In Miami, NADA and Untitled Art Test the Temperature of the Mid-Tier and Emerging Markets

Miami fairgoers have long had to ping-pong between NADA and Untitled Art, making strategic decisions about which fair to hit first to game the traffic and catch the best discoveries before they disappear. Design District versus the beach? First opening versus follow-up? There are no right answers and once again, these fairs opened on the same day, each courting the mid-level and emerging tiers of the market, offering collectors a more accessible economic entry point and space for discovery versus the blue-chip spectacle that is Art Basel Miami Beach.

While both openings were packed and sales chatter was constant, the audience this year—at least early in the week—has been primarily American and notably local, with a handful of visitors from South America and many more from the broader Latino community with ties to Miami. There are far fewer Europeans and almost no Asian collectors. The composition of this opening-day crowd seems to confirm that the nonstop global fair calendar, now delivering international offerings everywhere, is finally encouraging collectors to stay closer to their own regions unless they travel with the explicit intention of discovering new ecosystems through geographically focused fairs.

In terms of offerings, both fairs signaled a noticeable shift and an encouraging improvement: far less bright, easy figuration and a much broader range of approaches beyond straight identity politics, with deeper reflections on our fragmented relationship to reality, mediatization and alienation—and a renewed attempt to find reconnection through materiality as a vessel for memory, care and heritage traditions. A clear echo of the anxieties and uncertainties shaping the world we are all navigating.

The atmosphere on opening day was vibrant, with steady sales signaling a rebound in confidence—if still far from the sold-out-by-noon urgency of an earlier era, enough to give dealers more optimism than last year. “I think the market confidence is there from what I could see,” art advisor Maria Brito told Observer. “My clients bought several things from the previews, and many of the things that we inquired about today were sold.” Because the emerging and mid-career segments have suffered more than others, seeing this level of activity on day one of the younger fairs is a strong indication that the market may be recovering. Venezuelan and New York-based collector Ronald Harrar, spotted touring NADA with a group of friends, echoed this sentiment. “Being in Miami feels amazing—the whole city is buzzing with art,” he told Observer at the end of the day. “At NADA and Untitled, the energy was high, collectors were active and several galleries mentioned strong sales.”

Advisor Adam Green was on the same page. “The market feels the strongest it has all year,” he told Observer, noting how the mood took a positive turn a few months ago during Frieze London and Art Basel Paris and that became evident when the November New York auctions surpassed all expectations. “Since then, there has been renewed energy with collectors buying more decisively and with more confidence,” he added, emphasizing how, although this isn’t the same frenzy as a few years ago, it feels much stronger than earlier this year. “The energy felt good after the first day of NADA and Untitled, but there is still a sense of uncertainty and even curiosity about whether that momentum will continue.”

NADA is where the day begins and the $5k-20k market still hums

Despite the overlapping openings—and the pull of evening events dragging everyone back downtown—many still followed the ritual migration from South Beach to NADA, arriving at 10 a.m. sharp. With 140 galleries, art spaces and nonprofits from 30 countries and 65 cities, the fair—born as a dealer-led platform for a younger generation of American galleries (many of which have only recently graduated to Art Basel)—remains a vital alternative for those operating under the $50,000 tier and navigating the $5,000-20,000 price range.

New York dealer Charles Moffett, a consistent standout in past editions, returned with intimately scaled, evocative paintings by Dominican-born, New York-based Kenny Rivero, whom the gallery has represented for over seven years. The playfulness of the subtle, the unsaid and the partially erased underscores a charged tension between what is expressed and what is deliberately withheld. The presentation introduces Rivero’s first solo show in three years, opening December 11. The gallery’s strong past at NADA, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami acquisition prize in 2019, combined with the scarcity of his work and the density of his symbolic language, produced immediate demand, and 10 new works sold between $12,000 and $25,000. “We are very happy with people’s response to Rivero’s new paintings so far at NADA; we’ve introduced new collectors to his practice, and sales have been strong, which are of course two key factors to a fair’s success,” Moffett said.

Tara Downs, another consistent presence at NADA, opened with a packed booth and sold out Yirui Fang’s U.S. debut by evening, with works priced between $6,000 and $16,000. This comes ahead of his solo exhibition at the gallery opening on January 16, which is already nearly sold out. The gallery additionally placed works by Roger Winter with Wells Fargo. Mrs., another regular presence at the fair, also reported a successful first day, with two works by Lily Ramírez selling for $10,000, as well as two mortar works by Elizabeth Atterbury at $4,500 each and two works by Sachiko Akiyama priced at $12,000 each. Harkawick placed about $35,000 worth of work on day one, including three pieces by Jackson Markovic from his Baroque Sunbursts series.

