a visionary who transformed personal obsessions and childhood memories into a revolutionary artistic language. His carnival masks, grotesque figures, and satirical vision challenged conventional aesthetics and paved the way for the radical experimentation of twentieth-century modernism. By wedding technical innovation to social criticism and refusing to compromise his vision despite harsh rejection, Ensor created a body of work that continues to resonate with its psychological depth, visual intensity, and unflinching examination of the human condition. In the attic above his parents’ shop in Ostend, this reclusive Belgian artist changed the course of modern art.
Official Museums & Collections:
James Ensor Online Museum (Flemish Art Collection)
Icon Artists Who Redefined the Boundaries of Contemporary Art
Across five decades of radical experimentation, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Betye Saar, Cecilia Vicuña, David Hammons, and Lubaina Himid have reshaped the landscape of contemporary art through practices that are at once fiercely inventive, philosophically grounded, and socially transformative. Though distinct in medium and cultural context, these six artists are bound by a shared commitment to confronting entrenched systems of power and reimagining the possibilities of artistic expression.
Jonas revolutionized performance and video art, expanding the relationship between body, myth, and technological space. Piper merged conceptual rigor with political urgency, redefining how art interrogates race, identity, and personal ethics. Saar transformed assemblage into a powerful vessel for memory, spirituality, and Black liberation. Vicuña revived ancestral Indigenous knowledge while pioneering ecofeminist aesthetics that resonate profoundly in today’s ecological crises. Hammons subverted the art world from within, exposing the structures of market value, visibility, and racial politics through acts of conceptual mischief and poetic provocation. Himid reframed European art history by centering the African diaspora, challenging colonial narratives while celebrating cultural resilience and Black presence.
Together, these artists form a canon of resistance and renewal. Their practices do not simply reflect the world—they intervene in it. They open new spaces for marginalized voices, critique dominant systems, and expand the very definition of what art can be. Their legacies live in the hybrid, fluid, socially engaged art of today, and their influence continues to guide conversations around identity, ecology, politics, and imagination.
This constellation of iconic figures offers more than a history; it offers a blueprint for art that refuses silence, embraces multiplicity, and insists on transformation. Through their visionary approaches, they illuminate pathways toward a more expansive, just, and interconnected cultural future.
JOAN JONAS, Artist
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY) is a foundational figure in performance, video art, and interdisciplinary practice. Since the late 1960s, Jonas has fused movement, drawing, ritual, and myth to create poetic visual languages that transformed how performance and media art are understood today. Her influence spans generations of artists exploring embodiment, narrative fragmentation, and the relationship between the human body and technological mediation. As one of the first artists to use video as an expressive tool, Jonas helped define the possibilities of time-based art in the contemporary era.
Joan is a world-renowned artist whose work encompasses a wide range of media including video, performance, installation, sound, text, and sculpture. Jonas’ experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theatre. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of rituals, and the authority of objects and gestures.
Jonas has exhibited and performed extensively around the world. Her notable exhibition history includes Documenta 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, and 13; the 28th Sao Paolo Biennial; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale; and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. She has recently presented solo exhibitions at the United States Pavilion for the 56th Edition of the Venice Biennial; Tate Modern, London; Museu Serralves, Porto; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Dia Beacon; Haus der Kunst, Munich; The Drawing Center, New York, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Naples, Italy. The Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted a retrospective of Jonas’s work in 2024.
Jonas is the recipient of many awards including The Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon (2016); the Maya Deren Award given by the American Film Institute (1989); and the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). In 2018, Jonas was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize, given to those individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind, and in 2024 she was presented with the Nam June Paik Prize, awarded to artists who have contributed to the development of contemporary art, mutual understanding, and world peace.
Adrian Piper
Adrian Piper is one of the most groundbreaking conceptual artists and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work interrogates race, gender, identity, and systems of power with intellectual rigor and emotional precision. Through performance, text, participatory structures, and analytic frameworks, Piper exposed the mechanisms of racism and xenophobia long before such discourse became mainstream. Her confrontational yet deeply humane practice redefined what political art can achieve and continues to shape contemporary debates around ethics and social identity.
Adrian produces artwork in a variety of traditional and nontraditional media, including photo-text collage, drawing on pre- printed paper, video installation, site-specific sculptural installation, digital imagery, performance and sound works. Piper’s works locate the viewer in a direct, unmediated and indexical relation to the concrete specificity of the object of awareness. They consistently explore the nature of subjecthood and agency, the limits of the self, and the continuities and discontinuities of individual identity in the metaphysical, social and political contexts. In 1968 Piper’s Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds introduced explicit political content into Minimalism. In 1970-73, her Catalysis and Mythic Being series introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of Conceptual art. In 2000 her Color Wheel Series introduced Vedic philosophical concepts into political art. Her mixed media installation + participatory group performance, The Probable Trust Registry (2013-15), won the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist in the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 .
For her artwork Piper has also received Guggenheim, AVA, and NEA Fellowships, as well as the Skowhegan Medal for Sculptural Installation and the New York Dance & Performance Award (the Bessies) for Installation & New Media. She received the 2012 College Art Association Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, for having “since the late 1960s, … profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art;” and in 2014, a Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018 she became the first American to be honored by Germany’s Kaethe Kollwitz prize, and was elected to membership in the Akademie der Künste. In 2021, she was the winner of the Goslarer Kaiserring and was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2023 she was the recipient of the Harvard Arts Medal.
