Installation view of Henrik Godsk at Vigo Gallery at Untitled Art 2023.
Photo: World Red Eye; Courtesy Untitled Art
8 Emerging Artists Who Made a Splash at This Year’s NADA and Untitled Art in Miami
Every attentive art collector’s acquisition list should include these fast-rising talents, including Camila Falquez, Laura Footes, and Hugh Byrne
Two of the first art fairs to open in Miami and Miami Beach this year were NADA Miami, which returned to the legendary Ice Palace Studios with more than 150 exhibitors from 50 cities presenting new voices in contemporary art, and Untitled Art, which came back to its sprawling tent on the beach with over 160 exhibitors from 38 countries offering work by younger artists alongside older practitioners, who provided a context for the changing trends.
Surveying hundreds of artworks in a variety of media at both of these fashionable fairs, Galerie has selected eight outstanding emerging artists who should be on every attentive art collector’s acquisition list.
Laura Footes, Dinner Time, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Shrine, New York and Los Angeles
1. Laura Footes at SHRINE
A British artist who earned a degree from the Royal Drawing School in London in 2014, Laura Footes spent time studying in New York that same year on an academic exchange with the Art Students League, yet her work was only exhibited on this side of the pond in an October solo show at SHRINE. Recently commissioned by His Majesty King Charles III to create a series of “Margate Sunrises” in honor of the Coronation and to be auctioned at Christie’s in support of His Majesty’s charities, the talented young artist paints ghostly figures transcendently flowing through time in dreamlike urban and domestic settings. A member of Tracey Emin’s TKE Studios program, Footes has been dealing with a chronic illness since childhood, which makes the out-of-body experiences of the subjects of her Dinner Time painting at NADA all the more unnerving to see.
Camila Falquez, Samantha Siagama, Trans-Indigenous Leader, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Hannah Traore Gallery, New York
2. Camila Falquez at Hannah Traore Gallery
A Brooklyn-based artist of Colombian, Mexican, and Spanish descent, Camila Falquez utilizes the traditions of fashion and portrait photography to open up issues of social and gender diversity. Influenced by the styles of surrealism, she imaginatively employs the camera to advance narratives of community, humanity, liberation and visibility. Part of her solo presentation at NADA, her striking Samantha Siagama, Trans-Indigenous Leader photo portrays a community leader and activist from the coffee region of Colombia who works as a coffee picker on a farm. The leader of a group of fellow Trans women, who are exiled from the Emberá Indigenous tribe for defending their gender identity, Siagama is stylishly pictured in a flowing skirt fashioned from the farm’s window curtains. Selected as this year’s NADA Acquisition Gift for PAMM, the captivating photo was picked by Perez Art Museum Miami curators for the discerning institution’s permanent collection.
Anthony Miler, Not Titled, (2023). Photo: Courtesy The Pit, Los Angeles and Palm Beach
3. Anthony Miler at The Pit
An Ohio-born artist living and working in Brooklyn, Anthony Miler makes paintings that marvelously move between abstraction and figuration. Rendering cycloptic eyes that animate picture planes defined by curvy organic shapes, an interplay of graphic lines and softly colored backgrounds, Miler constructs meditative canvases that illuminate the delicate state of nature. Earning an MFA in Painting from the City College of New York in 2008, his work evolved during a residency in London during the 2020 lockdown and has gained a greater audience ever since. Seeming to capture a bird in flight or a salmon swimming upstream, his untitled painting at NADA presents a pared-down vision of a peaceful environment, yet it’s charmingly nothing more than a sublime arrangement of abstract forms evoking an enchanting space.
Amia Yokoyama, Resting thicket, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles
4. Amia Yokoyama at Sebastian Gladstone
A multimedia artist working out of Los Angeles, Amia Yokoyama has been creating playful ceramic sculptures since she was a kid. Receiving an MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts in 2017, she also known for composing stop-motion videos with a cast of clay characters. Featured in the critically acclaimed “Clay Pop” exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch in New York and Los Angeles, she’s done art residencies in Europe and America, including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and was an artist-in-residence at Sebastian Gladstone before showing with the gallery in 2021. At NADA, the gallery presented glazed porcelain sculptures, such as Resting thicket, that explore cosmology and mythology. Inspired by anime, her baby blue girls are fetishized figures in fairytale settings—fluid and let loose to multiply like a virus, they’re as wild as the wind.