Hailing from Paris to Miami this year, Bremond Capela saw a similarly brisk start, placing a work by Madeline Peckenpaugh with the FAMM Museum in France (a museum dedicated exclusively to women artists), two works by Alexis Soul-Gray—showing at a fair with the gallery for the first time—and several pieces by Valdrin Thaqi, who is concurrently having a solo exhibition in the U.S. for the first time.

Meanwhile, Toronto’s Patel Brown stuck with NADA and brought a sharp booth centered on Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka’s new works in conversation with Sergio Suarez, along with pieces by Malik McKoy, Surabhi Gosh and Raiji Parera. Two Hatanakas and one Suarez were placed within the first half hour. Also from Toronto, Pangee presented a solo exhibition of cinematic, romantic landscapes by Canadian painter Claire Milbrath, whose views—ranging from alpine peaks to sailboat-filled harbors—draw inspiration and emotional material from her recent relocation to Victoria’s Salish Sea. By the end of the day, most of the presentations were sold or on hold, with prices ranging between $5,000 and $20,000, depending on the scale.

Even for a gallery like Sargent’s Daughters, a regular at Art Basel and Frieze, NADA Miami remains an ideal platform for a hyper-curated, full-wall presentation. Their booth spotlights vivid works by Wendy Red Star, Scott Csoke and Debbie Lawson, all riffing on art-historical animal imagery and recontextualizing it to probe the histories and identities encoded within. Drawing on the lush ornamentation of 1980s Pattern and Decoration and the tactile legacy of 19th-century Arts and Crafts, the gallery set the works against Colefax and Fowler wallpaper, creating a layered dialogue of color and pattern. The often-dismissed “crafty” dimension becomes here a tool of hybridity and humor—a shared playful appropriation that subtly but critically points to the tangled cross-cultural exchanges of history rather than any singular reading. Allegra LaViola, the gallery’s owner and director, reported strong first-day sales, with multiple works by all three artists placed in private and public collections. “Our decision to focus on historical decorative arts and to cover the booth with wallpaper by Colfax and Fowler has been a hit: We’ve enjoyed a lot of positive attention from people who are excited by our departure from a traditional fair booth,” LaViola told Observer.

Another absolute highlight of this edition is Proxyco’s solo booth, dedicated to Lucía Vidales and anchored by her large-scale painting, Viendo desde el monte Calvario (Looking out from Mount Calvary). Originating from a dialogue with Siqueiros, including the “Christ archetypes” he explored during his imprisonment, the eight-panel mural unfolds with dense symbolism that resonates with our time, channeling the tension between the human and the cosmic to reflect on an uncertain future. Set on a symbolic, sacred mount that recurs across cultures as a site of revelation, the composition becomes a vantage point for contemplating the crises shaping contemporary life: the fall of ideologies, the collapse of certainties and the unease of a world in flux. Yet Vidales avoids catastrophe imagery; instead, she treats instability as a choreography of gestures—movements that suggest both danger and the possibility of transformation. Smaller works, priced between $8,000 and $12,000, sold quickly, while the major mural, priced at $60,000, is awaiting an institutional acquisition, hopefully after being shown at the Kemper Museum and Ballroom Marfa.

Among the notable international entries at NADA, FOUNDRY Seoul made its Miami debut following a successful New York show, presenting Omyo Cho’s hybrid, alchemical sculptural systems alongside Hyunhee Doh’s organically procedural Hanji abstractions. Although distinct in method, both practices aim to give form to the intangible—memory, time and identity—through material inquiries into existence and perception. Cho stages tensions between brass and glass, balancing fragility, resilience and a kind of symbiotic force field between materials. Doh mixes glue and throws it across her surface, collaborating with the medium in a process where harmony emerges through controlled unpredictability. Works priced under $10,000 drew significant interest, despite their more elaborate aesthetics, which do not always resonate with the Miami audience.

NADA also continues to foster discovery. A standout of this edition is Kazakh painter Waldemar Zimbelmann, who debuted with a solo at Amsterdam-based Althuis Hofland Fine Arts. His psychologically charged canvases shift fluidly between painting and drawing—drawing being central to his practice—and often begin with personal or anonymous photographs that he transforms into a subtle visual language hovering between figuration and abstraction. Through overpainting, scraping and scribing, Zimbelmann generates distorted yet intimate representations of body and mind, where feeling, dissonant scribbles and intuitive brushstrokes merge into imagined worlds that serve as allegories for human experience. Previously shown with Matthew Brown and Harkawick, his works were reasonably priced at $13,000.