Piper’s artwork is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Generali Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, and the Museum Ludwig, among others. From March to July of 2018, her seventh traveling retrospective, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965-2016 , was hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York , the largest retrospective ever for a living artist. It was dubbed “the most important exhibition of the year” by ARTNews. Her eighth retrospective (and first European retrospective in over twenty years), RACE TRAITOR, opened at PAC Milan in March 2024.
BETYE SAAR, Artist
Betye Saar
Betye Saar is a pioneering force of the Black Arts Movement and a master of assemblage. Her transformative works use found objects, family archives, and symbolic materials to challenge racist imagery and reclaim African American spirituality, memory, and resistance. Saar’s iconic assemblages—charged with mysticism and political critique—reframe domestic objects into powerful cultural monuments. Her influence on generations of artists working with memory, identity, and social justice is immeasurable.
As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, Betye Saar’s practice reflects on African American identity, spirituality and the connectedness between different cultures. Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists.
For over six decades, Saar has created assemblage works that explore the social, political, and economic underpinnings of America’s collective memory. She began her career at the age of 35 producing work that dealt with mysticism, nature and family. Saar’s art became political in the 1970’s namely with the assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972. Activist and scholar Angela Davis has cited this work as the beginning of the Black Women’s movement. Like many women who came to political consciousness in the 1960s, Saar takes on the feminist mantra “the personal is political” as a fundamental principle in her assemblage works. Her appropriation of black collectibles, heirlooms, and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion, and yet given her status as a pioneer of the Assemblage movement, the impact of Saar’s oeuvre on contemporary art has yet to be fully acknowledged or critically assessed. Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach and continues to both actively produce work and inspire countless others.
Saar received a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949 and has received six honorary doctorates. Her contributions to art and community activism have earned her numerous accolades, including two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, the W.E.B. Du Bois Award (2022), and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2022).
In 1975, Saar’s first solo museum show was held at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York where she was the first African American woman to have her art on display there. Recent solo exhibitions include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2021); and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2023); The Huntington Library (2024); and The Neubauer Collegium (2025.) Saar’s artwork is in numerous public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Modern and Museum Ludwig, among many others.
Cecilia Vicuña, Artist
Cecilia Vicuña
Cecilia Vicuña is an icon of ecofeminism, Indigenous knowledge, and expanded poetry. Working across performance, installation, sculpture, and text, she reconnects ancient Andean traditions—such as the quipu—with contemporary ecological and political urgencies. Her precarios (precarious sculptures) and monumental textile installations embody fragility, resilience, and ancestral continuity. Vicuña’s work sits at the intersection of activism and visionary poetics, offering a radically interconnected worldview urgently relevant to our time.
Cecilia s a poet, artist, activist and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s, after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co-founder of Artists for Democracy in l974.
She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile, as a new independent and non-colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris, structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (knot in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Vicuña has re-invented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers and oceans, as well as people, to re-construct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her poetry and Palabrarmas (word-weapons) stem from a deep enquiry into the roots of language. Her early work as a poet in the 60’s was simultaneously celebrated by avant-garde poetry magazines as El Corno Emplumado, Mexico City (l961–1968), and censored and/or suppressed for many decades in Chile and Latin America.
Solo exhibitions of Vicuña’s work have been organized at a number of major institutions, including, most recently, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, Chile (2023); Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá, Colombia (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, Spain (2021); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA (2020); and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including in documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), and the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and is part of major museum collections around the world.
The author of more than 30 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, her most recent books are: PALABRARmas, USACH, Editorial de la Universidad de Santiago (2023); Word Weapons, Co-published by RITE Editions and Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2023); Libro Venado, Direcciones, Buenos Aires (2022); Sudor de Futuro, Altazor, Chile (2021); Cruz del Sur, Lumen Chile (2020), Minga del Cielo Oscuro, CCE, Chile (2020), and New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá, Kelsey Street Press (2018), among many others.
Cecilia Vicuña was the winner of the 2023 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas 2023, one of the most prestigious awards given by her homeland. Preceding this recognition, Vicuña was elected a foreign honorary member of the United States Academy of Arts and Letters and also received the Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2022 at the 59th Venice Biennale.
DAVID HAMMONS, Artist
DAVID HAMMONS
David Hammons was born in Springfield, Illinois on July 24, 1943. He is a legendary and elusive figure whose practice critiques systems of race, class, market value, and cultural appropriation with unmatched conceptual sharpness. From body prints using his own hair and grease to street-based actions and found-object sculptures, Hammons inverts art-world hierarchies and exposes their contradictions. His resistance to institutional expectations and his strategic use of invisibility have made him one of the most respected—and enigmatic—artists in American art history.
David moved to Los Angeles in 1962, attending CalArts from 1966-1968, and the Otis Art Institute from 1968-1972, where he was inspired by artists such as Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Charles White, and Chris Burden. In 1974, Hammons settled in New York City.
Over the past five decades, Hammons has created a versatile body of work that explores the experience of African-American life and the role of race within American society. He began his career in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, where he was influenced by the politically charged imagery of the Black Arts Movement, the found-object assemblages of Dada, and the humble materials of Arte Povera. His first notable work is his series of Body Prints done in the 1960s and ’70s. Life-size representations of his own figure would be transferred to the support by coating his skin and hair with margarine and pressing his greased body onto the paper, then covering those sections with pigment powder. These images would be paired with politically charged symbols such as the American flag.
