If this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach lacked the frenzied, Swarovski-studded spirit for which it has become notorious, then Wynwood’s Art Miami — one of nearly two dozen satellite fairs this year — picked up the slack. Crowds pushed through the tent doors of Tuesday night’s preview party faster than security guards could scan the VIP passes. Inside, the event was bigger than ever, with 125 participating galleries, many hailing from the warmer climes, and a new “CONTEXT” section for emerging art.
And there was no shortage of glitter, gold, and body paint.
“Miami’s a great place for color,” said Santa Fe dealer David Richard, who specializes in geometric and Op art. “We’ve already had tons of interest in Fred’s work,” he added, referring to Finish Fetish artist Fred Eversley’s aeronautically sleek, cast polyester sculptures.
The booth of Miami’s Tresart gallery sparkled under Vik Muniz’s “Diamond Divas” series of bejeweled Marilyns, Brigittes, and Sophias. Those were contrasted with a different sort of commercial sure-thing — paintings by Wifredo Lam, star of the ever-hot Surrealist market.
Outside in the courtyard, a dancer coated in gold body paint performed near a Banksy mural that had been transported from its original home on the side of a Los Angeles apartment building to this velvet roped-off corner of the fair.
“The collectors here are very different from New York collectors,” said Anna Jill Lüpertz, whose gallery, AJLART, set up shop for the first time in a pink-walled booth as part of CONTEXT’s special focus on Berlin art spaces for 2012. “They invite you into their houses, and color-wise they’re different. But they’re still very serious.”
The mood was generally a bit more sober among several of the Berlin-based galleries participating in CONTEXT. A series of Knut Wolfgang Maron photographs taken of the artist’s mother in the years leading up to her death were on sale for about $48,000 for a set of three. “It’s relaxed, I had very good conversations with intellectual art buyers,” said the owner of the gallery, Zone B. “I have no interest in people who are just very rich.”
And at Allan Stone, the gallery once run by the major Ab-Ex collector and now spearheaded by his daughter Allison Stone Stabile, blue-chip artists like John Chamberlain and Wayne Thiebaud appear alongside the lesser-known painters Robert Baribeau and Richard Hickam.
“After my father passed away, I’ve been trying to put forward more of the artists he was interested in supporting,” said Stone Stabile. “This fair is much more interested in seeing breadth, not just the biggest names.”
Which means that the work at Art Miami can occasionally be hit or miss. But at least it is novel. “You’ll probably see work at Basel that you’ve seen for the last three years,” said dealer Thomas Jaeckel, who was showing paintings by Armando Marino, among others. “You will never see anything in my booth that you’ve ever seen at an art fair before.”
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