Embajada from Puerto Rico introduced young New Haven-based artist Taina Cruz. “Opening Day at NADA Miami was a fantastic start,” director Manuela Paz remarked. Cruz’s intuitive, Nuyorican-inflected paintings move fluidly between interiors, urban scenes and imagined landscapes, rendering memory through humor, alienation and warmth. Sales were steady, and conversations remained active throughout the day.

In the Projects section, London-based Chilli debuted with a resonant dialogue between the digital-analog tectonics of Juan Manuel Salas and the materially engaged archaeology of contemporary pop by Morgane Ely. Salas’s sedimentations of symbolic materials and fragmented bodies pair with Ely’s excavations of collective and individual memory, becoming tactile echoes of experience. Also in this section, Mama Project presented Fauvist Tropicalia hallucinations by Brazilian artist Paula Querido, all priced under $4,000, while Cuban Art Hub offered a solo exhibition by Gabriela Pez, whose practice draws deeply from Afro-Cuban mythology to present nature as a refuge, a source of healing and a protector. Houston-based Laura the Gallery also debuted here, reporting quick sales of Ernesto Solano’s hybrid bronze sculptures that explore the porous boundaries between “nature” and “culture/human-made,” imagining new forms of symbiosis where botanical forms, animal traces and human detritus act as collaborators. Solano’s works were paired with Keiko Moriuchi’s gold-covered talismanic compositions. The artist, associated with the Gutai movement, drew the attention of an acquisition committee from an important local institution.

Untitled Art’s international offerings

Several galleries that traditionally anchored NADA—and now travel consistently to international fairs—shifted or returned to the Untitled’s beachside tent. Credit goes in large part to executive director Clara Andrade, the fair’s power dynamo, who has shaped Untitled Art into one of the art world’s most forward-thinking platforms, attuned to new collaborative and inclusive models. Under the South Beach tent, Untitled hosts 160 exhibitors from more than seventy cities, yet its redesigned, fluid layout avoids crowding and encourages a sense of unfolding discovery as the fair reveals itself booth by booth.

Among the new presences in the Main section are Harper’s, Swivel Gallery, Meliksetian | Briggs, Spencer Brownstone, HAIR+NAILS and Soho Revue—art spaces more commonly associated with NADA Miami or New York. Swivel Gallery presented an engaging dialogue between the deceptively naïve aesthetics of Mexican artist Edgar Orlaineta and the hazy, dreamy synthetic compositions of Greek artist Ioanna Liminiou. Her U.S. solo debut opens at the gallery immediately after Miami—and is already nearly sold out. Liminiou emerges as a sharp storyteller and acute observer, balancing intuition and empathy to create a warm, deeply human synthetic reading of reality that slips between emotional and sensory perception. By day’s end, Swivel had nearly sold through her works between the fair and gallery, along with one Orlaineta wall piece at $20,000 and two sculptures at $6,500.

HAIR+NAILS sold out its full-booth solo of Emma Beatrez, whose intense narrative paintings transform teenage dramas into universal metaphors of human experience. Other galleries to sell out on day one included Miro Presents, RHODES, Vigo, SGR Galería, Spencer Brownstone and Belgian space Stems. Sales remained strong at the top end: Kavi Gupta placed a Glenn Ligon Untitled for $250,000-300,000, while mid-range demand showed real momentum in the under-$50,000 bracket. Other notable placements included a work by Lola Stong-Brett and one by Billy Childish, both for $47,500, with Carl Freedman Gallery, alongside multiple works by Nate Lewis, placed by Fridman Gallery, in the aftermath of his Whitney acquisition days earlier.

Ravji Menon Contemporary, another returning success story, presented “The Missing Figure,” a booth examining absence, erasure and disappearance across South Asian histories of colonization and its effects. Pakistani artist Ahsan Javaid used Gulf mannequins to interrogate value, labor and divinity; Ammama Malik explored self-representation through draped fabrics; and Sid Pattni eliminated the human figure entirely to reflect on postcolonial displacements. Five of six works by Pattni and Malik sold within hours (priced $6,000-10,000), signaling surging interest in emerging South Asian artists in a market where they remain underrepresented.

Also returning with success is Brooklyn-based CARVALHO, presenting an all-female dialogue between newly represented French artist Élise Peroi, London-based Yulia Iosilzon (fresh off a strong reception at Frieze Seoul) and New York-based artists Rachel Mica Weiss and Rosalind Tallmadge. The presentation foregrounds material processes as vessels of memory and tools of resilience beyond dominant forms. Works are priced under $30,000, with Weiss’s works selling out in the first hours and Peroi’s also selling through; the latter will present a solo booth at Frieze L.A.