After his move to New York in the mid-1970s, Hammons disengaged from two-dimensional works, preferring to devote his practice entirely to sculptural assemblage, installation, and performance, in which he would employ provocative materials such as elephant dung, chicken parts, strands of hair, and bottles of cheap wine. Centered in the Black urban experience, Hammons often uses sarcasm and humor as a means of confronting the cultural stereotypes and racial issues at the core of his practice. In recent years, Hammons returned again to two-dimensions in series such as his Kool Aid drawings, which use the popular drink as a medium for mark-making, and the Basketball Drawings, which are composed through repeatedly bouncing a basketball covered with charcoal onto the paper. As in so many of Hammons’ works, the title and physical object work together as a verbal and visual pun to generate meaning – in this case, an allusion to the unrealistic dream of basketball providing an escape from urban poverty, and encouragement for black youths to seek loftier goals than athletic prowess. In the 1980s, Hammons became known for his public sculptures and installations, such as the 1986 work “Higher Goals,” a group of five, 20-30 foot tall telephone poles topped with basketball hoops and covered in mosaics of discarded beer bottle caps.
Hammons was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in July 1991. His work is collected by major public and private institutions internationally, among them: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; Glenstone, Potomac; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Francois Pinault Foundation, Venice; and Tate Britain, London.
Lubaina Himid, Artist
Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid is a central figure in the British Black Arts Movement and the first Black woman to receive the Turner Prize. Her paintings, installations, and theatrical tableaux foreground the histories and contributions of the African diaspora, challenging the erasure of Black presences from European art history. Himid’s work is known for its bold color, incisive narrative strategies, and its ability to critique colonial histories while celebrating cultural resilience, community, and creativity.
Lubaina, CBE, lives and works in Preston, England. A two-person exhibition with Magda Stawarska is currently on view at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean through August 24. In 2026, she will represent the United Kingdom at the 61st Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition of new work at the British Pavilion.
Himid received the Turner Prize in 2017 and was the subject of a major survey at Tate Modern in 2021–22. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include MUDAM Luxembourg (through August 24, 2025); FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2024–25); Greene Naftali, New York (2024); The Contemporary Austin (2024); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2023–24); Glyndebourne Opera Festival, East Sussex, UK (2023); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland (2022); Tate Britain, London (2019); Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands (2019); CAPC Bordeaux, France (2019); New Museum, New York (2019); Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2017); and Modern Art Oxford (2017). Her work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; National Museums, Liverpool; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Royal Academy, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others.
Connecting Cao Fei, Delcy Morelos, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ibrahim Mahama, Nairy Baghramian, and Tony Cokes
Across continents and artistic languages, these six internationally acclaimed artists—Cao Fei, Delcy Morelos, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ibrahim Mahama, Nairy Baghramian, and Tony Cokes—collectively map the urgencies, transformations, and contradictions of contemporary life. Their practices expand the boundaries of sculpture, film, installation, and digital media, offering new vocabularies through which to understand identity, history, and social responsibility.
Cao Fei imagines the psychological landscapes of a digitized world; Delcy Morelos grounds viewers in the spiritual and ecological weight of the earth; Ho Tzu Nyen resurrects fragmented histories through layered cinematic fictions; Ibrahim Mahama activates public space and social memory through collective labor; Nairy Baghramian destabilizes sculptural form to reveal vulnerability and power; and Tony Cokes disrupts media narratives through text, color, and sound to expose the mechanics of ideology.
Together, they form a constellation of voices that redefine how art reflects and intervenes within the global present. Their works challenge viewers to reconsider the infrastructures—technological, political, material, and historical—that shape our lived experience. This grouping, while geographically diverse, is unified by a profound commitment to questioning the systems that govern perception, belonging, and truth. Each artist offers an invitation: to confront complexity, to embrace critical imagination, and to envision alternative futures.
Cao Fei, Artist
Cao Fei
Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou) is one of the most influential artists working at the intersection of virtual reality, gaming culture, and the sociopolitical realities of contemporary China. Her films, digital environments, and speculative narratives examine how technology reshapes identity, labor, and urban life. Through imaginative world-building—ranging from Second Life avatars to future dystopias—Cao Fei captures the psychological atmosphere of a rapidly digitizing society.
Cao is an internationally renowned Chinese contemporary artist currently living and working in Beijing. She mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and developmental changes that are occurring in Chinese society today.
Cao Fei’s works have been exhibited at a number of international biennales, triennales, and major art museums including MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Cao Fei’s recent projects include a major retrospective at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2021); solo exhibitions at the MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2021), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022), Pinacoteca Contemporânea, São Paulo (2023), Lenbachhaus, Munich (2024), SCAD Museum of Art (2024), Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai (2024),Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2024), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2024).
Cao Fei was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2010. She received the “Best Young Artist” award at the China Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 2006 and the ‘Best Artist’ award in 2016. In 2021, she won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, and in 2024, she was awarded the SCAD deFINE ART Award.
Delcy Morelosi, Artist
Delcy Morelos
Delcy Morelos (Born in 1967 in Tierralta in Colombia) is internationally recognized for her immersive installations made from soil, natural fibers, pigments, and scents. Her work bridges Indigenous cosmologies with contemporary ecological discourse, emphasizing the spiritual and political agency of the earth itself. Morelos transforms exhibition spaces into tactile, sensorial environments that confront colonial histories, land dispossession, and the healing potency of material connection.
