Program

SP2
Ibrahim El-Salahi
Pain Relief, 2016
Unique silkscreen on calendered Belgian Linen
Presented by Vigo Gallery, C4

When Ibrahim El-Salahi is drawing, he gains temporary respite from his sciatica, Parkinson’s, and chronic back pain. The ‘Godfather of African Modernism’ says it’s the only time he has relief. Since 2016, he has created this extraordinary body of work on the back of medicine packets and envelopes from the comfort of an armchair, refusing to let physical restriction limit his ambition. He used the drawings as a nucleus to create large, unique mono-print paintings. The original image is pressed through the gauze onto pre-shrunk linen canvas many times over until a thick, inky texture is achieved, amplifying the marks. This has allowed El-Salahi to do something that otherwise would not be possible. Made despite and because of circumstance, ‘Pain Relief’ allows us to delve into the artist’s memories of a long and fruitful life.

SP3
Reynier Leyva Novo
Federal Cleaning, 2024
Dust collected from various federal buildings in Washington, D.C. on adhesive paper, wood, glass, and digital print on paper
Presented by El Apartamento, B17

Each artwork in Reynier Leyva Novo’s series Federal Dust Collection features dust meticulously arranged on adhesive paper, creating a visual archive of impermanence. This seemingly insignificant material, collected from the surfaces of emblematic federal buildings and national monuments such as the White House, becomes a powerful metaphor for the inevitable decay and transformation of even the most enduring institutions. Dust, often dismissed as a byproduct of neglect, is elevated here to a medium of historical and political significance, carrying traces of daily life, decision-making, and the unseen shifts within these centers of authority and memory. This project was undertaken during Novo’s Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, D.C., in May and June 2024.

Federal Cleaning compels viewers to confront the transient nature of governance. By capturing the material remnants of these iconic spaces, Novo highlights the tension between the perceived permanence of political and cultural structures and their actual susceptibility to change. The project challenges the notion of enduring power, emphasizing that even the strongest symbols of authority are ultimately subject to the inexorable forces of time and transformation.


SP4
Tyrrell Winston
The Living Years, 2023-2024
Aluminum bleacher planks, used basketballs, liquid plastic, steel, and epoxy
Presented by Library Street Collective, C13

California-born, Detroit-based artist Tyrrell Winston transforms discarded objects into thought-provoking sculptures, exploring their hidden stories and embedded histories. Known for bridging sports and fine art, Winston is best recognized for his basketball wall sculptures, reconfiguring used basketballs into meticulously arranged compositions that highlight the objects’ past lives, challenging the idea of material insignificance in our transient world. Winston believes that forgotten objects retain both energy and meaning, serving as records of human experience.

Furthering his fascination with found materials, Winston repurposed outdoor bleachers in his work commissioned for the MSU Broad Art Museum, Everything is Won Before It Has Begun, bending aluminum into an industrial bouquet. The piece symbolizes resurrection by reimagining a sporting accessory as a modern monolith, breathing new life into what was once discarded. Winston’s assemblages encourage reflection on permanence, connection, and the consequences of neglect, offering a poignant commentary on our relationship with the material world.


SP5
Onajide Shabaka
Totem, Long Journey Home, 2024
Presented by Oolite Arts (Miami, FL), in conversation with Healing Nature, a current exhibition curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud on view at Oolite Arts

In many traditional, historic African cultures, kinship is two-sided – it can be established either through bloodline or totems, and both are equally as important. A totem is a spirit, sacred object, symbol or emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage or tribe, that has special significance in tribal life. The concept of using totems demonstrates the close relationship between humans, animals and the lived environment.

“After a very quick glance at a text by Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers, curator of African Art and head of the Arts of Africa and the Americas at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, that included a ritual walking stick, I shared with him sketches of what I was thinking as a much larger sculptural idea for a project I wanted to develop. The hexagonal form used is one of natural strength and also beautiful. I remember my mother that way, as strong and beautiful, and dedicate this sculpture to her memory.” Onajide Shabaka

Onajide Shabaka is a visual artist, curator, and writer living and working in Miami, Florida. Shabaka’s decades-old walking practice explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of the creative in various environments, and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with an interest in walking envisioned as a relational practice and tactic enabling Shabaka and his audience to read and rewrite space.


SP6
Judy Pfaff
El Patio, 1988
Steel, enamel, wood and plastic
Presented by Cristin Tierney Gallery, A27

Judy Pfaff’s prolific artistic career spans more than five decades. Highly influential and renowned for her site-specific installations, Pfaff continues to work at the forefront of avant-garde practices by ceaselessly reinventing her distinctive visual lexicon and embracing unusual combinations of materials. Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, she creates exuberant, sprawling artworks that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation but is perhaps best described as painting in space. Pfaff’s large-scale installations inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist. El Patio is a classic example of this kind of work, combining a bright, riotous palette with sweeping diagonal lines and a playfully off-kilter sense of balance.