The fair also encouraged cross-border collaborations, including a joint venture booth by Japanese gallery Cohju and CDMX-based Saeger, pairing Shinya Azuma and Scott Reeder in a synchronic dialogue rooted in play and cultural resilience against the flattening forces of globalized culture. As the gallerists explain, it is less about sustainability than a long-term strategy of sharing and circulating artists with deep affinities.

In the Spotlight sector, Superposition presented a standout solo by John Rivas—a deeply emotional rediscovery of El Salvador, where Rivas returned this year for the first time in over two decades. The installation Tierra Que Llora expands his practice into sculpture using soil, beans, corn husks, chains, carved wood and stitched textiles. “The energy at Untitled today was off the chain,” owner Storm Ascher told Observer. “I loved seeing everyone gasp and at the same time find peace through John’s immersive installation.” She predicted the booth would sell out by Sunday.

New York-based LATITUDE also reported a strong first day. Known for championing emerging Asian talents in the U.S., the gallery presented a two-person dialogue between the vibrantly psychedelic yet tactile abstractions of Iris Yehong Mao and the hallucinatory landscapes of Liane Chu, whose paintings arise from her lived experience of Teres syndrome—a natural, glitch-like visual seizure that allows her to access visions where reality already slips between parallel dimensions. Despite being located toward the beachside end of the fair, visitor flow remained strong, the gallery founder noted. Four to five works were placed within the first three hours, priced between $3,000 and $8,000, with additional works and inventory on hold. “Due to the level of activity, we are reinstalling nearly half of the booth around noon to show more available works for the remaining VIP hours,” founder Shihui Zhu told Observer.

One of the fair’s few digital-art presentations, LatchKey Gallery spotlighted Jessica Lichtenstein’s richly layered visionary world. Built entirely without generative A.I., her expanding cosmology imagines a luminous forest animated by feminine power and ecological healing. Anime-inflected nymphs bloom into floral formations, generating their own environment. The digital prints drew significant interest and the gallery hopes this enthusiasm will translate into sales, even though the $35,000 price point is slightly above her usual range. Lichtenstein also has an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

Heft Gallery, a longtime pioneer in digital art’s hybrid territories, split a double booth between Untitled and Art Basel Miami Beach’s inaugural Zero 10 section. At Untitled, the gallery spotlighted Auriea Harvey, whose densely stratified mythologies emerge through a dialogue between algorithmic exploration and analog craft. Treating polygons as mathematical clay and algorithms as contemporary craft materials, Harvey bridges the digital and physical realms through 3D scanning, robotic fabrication and handwork, testing the boundaries between the virtual and the tangible, the monstrous and the divine. A net.art trailblazer and co-founder of Tale of Tales, she now extends her digital assemblages into bronze and marble, exploring how classical materials are transformed when rooted in digital origins. The booth—also showcasing Nancy Burson, Zach Lieberman, Gretchen Andrew and Rafael Rozendaal—remained busy, attracting what founder Adam Heft described as “their own crowd,” a notably active Miami digital community.

Many presentations at Untitled navigated a liminal space between reality and virtuality, between past and future technologies and mythologies and the sense of fragmentation and narrative disorientation in between. Among these, Sanatorium (Istanbul) returned with a solo by Austrian-born, Vienna-based Christine Peschek, whose work probes shifting definitions of reality in an age saturated with digital and social media. Her hybrid body-tech identities—post-internet, post-human, post-binary—ask what it means to inhabit a body increasingly mediated by machines.

Also in the Spotlight sector, Gene Gallery introduced Zhang Haoyang, whose paintings function like compact encyclopedias—dense combinations of mythology, history and knowledge systems. Drawing from Chinese cosmology and ecological structures, his works map how information is organized, transmitted and mythologized across time. Priced between $5,900 and $7,500, they offer visually intricate syntheses of research and symbolism.

A similar tension unfolds at Albertz Benda, where rising Brazilian artist Larissa de Souza presents works of material prayer and emotional force, shaped by personal symbolism connected to ancestral Afro-Brazilian traditions. Born in 1995 and raised in one of São Paulo’s poorest strata, she began making art at fifteen while working in an art-supply store, finding in material elaboration a channel for lived experiences and cathartic rituals. Interest was strong and sales steady, with works ranging from $7,000 to $14,500, setting the stage for her anticipated January exhibition following a successful one in São Paulo.