Delcy studied at the Cartagena School of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Bogotá. Her practice is rooted in ancestral Andean cosmovision, and her works inspire rumination on the interplay between human beings and earth, the human body and materiality.
In her early works, Morelos focused primarily on the intersection between body and violence. Over time, her material investigations extended into ceramics and textiles, developing a more sculptural practice and large-scale multisensory installations.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Artist
Ho Tzu Nyen
Ho Tzu Nyen (Singapore) produces conceptually rich films, theatrical installations, and algorithmic artworks that explore Southeast Asian histories, mythologies, and political imaginaries. Blending archival research with speculative narrative, he reanimates ghosts, rebels, tigers, and historical figures to investigate how power is constructed and remembered. His work stands at the forefront of contemporary moving image practice.
Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references ranging from art history to theatre and from cinema to music to philosophy, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilise different understandings of history, its writing and its transmission. The central theme of his œuvre is a long-term investigation of the plurality of cultural identities in Southeast Asia, a region so multifaceted in terms of its languages, religions, cultures and influences that it is impossible to reduce it to a simple geographical area or some fundamental historical base. This observation as to the history of this region of the world is reflected in his pieces which weave together different regimes of knowledge, narratives and representations. From documentary research to fantasy, his work combines archival images, animation and film in installations that are often immersive and theatrical.
One-person exhibitions of his work have been held at the Mudam Museum of Modern Art (2025), Hessel Museum of Art (2024), Art Sonje Center (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), Hammer Museum (2022), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021), Crow Museum of Asian Arts (2021), Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum [McaM] (Shanghai, 2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, (2012), The Substation (Singapore, 2003). He represented the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
Ibrahim Mahama, Artist
Ibrahim Mahama
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama is known for monumental, socially engaged installations using jute sacks, rescued materials, and architectural interventions. His collaborative approach transforms discarded objects—often tied to histories of trade, migration, and labor—into powerful symbols of collective resilience. Mahama’s large-scale public works question global supply chains while empowering local communities through shared making and cultural infrastructure.
Ibrahim is an artist interested in the redistribution of materials forms through the making of artistic interventions. his current work focuses on building various institutions to connect new audiences to contemporary art. the artist’s studio isn’t just a place for production but a space for collective reflection about the conditions of the body across time. the artist’s studio can be a space of miracles.
Nairy Baghramian, Artist
Nairy Baghramian
Nairy Baghramian (Iran/Germany) is a leading figure in contemporary sculpture, recognized for her explorations of the body, architecture, and material instability. Working with cast metal, resin, wax, and industrial components, she creates forms that appear simultaneously fragile and authoritative. Her sculptures probe vulnerability, support structures, and the politics of display, offering a nuanced critique of modernist sculptural traditions.
Nairy’s work traverses the realms of sculpture, installation, photography and drawing with fearless experimentation, historical acuity and conceptual rigor. Particularly in her prime medium of sculpture, the artist employs an extensive repertoire of techniques, materials and forms to address the spatial, architectural, social, political and contextual conditions of contemporary art. Using an abstract vocabulary that often combines geometric shapes and organic matter, industrial process and gestural procedure, Baghramian’s abstract yet eminently allusive works subtly explore the ligatures between art and other fields of object production (most notably interior design, dance and theater) in order to evoke and address bodies of all variants in both their vulnerability and obstinacy. Through her innovative use of materials and manipulation of familiar forms, Baghramian’s work invites viewers to reconsider their sense of self, space, object and site.
German artist Baghramian was born in Isfahan in 1971 and had to flee post-revolutionary Iran as a teenager and has been living and working in Berlin since 1984.
Recent solo exhibitions include those at South London Gallery, London UK (2024); the the Nivola Museum, Sardinia IT (2024); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY (2023 -24);the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO (2023); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas TX (2022); Carré d’Art, Nimes, France (2022); Secession, Vienna, Austria (2021); Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan, Italy (2021); MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2019); Palacio de Cristal, Madrid, Spain (2018); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN (2017); Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent, Belgium (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland (2016); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2015); The Art Institute of Chicago IL (2014); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2014); MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2013); Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2012); the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2012); and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2010); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2006).
Baghramian has also participated at Venice Biennale, Italy (2019 and 2011); Yorkshire Sculpture International, Wakefield, UK (2019); Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece (2017); Skulptur Projekte Muenster, Germany (2017 and 2007); Lyon Biennale, France (2017); Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, UK (2012); and the Berlin Biennale, Germany (2014 and 2008).
Baghramian has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Aspen Art Award (2023); the Nivola Award (2022); Nasher Prize Laureate (2022); the Malcolm-McLaren-Award with Maria Hassabi (2019); the Zürich Art Prize (2016); the Arnold-Bode Prize, Kassel (2014); the Hector Prize, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2012); and the Ernst Schering Foundation Award (2007).
Her works are held in institutional collections, including Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Salomon Guggenheim Collection, New York NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; Tate Modern, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; Jumex Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; Nasher Art Center, Dallas TX; Art Institute Chicago, Chicago IL; MOCA, Los Angeles CA.
Upcoming projects are the contribution to the sculpture garden Kistefos, Oslo, NO and a solo exhibition at Wiels, Brussels, BE both in 2025.