SP7
Equipo 57 and Monika Buch
Concrete and Spatial Views, 1957-1961/1975-2010
Geometric and concrete paintings
Presented by Rafael Ortiz Gallery (Seville/ Madrid, Spain).

The “Concrete and Spatial Views” project merges the collective work by Equipo 57 with that of the artist Monika Buch.

Monika Buch was a student at the Ulm School (Hochschule für Gestaltung), and a disciple of Max Bill -master of the Bauhaus- with a career converging with that of Equipo 57. Equipo 57, a group of five young Spanish artists who renounced the personal authorship of the works they created, began its career at the Denise René Gallery in Paris, where Max Bill also exhibited his work and started a lasting relationship of friendship and correspondence with them.

The overflowing power of Equipo 57's works and Monika Buch's delicacy of form and color interact with each other. Both works are concrete and dynamic. In the case of Equipo 57's works, color and form are determined by the Theory of the Interactivity of Plastic Space, which they developed in 1957. In the case of Monika Buch, her proposal is more optical and kinetic, but both coexist in harmony.
The confrontation of these works creates dynamic situations between two important European artistic voices who hold the key to geometry and concretism with a very defined personality.


SP8
Izhar Patkin
Palagonia, 1990
Wax, plaster, gold leaf, wood, polyresin and mixed media
Presented by JUPITER (Miami, FL / New York, NY)

Patkin’s 1990 epic sculpture Palagonia is in many ways his ‘Grand Tour.’ It fluxes Bernini’s 1652 altarpiece marble depiction of St. Teresa’s orgasmic transverberation at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, with the 1749 frolicking grotesques by Francesco Ferdinando II Gravina at the Villa Palagonia in Sicily–a sight Goethe described as filled with “elements of madness,” and as a monstrous expression of the unconscious. Adding to the mix, Patkin invokes the ‘veil-like’, groundbreaking impressionist wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso of the 1890’s.


SP 9
hettler.tüllmann
Seating Installation, 2022 - 2024
Palm leaves, cotton strings, rattan, powder-coated metal and wood

Nest Seating Installation, 2024
Hand-dyed woven palm leaves with an MDF base

The Fred and Jacob chairs are a result of a collaboration with Flechtwerk Berlin and take their names from the first and last name of the artisan. Fred Jacob is a third-generation basket weaver based in Berlin and has woven the seats from rattan. The final chair in the collection is the Puli chair, named after the Hungarian herding dog. The studio was inspired by the Shakers’ concept of re-use and their utilitarian design and crafted the shaggy chair from the cotton textiles used in household mops, bringing a playful anthropomorphic element to the collection.

Visitors to the lounge are invited to rest their feet and sit in a hettler.tüllmann selected chairs in the space. Each piece is handmade from palm leaves, using a coil weaving technique, and sits on a metal base.

Visitors are also invited to explore the Nest Installation, featuring bespoke one-of-a-kind seats. The six basket-like pieces were designed in collaboration with People of the Sun – a social enterprise from Malawi that helps low-income artisans build sustainable businesses while preserving their cultural heritage. Each chair is handmade from palm leaves, using a coil weaving technique.

Two of the chairs are arranged as a love seat” – a 19th-century seating design where the seats are placed at opposite angles. The design was also known as a ‘gossip chair’ or a ‘conversation bench’ – perfect for a photo opportunity.


SP10
Ralph Iwamoto
Geometric Paintings, 1965-1975
Acrylic on cotton
Presented by Hollis Taggart, A74

Ralph Iwamoto’s paintings, from 1965 to 1975, add historical depth to Hollis Taggart’s main booth’s presentation of a transoceanic dialogue. Iwamoto, who witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a teenager, created early work that synthesized the geometric abstraction of Cubism, Surrealist motifs, and flat, planar characteristics of traditional Japanese art. In the 1960s, Iwamoto began exploring geometric abstraction, taking further the visual language of flat planes seen only nascent in his earlier works. While working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, Iwamoto formed close friendships with artists Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Dan Flavin, who would later become the core group of the Minimalism movement.Influenced by their stylistic and formal innovations, Iwamoto began experimenting with pure color, form, and rigorous geometricism. Through Minimalism, Iwamoto saw the potential for a method by which he could explore and express a universal truth, and in the early 1970s, he began to work specifically with the octagon as his “shape within a grid.” Inspired by LeWitt’s right-angle and left-angle compositions, as well as the work of Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Iwamoto mined ways to syncopate a grid through seemingly infinite permutations of an octagon and a minimal color palette. Often working with groups of four (as in Red Blue Move (4 Octagons)), eight (which he termed “Octagon Concepts”), and sixteen octagons (“Factors”) in grid format, he went on to use the octagon in increasingly complex arrangements. Iwamoto put forth his abstraction vision, inflected by American minimalism and Japanese hard-edge planar elements.


