The name of the game at this year’s edition of the New Art Dealers Alliance’s (Nada) Miami fair (until 7 December) is scale: close, intimate moments that promote a one-to-one relationship with onlookers. High detail, mysterious materiality and subtle textural shifts create pockets of quiet amid a blaring fair week, providing ample space for visitors to contemplate works.
On the Ohio-based gallery Abattoir’s stand, gently coloured convex canvases by the Maine-based artist Eleanor Conover meld the elegance of canonical feminist painting with fierce references to Land Art machismo. “This isn’t wallflower art,” says dealer Lisa Kurzner. In her 2024 piece Granite and Rainbows ($9,000), Conover’s bowed stretchers and sewn-in slabs of marble foreground the physicality of her process.
Over at Cierra Britton Gallery’s stand, the self-taught artist Bre Andy seeks both beauty and political resonance in her depictions of Black women’s domestic interiority. “I find power in representing us as is,” says the artist. Her portrait painting Upon Arrival (2024) is priced at $19,000.
The London-based gallery Seventeen is turning heads with its spotlight on the British artist Patrick Goddard, whose modular avian installation Migratory Birds uses 100 life-size sculptures of nine different British ornithological species to comment on the global environmental and border crises. “The work is simultaneously exploring ecological collapse and extinction events and operating as a metaphor for migrant strife,” says Goddard.
The stand of New York-based Swivel Gallery includes works by the sculptor Christine Rebhuhn. Her 2024 assemblage piece Deliver Us, priced at $8,000, updates taxidermy as a memento mori for a contemporary audience. At Storage Gallery’s stand, the Tribeca-based space is showing Jen DeLuna’s bleary figurative paintings based on found and family photographs, which highlight the vulnerability of connection. The boisterous nude painting Timid Repetitions (2024) is on offer for $7,000.
Anthony Miserendino’s relief sculpture Under and Out (2024, on offer for $8,500) encourages peaceful pause at Moskowitz Bayse’s stand. “There’s always a quietness to this work,” says gallerist Adam Moskowitz. A similar haunting happens on the stand of Cologne- and New York-based Gaa Gallery, which features the sculptures of Finnish artist Eetu Sihvonen. Their ghostly resin and charred-wood cabinet Constant of the Sacred Saline Dew Drops (2024, $12,000) explores notions of transition and transformation. Says gallerist Mati Gibbs: “In Finnish folktales, the breaking and cracking of eggs is central to the creation of the world.”