Tony Cokes, Artist
Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes (USA) is celebrated for his incisive text-based video works that remix political speeches, pop music, media theory, and found footage to critique race, capitalism, and state violence. Using bold typography and saturated color fields, Cokes deconstructs the language of power and propaganda. His work has shaped new directions in moving image art, offering a radical reconsideration of how narrative and authority function in contemporary culture.
Tony received a BA from Goddard College (1979) and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (1985). He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.
Art Basel Miami Beach Closes Year on a High Note with Strong Sales, Expansive International Engagement, and Vibrant Programming in a Standout Edition
ART BASEL AWARD CATEGORIES A new model of recognition
Art Basel Awards seek to support the future of the industry by democratically honoring those who move and make art from vision to reality. The first of its kind, Art Basel Awards span the full spectrum of artistic and cultural impact, covering nine categories.
EMERGING ARTIST
Commending an exciting new or early-career artist making initial, yet impressive strides into the industry.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane (Algeria/UK) is known for conceptually rigorous works that examine borders, displacement, and the lingering effects of colonialism. Her practice spans installation, sound, video, and sculpture, often incorporating bureaucratic processes or personal artifacts as material. She creates environments that feel both intimate and geopolitical, revealing how political structures infiltrate the most private layers of existence.
Ourahmane is a conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sound, video, performance, and sculpture. She graduated from Goldsmiths University in 2014 and has exhibited internationally since with recent solo exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona, SculptureCentre, New York; rhizome, Algiers; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; S.M.A.K Ghent; Portikus, Frankfurt; De Appel, Amsterdam; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Her work was included in the 60th Venice Biennale and 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017), 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021), New Museum Triennial and Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018).
Meriem Bennani, Artist
Meriem Bennani
Meriem Bennani (Morocco/NYC) merges humor, digital animation, documentary, and social satire to explore identity in the age of surveillance, migration, and internet culture. Her surreal video worlds—featuring talking animals, reality-TV aesthetics, and fractured narrative timelines—challenge orientalist stereotypes and propose new hybrid identities born from global digital life.
Meriem Bennani makes groundbreaking video installations and sculptures informed by the circulation of global cultures online. Frequently rooted in the specifics of Moroccan life offline and online, her work speaks to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows. Bennani combines elements of reality television, documentary film, telenovela, music videos, science fiction, and animated cartoons in her videos. Exaggerating media tropes in what Bennani describes as a “hyperactivity of genre,” her works reflect the disjointed state of contemporary mediation, an effect she amplifies in installation settings where her moving images are mapped to sculptural projection structures or viewing stations. Using strategies of immersion, duplication, multiplicity, and remix, Bennani blends a powerful mix of humor and critique, reaffirming the power of family and home while analyzing larger systems of power across a networked world. Meriem Bennani earned her BFA from Cooper Union in New York, and her MFA at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Her video series 2 Lizards, produced in collaboration with Orian Barki, has been hailed by writers and curators as a preeminent document of life under quarantine. Recent solo presentations include Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy, Fondation Kamel Lazaar, Tunis, Tunisia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; The High Line, New York, USA; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, USA; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, Germany; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; and MoMA PS1, Queens, USA. Bennani’s work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 Biennale of Moving Images, and the 2016 Shanghai Biennale. She has an upcoming exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
Bennani’s work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Kadist Foundation, Paris, France; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France.
Mohammad Alfaraj, Artist
Mohammad Alfaraj
Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj creates poetic film-based works that focus on ecology, memory, and the fragility of human and non-human life. Often using found objects, rural landscapes, and slow-paced cinematography, his practice reflects on environmental degradation and the emotional weight of regional change. His work stands out for its quiet, meditative tone and deep sensitivity to place.
Mohammad Alfaraj: Having studied engineering and growing up loving the camera in Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia: A palm tree oasis which is also the oil source of the country, Alfaraj’s work can be described as a cinematic collage of mediums, practices and ideas that create a world charged with stories, poetry and search for truth by exploring documentation and interpretation, which results in works that the artist hopes to nurture imagination and empathy in the experiencer. His use and reuse of organic and manmade waste plays as a physical capsule of memories and time, where these materials and their histories hold a spiritual quality too. A visual artist that works in film, photography, sculpture and poetry, that’s influenced by his hometown and his travels, in an attempt to capture the trace, imprint and impact of life both literary and metaphorically. Mohammad also engages in workshops and action based activities with the community as a belief in collective creativity.
Pan Daijing
Pan Daijing (China/Berlin) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly across performance, sound, opera, and film. She constructs immersive psychological environments where the human voice—raw, fragmented, or operatic—becomes an instrument of emotional architecture. Her work probes intimacy, trauma, and the unconscious, expanding the boundaries of sound art.
Oscillating between visual art and music, Pan Daijing (b. 1991, Guiyang) works across various media such as film, sound, performance, choreography, installation, and sculpture. Her work demonstrates a strong psychological sense of space, evoking physical, emotional, and sonic depths. She has held solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center (2025), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024), Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021), and Tate Modern, London (2019), among others.
Saodat Ismailova
Uzbek filmmaker and artist Saodat Ismailova is a central figure in bringing Central Asian narratives to contemporary art. Her films and installations draw from regional mythologies, women’s histories, ritual practices, and the spiritual dimensions of everyday life. Through a lyrical and atmospheric visual language, she preserves cultural memory while confronting modern social tensions.
