Image via Complex Original
There's so much to see during Art Basel Miami Beach 2014, from Swizz Beatz's curated collection at SCOPE to all the booths at Design Miami/, that it's hard to decide where to visit. One of the biggest satellite fairs during Art Basel Miami Beach that's worth checking out, however, is UNTITLED. The fair always delivers with a lineup of impressive galleries and artists. While there are many familiar names on view this year, there's also a bunch of lesser known artists who are shaking up the scene in Miami. To make sure you don't miss some of the best work, we picked 10 Artists to Check Out at the UNTITLED. Art Fair.
Yung Jake
Booth: Steve Turner Contemporary
Yung Jake is the perfect artist of the Internet era. His practice blends social media and computer programs with art techniques. In the past, he's written a rap song about unfollowing your ex on Facebook, printed out online content on scrap metal, and covered digital canvases in endlessly moving cursors. His art takes the Internet as a medium to explore why we're so addicted to being online. For his piece at UNTITLED. Yung Jake has created a triptych of three warped Fiji bottles, elevating Photoshop and Tumblr images to the walls of a gallery.
Rafael Rozendaal
Booth: Steve Turner Contemporary
Rafael Rozendaal is one of the hottest digital artists right now, and he's known for creating beautiful and mesmerizing websites that often take the form of endless patterns. His digital art is both addictive and meditative, and you could spend all day clicking through one of his sites. For UNTITLED. Rozendaal has created something equally distracting, which he calls lenticular paintings. Made from digitally sliced up images printed on lenticular sheets, the pieces morph as you move around them like abstract holograms.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Booth: Johansson Projects
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's shadow boxes, one of which they've brought to UNTITLED., are like mini scenes of the Apocalypse. Mixing images from San Francisco, the world of branding, board games, movies, and more, the mixed-media dioramas consider the future of the Bay Area in terrible beauty. Often working with video, they have created sculptures that transmit information to a screen, blurring the line between what is real in front of you and what you see projected digitally.
Balint Zsako
Booth: Mulherin
Balint Zsako's delicate watercolors remind you of mythical tales weaved into tapestries with a psychedelic twist. His figures float across paper, and often his individual pieces line up like a long story. It's tough to say if the tale they're telling is a happy or sad one, but the careful works create a world that easy to fall into.
Brian Belott
Booth: Zurcher Gallery
Drawing, painting, performance, collage, and photography—New York-based artist Brian Belott seems to do it all. In the past, he's covered whole rooms in cut paper and painted shapes, turning space into an experiential painting or collage. For UNTITLED. Belott has created sculptures with a sense of humor: old calculators covered in glue, pebbles, sand, and even Doritos. The pieces look like relics or fossilized creatures found at the bottom of the ocean.
Paul Anthony Smith
Booth: Zieher Smith & Horton
Paul Anthony Smith's photographs are intriguing on their own right, but when he rips up the surface of the prints using a ceramic tool, they become even more captivating and strangely haunting. He calls this process “picotage” and usually begins with candid pictures of his family in his homeland of Jamaica. The white figures are ghostly forms that seem to shimmer as you approach them.
Alex Kvares
Booth: ADA
Ukraine-born artist Alex Kvares creates colorful and graphite drawings that depict both monsters and men in dark fantasy settings. In the past he's worked on graph paper, filling in the grid with explosions of figures and shapes. His work for UNTITLED. started as a side project or doodle, but it's clear why ADA chose to show it. Kvares’ drawings of colorful interiors fill the paper with patterns like an exotic Matisse.
Jen Stark
Booth: Eric Firestone Gallery
Known for her rainbow paper creations, Jen Stark is doing it big for Art Basel Miami Beach. Besides a psychedelic painted tent she installed at the Mondrian hotel, Stark has brought her trippy sculptures to UNTITLED. No matter how many times you see her work, it's hard not to keep looking at the layers upon layers of vibrant color.
Rebecca Morgan
Booth: Asya Geisberg Gallery
Rebecca Morgan's drawings and paintings depict cartoonish faces that are almost ghastly in their exaggerated features. For UNTITLED. these faces have become 3D in the form of ceramic jugs. With buckteeth, Pinocchio noses, and bushy eyebrows, Morgan’s creations are far from pretty, but that's the point. The incredible detail that goes into her work makes it impossible to deny her talent.
Jared Clark
Booth: ADA
Jared Clark relies on a variety of unusual materials, including map pins, Styrofoam, cutting boards, soap, Sharpies, and, for UNTITLED., collectable figurines. For the fair, he's taken a bunch of porcelain tchotchkes you would find at an estate sale, flipped them over, and painted their bottoms. According to John Pollard, the owner and curator of ADA, Clark thinks that, viewed straight on, these are paintings, but when you walk around them and see the figures they're made of, they become sculptures.
