Art Basel Miami Beach 2024: 6 artists to look out for

Stepping into Art Basel Miami Beach is an experience to say the least. This year, the fair encompasses 286 galleries, not to mention countless satellite projects, such as Faena Art’s Miami Art Week program – promising a special Marina Abramović exhibition – and our very own Art Basel spotlight on retro-futurist digi artist, Lucy Ellis, who was just announced winner of the Rabanne Arts Factory x Dazed initiative.

You won’t need any tip-offs for finding the big, blue-chip galleries and myriad Warhols, Murakamis or Basquiats punctuating the trade show. However, you might do well to swot up on some of the less tech-bro-attracting works on display. Or perhaps the queer or identity-citing works, such as, say, Portia Munson’s bric-a-brac installation of found ornaments, candles and lamps, which comments on the intersections of ecological disaster and reproductive rights. 

As much as attending an art fair can be overwhelming – there’s so much to take in, often at a frenzied pace – it’s also an ideal setting to home in on the lesser known works, made by emerging, emerged or widely known artists alike. To get you started, we’ve pulled together a roster of esoteric names to keep an eye out for…

A US-born draftsman (don’t call him a painter!) based in London, Henry Curchod graduated from a BFA at the University of New South Wales and has built his name as one the art world’s most meticulous and humorous millennials. “It seems that people think my works are paintings. But they are drawings,” he says. “Drawing is violent and spontaneous, and democratic; painting has a tendency to mask.” In this vein, his works display an almost confusing sensibility, scattered with narratives that never quite reveal themselves. Often made with charcoal and oil paint, these dreamy encounters are spliced with moments of transcendence or contrastingly, irreverence, exemplified in the two works he’s showing during the fair: “Watch me fly” (2024) and “We fall, along with our voices, into the abyss” (2024).

Hot on the heels of two solo shows, one at Marian Goodman Gallery’s 66 rue de Temple outpost in Paris, and the other with Madragoa in Lisbon, the Polish-born, London-based artist Joanna Piotrowska takes to Art Basel Miami Beach. Here, she’s especially excited to flex some tapestry based on an early childhood drawing. “The drawing is a single, erratic, long, black line, which fills almost the entire ‘canvas’,” she explains. “The drawing – such early and pre-verbal expression – reminded me of a child’s high receptivity to the outer world and its closest surrounding, as well as their capacity to absorb and express what cannot yet be understood.” Indeed, her often eerie and domestic sensibility has taken an even more surreal turn, mish-mashing archival materials. Instead of accurately re-staging items and ideas, her newer body of works indulges further in mystery. She tells Dazed,“In recent years, it started to become clear that what I most cherish in art is its indefinability.

Based in LA, raised in Brooklyn and educated at Bard College, Omari Douglin presents poignant snapshots of life and goals within late-capitalist USA, tuning into the subtleties of these and their contextual nuances – be it an Hermès Birkin bag or a New Era cap. His exhibition, boutique O (2024) at Matthew Brown gallery, for example, saw wigged mannequins, trucker caps and a cheap ottoman scattered across curtained changing rooms, meanwhile his work as a painter – deceivingly light, cartoonish and figurative – has been more precisely tied to his identity. Does this hold for his display at Miami? “Yep, [I’m] showing paintings that only I could or would make,” he says. “Many of the figures are wearing dark colours in the works. Many of the figures have brown skin. They’re all reflections of me.”

Sunil Gupta has dedicated a lifetime to configuring his and the wider place of queer men across geographies – or, as phrases it, what it means to be an Indian gay man. Most will know the cruising scenes of his Christopher Street (1976) series, or Exiles (1986-87), his documentation of gay pick-up spots in Delhi. But for Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist shows two lesser-known photographs, “Pablo & Charlie” (1985) and “John & John” (1985) from a series called Lovers: 10 Years On. Focusing on a since-gone social milieu of gay men in Earls Court and Hammersmith, he depicts a young Jewish man [wearing glasses] from Austria, Charlie Roberts – who was crowned “Queen of Earls Court” – and his partner, Pablo, a gay asylum seeker, as well as two working-class gay men, “known colloquially as ‘the Janes’.” Both couples, it transpired, died of HIV-related complications soon after the pictures were taken, but remain a poignant snapshot in time.

An Algerian-French artist, Tarek Lakhrissi recently showed with East London’s Nicoletti gallery, presenting his clear, glass-blown tongues and gelatinous door knockers – each one as ASMR-inducing as they sound – as part of a show entitled SPIT (2024), which took its name from his experience of being spat on at a Pride parade in Paris for carrying Algerian flags. The attackers were disgusted that he was queer and sympathetic to Palestine. From there, he unearthed the varied associations with spitting, both sensual and violent in a full-blown show. For Art Basel Miami Beach, he continues a focus on glass-blown sculpture. “I aimed to create a unique materiality that mirrors the transparency of these tongues in relation to the fluids produced when one spits or kisses,” he says. “This results in a peculiar scene that evokes a staged, queer-alien desire.” According to Lakhrissi, the tongues act like a “choreographed ballet”, provoking conversations around queer sexuality, race, class and also the shared hunger for community.

Meet Haitian artist Tomm El-Saieh, a returning favourite who cemented his status in the city way back in December 2017, when he aired his ICA Miami exhibition. Born in Haiti, he left the island aged seven, but has since riffed on its cultural cues, including Voudou. Splicing the trippy sensibilities – redolent of a trance – with abstraction, his work shares affinities with modern art classics, such as Kandinsky and perhaps in a more contemporary vein, the likes of Jawara Alleyne’s favourite, Caymanian artist Bendel Hydes. Of course, El-Saieh’s work is all his own, deploying an amped-up palette that almost breathes on the canvas. Richly layered with labyrinthine patterns and several coats, the oil paintings recall oil slicks or phosphenes. At the fair, he’s showing a work called “Spiraling Siren”. “[It’s] an anthem for hybridity and/or the ‘third space’,” he explains. “Sounds called from the depths, where myth and memory entwine, spiraling above and below waters, mapping what was and will be.”

Art Basel Miami Beach runs from Friday, 6 Dec 2024 – Sunday, 8 Dec 2024.