Saodat is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist who came of age in the post-Soviet era. Interweaving rituals, myths and dreams within the tapestry of everyday life, her films investigate the historically complex and layered culture of Central Asia. Frequently based around oral stories in which women are the lead protagonists, and exploring systems of knowledge suppressed by globalized modernity, these consciousness expanding works hover between visible and invisible worlds. Graduated from Tashkent State Art Institute and Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts, France she has established artistic lives between Paris and Tashkent. In 2021 she initiated Davra research collective in Central Asia to develop local art scene. In 2022 Saodat Ismailova participated both in 59th Biennale of Venice and documenta fifteen. In 2022, she received The Eye Art & Film Prize, Amsterdam. Her new film “Melted into the Sun” is presented at Nebula collective exhibition, commissioned by Fondazione in between Art and Film, during Venice Biennale of Arts, 2024.
Sofia Salazar Rosales, Artist
Sofia Salazar Rosales
Sofía Salazar Rosales (1999, Quito, Ecuador) explores themes of migration, diaspora, and cultural hybridity through sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her work often incorporates textiles, organic materials, and references to Andean cosmology, creating symbolic systems that bridge ancestral knowledge with contemporary concerns. She has emerged as a vital voice in expanding Latin American diasporic narratives in global art.
Sofía lives and works between NYC, Paris, France and Quito, Ecuador. She is currently participating in the two-year residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, having previously obtained a master’s degree with distinction at the School of Fine Arts (ENSBA Paris) in the ateliers of Tatiana Trouvé, Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with distinction from School of Fine Arts of Lyon (ENSBA Lyon) where she worked in the studios of Pauline Bastard and Niek Van de Steeg. In 2023, she was nominated for Premio illy Sustain Art Prize and Emerige-CPGA Prize and in 2022, she won the SARR Prize. Her first publication Hay cuerpos cansados por el viaje que buscan enraizarse (There are bodies tired from the journey seeking to root) was published by ChertLüdde on the occasion of her 2022 solo exhibition at Bungalow, Berlin and contains letters from her diary addressed to her sculptures. Collection: Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen.
Bringing together 283 leading galleries from 43 countries and territories—including 48 first-time exhibitors—this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach attracted more than 80,000 visitors across its VIP and public days. The fair welcomed prominent private collectors, museum patrons, and cultural leaders from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, further affirming its position as the premier marketplace and discovery platform for Modern and contemporary art in the Western Hemisphere.
A
Miguel Abreu Gallery ACA Galleries Acquavella Galleries Afriart Gallery A Gentil Carioca Alexandre Gallery Alisan Fine Arts Galerie Allen Almeida & Dale Altman Siegel Ames Yavuz Galería Isabel Aninat AOTM El Apartamento Galeria Raquel Arnaud Art Blocks Alfonso Artiaco Piero Atchugarry Gallery
B
Barro von Bartha Gallery Baton Nicelle Beauchene Gallery Beeple Studios Livia Benavides Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte Berggruen Gallery Berry Campbell bitforms gallery Peter Blum Gallery Marianne Boesky Gallery Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Bortolami Bradley Ertaskiran Luciana Brito Galeria Broadway Ben Brown Fine Arts Matthew Brown
C
Rebecca Camacho Presents Canada Cardi Gallery Casa Triângulo David Castillo Cayón Central Fine Galeria Pedro Cera Chapter NY Catharine Clark Gallery Erin Cluley Gallery James Cohan Gallery Commonwealth and Council Galleria Continua Paula Cooper Gallery Crèvecœur Crisis Cristea Roberts Gallery
D
Thomas Dane Gallery Dastan Gallery David Peter Francis Massimodecarlo Jeffrey Deitch Luis De Jesus Los Angeles Tibor de Nagy Dimin Document
E
Anat Ebgi Edel Assanti Andrew Edlin Gallery galerie frank elbaz Derek Eller Gallery Thomas Erben Gallery Larkin Erdmann Espacio Valverde
F
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury Daniel Faria Gallery Fellowship Eric Firestone Gallery Konrad Fischer Galerie Franz Kaka Peter Freeman, Inc. Freight+Volume Stephen Friedman Gallery James Fuentes
G
Gaga Gagosian Galatea Gavlak Gemini G.E.L. François Ghebaly Gladstone Gallery Sebastian Gladstone Gomide&Co Galería Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Gallery Gray Alexander Gray Associates Garth Greenan Gallery Galerie Karsten Greve
Alison Jacques Charlie James Gallery rodolphe janssen Jenkins Johnson Gallery Nina Johnson Johyun Gallery Galerie Judin
K
Kalfayan Galleries Casey Kaplan Jan Kaps Karma Kasmin kaufmann repetto Sean Kelly Anton Kern Gallery Tina Kim Gallery kó Michael Kohn Gallery David Kordansky Gallery Andrew Kreps Gallery kurimanzutto
Candice Madey Madragoa Magenta Plains Maisterravalbuena Mai 36 Galerie Galeria Mapa Matthew Marks Gallery Philip Martin Gallery Martos Gallery Maruani Mercier Barbara Mathes Gallery Max Estrella Gallery Mayoral Mazzoleni Miles McEnery Gallery Anthony Meier moniquemeloche Mendes Wood DM Mennour Mignoni Victoria Miro Galerie Mitterrand Mnuchin Gallery The Modern Institute mor charpentier Galeria Elvira Moreno mother’s tankstation