Hugh Byrne, Next Stop, (2023). Photo: Courtesy EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town and Franschhoek
5. Hugh Byrne at EBONY/CURATED
Exhibiting in his native South Africa and in Europe for more than a decade, Hugh Byrne only started getting American exposure for his art this year, when his paintings were exhibited by EBONY/CURATED at Expo Chicago and now in Miami at Untitled Art. An experimental abstractionist, the Cape Town–based artist is continuously changing his approach to his art—shifting between painting, assemblage and sculpture—while always staying true to his interest in color, structure and composition. His colorful Next Stop painting at the fair presents a two-dimensional visual landscape consisting of geometric shapes floating and touching on a curvy, two-dimensional plane. Alternating between oil sticks and brushed-on paint, his paintings offer a mix of line, form and texture to keep the eye in motion and engaged.
Caio Marcolini, HYB186 - hybrid series, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Gallery Nosco, London and Brussels
6. Caio Marcolini at Gallery Nosco
With degrees in Industrial Design and Jewelry, Caio Marcolini approaches sculpture with a keen sense of both form and delicacy. A Brazilian artist based in Portugal, Marcolini strikingly constructs his organically shaped metal sculptures through a weaving process that he developed on his own. Blurring the boundary between figuration and abstraction, his sculptures refer to the human body while offering new physical forms. Using brass wire left in its natural color or oxidized to become black while also employing copper wire to get another sheen, he gracefully weaves the thin wire into voluminous, looping configurations that are evocative of both the human figure and forms in nature. Marcolini’s wall-mounted HYB186 – hybrid series sculpture at Untitled Art depicts woven tubular vines, protruding from two breast-like forms, which wonderfully wind and intersect before elegantly ending in a surprising, stalactite shape.
Henrik Godsk, Protector, (2023). Photo: Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London and New York
7. Henrik Godsk at Vigo Gallery
With a family history rooted in Denmark’s carnivalesque theme parks, Henrik Godsk grew up maintaining the folkloric panels on the festive park’s colorful rides—a task that eventually led the developing artist to design and paint his own motives. Studying art and literature in college, he had a slow build before beginning to publicly show his constructivist form of art in 2017, but his career has been on a rapid track ever since. Inspired by the modern art masters, particularly Amadeo Modigliani’s figures with long necks and flattened proportions and the abstracted forms and vibrant colors of the artists related to the Russian avant-garde, Godsk employs a simple graphic clarity and a retro color palette to create exciting, eye-catching portraits and still lives. Displayed in a carousel-like structure with a group of his canvases in the gallery’s Untitled Art booth, his Protector painting constructs a classic symbolic form for an iconic female figure.
Mia Chaplin, The Matriarch, (2023). Photo: Courtesy WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town and Tulbagh
8. Mia Chaplin at WHATIFTHEWORLD
Getting her initial exposure in America, South African painter and sculptor Mia Chaplin creates fascinating figurative paintings and equally compelling papier-mâché sculptures that mix abstract forms with figuratively painted elements. Exploring issues of sexuality, intimacy, sensuality, and violence, the visible brushstrokes and impasto surfaces of her flesh-colored canvases—such as The Matriarch at Untitled Art—add an impressive level of physicality and realism to her abstract female figures. A current artist-in-residence at Miami’s Fountainhead Residency, she exhibited a selection of lively canvases of nude women coupled and clustered in nature at the fair, alongside several totemic sculptures that beautifully balanced her painted papier-mâché pieces atop sensually carved wooden plinths, which stylistically repeat the fascinating forms above.
Cover: Installation view of Henrik Godsk at Vigo Gallery at Untitled Art 2023.
Photo: World Red Eye; Courtesy Untitled Art