SP11
Wendy White
Highs and Lows (Double Happiness), 2024
Steel, dibond, epoxy, enamel, PVC, powder-coated steel chain, LED and hardware
Presented by C O U N T Y, A65

Wendy White’s mobile features an index of visual archetypes: vector images of black rainbows, rain clouds with suspended drops, hearts shaped from chunky pixels, oversized rain droplets, and distorted peace signs. Despite their roots in popular culture, phone apps, and video games, White’s chosen motifs lack one immediate, coherent referent. Instead, they hover in a liminal space, one of psychological connections rather than real-world anchors. The simplicity and recognizability of hearts and rainbows as universal placeholders for optimism and positivity belie a more profound construct regarding symbols' mutability. These heavy-duty cutouts communicate from a non-logocentric space wherein the particular anxieties of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood intersect depending on the viewer’s perspective.

Highs and Lows (Double Happiness) alludes to an emotional duality—the alternating of apex and nadir that defines a post-adolescent realm: those mentioned above “let downs” of childhood dreams versus the emotional maturity required to navigate adulthood. This concept is underscored by the physical balancing act of the mobile’s construction, in which industrial materials and hardware are vaguely reminiscent of a mechanical or athletic setting.


SP12
Made of Matter: Diasporic Mediations on Ancestry and Futures
Charlene Tan, Kongkee, Ashley Dequilla and Kamran Samimi
Presented by Auttrianna Projects x re.riddle (Los Angeles, San Francisco, CA)

Made of Matter: Diasporic Mediations on Ancestry and Futures is a collaborative project curated by Auttrianna Projects and re.riddle, exploring the poetics of materiality in the artistic practices of contemporary Asian diasporic artists Ashley Dequilla, Charlene Tan, Kongkee, and Kamran Samimi. Through a diverse array of multimedia, textiles, sculpture, video, and works on paper, the artists ask: Can reclaimed cultural practices transmute colonial legacies and empower collective narratives of joy and pride, guiding us toward a more equitable future?

By invoking diasporic ancestral histories and situating them alongside dominant narratives and prevalent iconography in Western art history, the artists poignantly complicate and redefine established hierarchical structures, thereby expanding our understanding of contemporary visual and material culture. This project offers potential pathways for reclaiming one’s cultural heritage from cycles of occupation and appropriation, allowing individuals to reconnect with their sense of self and cultural identity.


SP13
contain and mend
Tra My Nguyen, Leila Seyedzadeh, Trần Thảo Miên, Shaheer Zazai, Defne Tutus, Duy Hoà and Z.T. Nguyễn
Presented by Transmitter (Brooklyn, NY)

Transmitter is proud to present contain and mend, a group exhibition of work by artists Tra My Nguyen, Leila Seyedzadeh, Trần Thảo Miên, Shaheer Zazai, Defne Tutus, Duy Hoà and Z.T. Nguyễn for Untitled Art, Miami Beach Special Projects sector. Responding to Untitled Art’s 2024 curatorial focus of “East Meets West,” the group presentation draws inspiration from postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha to challenge traditional categories of “East” or “Asian,” especially proposing expansive definitions inclusive of Southeast and Southwest Asia. Further referencing the fluid nature of identity and resistance to stasis, the works on display will rotate over the course of the fair, each day featuring a new selection of works. By highlighting recent works from emerging international artists, contain and mend emphasizes the instability of geographic, ethnic, and nationalist categories. Through porous, diaphanous, and textile-driven works that center the human body and its relationships to physical, external environments, the group presentation embraces the overhang or the excess material that evades neat dichotomies and dualisms, implicit in the endless attempts to separate humanity from one another: leakes and slippages will always continue.


SP14
dach&zephir
In between rèpriz and konpozisyon: a space for Caribbean cultures and communities, 2024
Textile, wood, collage, archival pictures, recycled objects and newly designed objects
Presented by Atlantic Arthouse (Miami, FL / Bermuda)

French-Caribbean creative duo dach&zephir presents an in-situ art and design installation, to be produced during their artist residency at Fountainhead Arts, supported by Atlantic Arthouse and La Station Culturelle. For this year's theme of "East meets West,” dach&zephir respond with the installation "In between rèpriz and konpozisyon: a place for Caribbean cultures and communities" that brings to light mixed-race thinking that is both rooted in creolity and open to the world, drawing on the concept of creolisation popularized by Martinique philosopher Edouard Glissant.

Looking at the Caribbean as a floating space, where plural geographies, histories and cultures - both from the West and East, both ante- and post-colonial - come together, the installation celebrates the interferences of East and West and the ambiguities of the Creole worlds of the Caribbean.By combining textile, images-collages and various art & design objects taking their roots in Caribbean tradition and influenced by the East and West, the installation invites us to take a closer look at the cross-fertilisation of Caribbean culture, from the Native American peoples to the African, Asian, Middle Eastern and European cultures imported and hybridized in the insular and continental Caribbean region. It highlights how Indian and Chinese communities that play a central role in contemporary Caribbean societies are often disregarded as a part of the region's cultural identity. The installation therefore creates a space that is as much metaphorical, conceptual and physical inspired by a popular imagery shared from East to West – and across the Caribbean: the sunshade, punctured outdoor scenes on the beach and traditional marketplaces.