Pace Gallery Pace Prints Paci contemporary Galerie Alberta Pane Paragon Parallel Oaxaca Parker Gallery Parrasch Heijnen Gallery Franklin Parrasch Gallery Pasto Patron Pavec Pequod Co. Perrotin Petzel The Pit PKM Gallery Polígrafa Obra Gràfica Proyectos Monclova Proyectos Ultravioleta P.P.O.W
R
Galeria Dawid Radziszewski Galeria Marilia Razuk Almine Rech Regen Projects Rele Gallery Galería RGR Roberts Projects Nara Roesler Rolf Art Thaddaeus Ropac Michael Rosenfeld Gallery Diane Rosenstein Gallery Meredith Rosen Gallery Ross+Co Ryan Lee
S
Richard Saltoun Gallery Margot Samel Sapar Contemporary SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Schoelkopf Gallery Galerie Thomas Schulte Marc Selwyn Fine Art Jack Shainman Gallery Chris Sharp Gallery Susan Sheehan Gallery Sicardi Ayers Bacino Sies + Höke Sikkema Malloy Jenkins Silverlens Jessica Silverman Bruce Silverstein Simões de Assis Skarstedt Smac Art Gallery Fredric Snitzer Gallery Société SOLOS Paul Soto Gallery Southern Guild Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers STPI Marc Straus Galería Sur
T
Timothy Taylor Templon Cristin Tierney Gallery Tornabuoni Art Leon Tovar Gallery Travesía Cuatro Two Palms
U
Uffner & Liu ULAE Union Pacific
V
Vadehra Art Gallery Van de Weghe Van Doren Waxter Tim Van Laere Gallery Nicola Vassell Vedovi Gallery Vermelho Verve Vielmetter Los Angeles Visualize Value Voloshyn Gallery
W
Galleri Nicolai Wallner Weinstein Gallery Welancora Gallery Wentrup Kate Werble Gallery Michael Werner Gallery White Cube Wooson W—galería
Art Basel Miami Beach Closes Year on a High Note with Strong Sales, Expansive International Engagement, and Vibrant Programming in a Standout Edition
Art Basel Miami Beach Closes Year on a High Note with Strong Sales, Expansive International Engagement, and Vibrant Programming in a Standout Edition
The 2025 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach
The 2025 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach — the second led by Director Bridget Finn — concluded today to enthusiastic acclaim from galleries, collectors, institutions, and visitors across the Americas and around the world.
Bringing together 283 leading galleries from 43 countries and territories, including 48 first-time exhibitors, this year’s show attracted an attendance of more than 80,000 across its VIP and public days. The fair welcomed prominent private collectors and patrons from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, underscoring Art Basel Miami Beach’s position as the premier market and discovery platform for Modern and contemporary art in the Western Hemisphere.
Exhibitors reported dynamic sales across all sectors and market segments, with placement of works by postwar and Modern masters, leading contemporary artists, and rising talents into major public and private collections. Standout acquisitions included works by Ruth Asawa, Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, Andy Warhol, and Martin Wong. Notable successes also came from rediscoveries by Emma Amos, Eva Olivetti, and Juliette Roche as well as emerging voices such as Kelsey Isaacs, Cisco Merel, and Adriel Visoto. The breadth of activity reflected the strength and diversity of gallery programs across the show floor.
The fair welcomed representatives from more than 240 museums and foundations worldwide, including the Art Gallery of Ontario (Canada); Aspen Art Museum (CO); Brooklyn Museum (NY); Carnegie Museum of Art (PA); Centre Pompidou (France); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR); Dallas Museum of Art (TX); El Museo del Barrio (NY); Fondation Beyeler (Switzerland); Fralin Museum of Art (VA); Getty Museum (CA); Guggenheim Museum (NY); Groeninghe (Belgium); Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (Turkey); LACMA (CA); Malba (Argentina); MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima (Peru); MCA Chicago (IL); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); MFA Boston (MA); MFA Houston (TX); MOCA Los Angeles (CA); MoMA and MoMA PS1 (NY); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) (Brazil); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada); Norton Museum of Art (FL); Palais de Tokyo (France); Seoul Museum of Art (Korea); Serpentine (UK); SFMOMA (CA); Städel Museum (Germany); Studio Museum in Harlem (NY); Tate (UK); Toledo Museum of Art (OH); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); Zeitz MOCAA (South Africa), and more. Their presence reaffirmed the fair’s significance as a premier platform for institutional discovery, acquisition, and engagement across the Americas and beyond.
Meridians, now in its sixth edition, returned as the fair’s epicenter of curatorial ambition — a platform where artists and galleries from across the Americas and beyond push the limits of form. Curated by Yasmil Raymond, former Rector of the Städelschule and Director of Portikus, the 2025 edition — The Shape of Time— brought together 19 works by multigenerational and international artists whose practices probe how art can embody, distort, and suspend time. Ambitious large-scale installations, immersive media works, and monumental sculptures deepened this year’s expanded narrative of the Americas, reinforcing Meridians as one of the fair’s most anticipated and boundary-breaking sectors. Notable placements include Kye Christensen-Knowles’ mural-scale Cycle of Additional (2025) and Silva Rivas’ immersive video installation Buzzing (2009).
The inaugural edition of Zero 10, Art Basel’s new global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era, emerged as one of the defining successes of this year’s show. A dynamic hub of experimentation and cross-media exchange, the sector, curated by Eli Scheinman, drew strong interest from established collectors, new buyers, institutions, and the wider public — affirming the growing centrality of digital practice within contemporary art. Presentations by Beeple Studios, Heft, Nguyen Wahed, AOTM Gallery, Art Blocks, Asprey Studio, Fellowship x ARTXCODE, Pace Gallery, SOLOS, Visualize Value, and others registered exceptional momentum, with multiple works placing quickly across generative, computational, and hybrid physical-digital forms. Highlights included Beeple Studios’ sold-out editions of Regular Animals and significant engagement with leading digital artists such as Tyler Hobbs, Kim Asendorf, Joe Pease, and XCOPY, whose Coin Laundry attracted over 2.3 million NFT claims. Together, these results position Zero 10 as a breakout narrative of the 2025 edition and a vital platform for an expanded digital ecosystem ahead of its next iteration at Art Basel Hong Kong.
Conversations, Art Basel’s flagship talks program, recorded exceptionally robust attendance in Miami Beach. Held in the Auditorium of the Miami Beach Convention Center from December 4–6 and free to the public, this year’s program opened with a day dedicated to the intersection of art and sport, featuring artists, athletes, and collectors including Malcolm Jenkins and Elliot Perry, who explored the shared dynamics of endurance, legacy, and representation. In parallel with the debut of Zero 10, this year’s Digital Dialogues brought together emerging Web3 communities with established collectors, artists, and curators to examine the rapidly evolving relationship between art and technology.
The Art Basel Awards — presented in partnership with BOSS — marked a major highlight of show week with the inaugural Art Basel Awards Night, supported by the City of Miami Beach and the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Hosted by Grammy Award–winning producer Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean, the evening took place at the New World Center — the celebrated Frank Gehry–designed landmark — and brought together leading figures from the worlds of art, design, fashion, music, and entertainment. Selected by their peers through a unique voting system, the first class of Gold Awardees included Ibrahim Mahama, Nairy Baghramian, and Cecilia Vicuña, who received the Icon Artist Gold Award. The evening also introduced the inaugural BOSS Award for Outstanding Achievement, presented to Meriem Bennani, underscoring the initiative’s mission to honor the visionaries shaping the future of art and culture. For the full list of Gold Awardees and further details, clickhere. Event photography is available here.
Reflecting its longstanding partnership with Art Basel, the City of Miami Beach continued its Legacy Purchase Program for a seventh year, acquiring Modulations – Sequence XXIX by Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca, presented by Livia Benavides, for its public art collection. Selected through a public vote, the initiative invited participation from exhibitors in Nova and Positions, as well as newcomers and recent entrants to the Galleries sector presenting emerging or early-career artists. The program underscores the city’s commitment to fostering the next generation of artists and galleries and to building a cultural legacy that affirms art’s power to shape the future.
The CPGA–Villa Albertine Étant donnés Prize — presented by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art (the French Professional Committee of Art Galleries) in collaboration with Villa Albertine — returned for its fifth edition, recognizing excellence in contemporary creation and highlighting the essential role of galleries in championing the French art scene internationally. At Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Kelly Sinnapah Mary and James Cohan Gallery received this year’s award, selected by a jury of international curators and collectors and supported by a $15,000 prize from the CPGA.
The Art Basel Shop returned to the West Lobby of the MBCC with a new USM design, offering limited-edition collaborations, artist-designed products, and bespoke Art Basel pieces that bridge art, design, and contemporary culture. Highlights included the AB by Artist capsule by Sanford Biggers — featuring jewelry created with Dodo and a suite of exclusive objects — alongside new additions to the Art Basel Core Collection. Special collaborations drew significant attention, among them the limited-edition Art Basel Miami Beach Labubu; the Art Basel x Inter Miami Jersey, an authentic pink kit released in a hand-numbered edition of 305; the Marc Jacobs JOY capsule designed with Derrick Adams, David Shrigley, and Hattie Stewart; a print from Iconic Moments by Emily Xie; and two colorways of Takashi Murakami’s Ohana Full Bloom and Surripa slides. Additional exclusive items rounded out a vibrant offering that connected visitors with the creative spirit of the fair.
Bridget Finn, Director of Art Basel Miami Beach, said: “Looking back on the 2025 edition, I am thrilled by the energy, ambition, and creativity that reverberated within and beyond our halls. With standout presentations, innovative projects, and record engagement, the fair reinforced its leadership in the Americas and its power to influence the global art market. Through the fair’s core sectors, as well as initiatives like Zero 10 and the Art Basel Awards, and our revitalized Conversations program, we celebrated diverse artistic voices — from Latinx, Indigenous, and diasporic practices to emerging digital forms — creating moments of joy, discovery, and meaningful cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchange that will resonate well into the year ahead.”
John Mathews, Head of Private Wealth Management Americas at UBS, said: “This year’s fair was another standout example of Art Basel’s progressive commitment to artists and UBS’s longstanding support for cultivating ideas and dialogue that deepen public engagement with contemporary art. UBS was proud to present Beyond Pop: Art of the Everyday, featuring works that bridge the gap between fine art and pop culture. They reflect the core of the UBS Art Collection’s values that contemporary art can challenge us and inspire innovative thinking.”
Testimonials from participating exhibitors of this year’s edition are available for the media here.
Art Basel, whose Global Lead Partner is UBS, took place from December 5–7, 2025, with VIP Days on December 3–4 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The 2026 edition of the show will take place December 4–6.