A magnetic suite of works by Chris Roberts-Anteau in the Spotlight section transforms fabric and embroidery into a conduit for memory, mysticism, and self-formation. Often described as a “son spotlighting the mother,” Anteau draws on his childhood curiosity with textiles—an early fascination with how cloth absorbs touch, time and story—to build a symbolic vocabulary that moves between the domestic and the visionary. His stitched, layered compositions operate like soft epistemologies, charting alternative systems of knowledge through symbols, talismanic forms and devotional gestures embedded in fabric. Hovering between folk cosmology and speculative world-building, the works invite viewers into an intimate, alternative order of meaning. Priced between $4,000 and $6,000, they were among the most thoughtfully scaled and quietly resonant offerings in the section, with a larger signature work placed at $91,000, underscoring the depth and ambition behind his materially driven practice.

Untitled Art Miami Beach’s newly introduced Nest section offered the fair’s strongest—and most affordably priced—discoveries, opening onto a diverse range of emerging voices. A more accessible fee structure allowed not only younger galleries and independent projects but also a notable number of Asian exhibitors to participate despite rising logistical costs. Among these, Cub_ism_Artspace from Shanghai returned after last year’s sold-out showing with a solo of young Chinese artist Xinyu Long, who builds a syncretic cosmology of female goddesses across more than ten paintings and sculptures. Long creates a world where physis (nature) and nomos (human artifice) intertwine and contend, offering a vision in which feminine divinity, landscape and invented ritual coexist within a charged symbolic system.

Also in this section, Starch (Singapore) introduced Moses Tan, whose work navigates queerness, eroticism and the coded visual languages of fortune-cat culture and adult shops, unfolding as a layered choreography around the body and sexuality. Their solo presentation, d33p cuts, t3nd3r not3s, is an autotheoretical installation that weaves queer theory, allegory, horror and disavowal through drawing, sculpture and video, revealing codedness, camouflage and assimilation as essential strategies for queer survival in tightly controlled, heteronormative environments.

Nearby, pixelated military camouflages reappear on vessels evoking Greek vases by Russian artist Kurilchto, presented by the nomadic Brooklyn project Bahnhof. His practice explores the aesthetics of catastrophe and how digital communication alters our perception of violence and everyday life, inviting viewers to reconsider how visual codes of conflict infiltrate the objects and realities they inhabit.

Also in Nest, Venezuelan gallerist Juliana Sorondo (Sorondo Projects) presented a more conceptual booth pairing Venezuelan artist Angyvir Padilla with Eliana Henriquez and Miranda Makaroff, each exploring “the politics of the body.” Here, the body becomes the first site of meaning—where identity, history and perception collide and where visibility is a negotiation between truth and performance. Shaped by culture, gender and survival, appearance emerges as a form of power—a language used to shield, communicate, seduce or resist.

Untitled Art punctuated the fair with compelling large-scale installations, including the natural-sounding instruments by Leonel Vásquez, presented by Bogotá-based Casa Hoffmann, where sound is generated through the friction of stones from a dried riverbed or by channeling the movement of water, amplifying the micro-sounds of nature into resonant sculptural instruments. At the entrance, a monumental installation by Mexican duo Celeste, inspired by the resilient Cosmos flower (Cosmos bipinnatus), transformed the fair’s threshold into a pink, atmospheric field reminiscent of the landscapes the flower creates during the rainy season.

CDMX- and New York-based JOHS debuted with a solo booth of Rodrigo Echeverría’s deconstructed psychologies—paintings unraveling memory, identity and instability through fractured figuration and emotional distortion, staging private crises against broader contemporary pressures.

The fair also welcomed beloved alternative and nonprofit spaces. NYC Culture Club, in collaboration with Silver Art Projects, presented works by Jamel Robinson, Leah Ying Lin and Aristotle Forrester in a booth curated by Anwarii Musa. Adding its signature downtown vibrancy, the Lower East Side’s legendary artist-run hybrid art and nightlife space Beverly’s imagined its booth inside a Venetian palazzo during acqua alta—complete with water lines—featuring works by Marco DaSilva, Jack Henry, Leah Dixon, Heidi Norton, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Carlo Cittadini, Anders Lindseth, Andrew Birk, Alex Hammond and Juan Alvear.

Yet one of the most intriguing narratives unfolded at La Cometa’s booth. The Bogotá gallery dedicated its Miami presentation to Camilo Restrepo’s “Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood,” a hallucinatory and deceptively playful suite that confronts one of Colombia’s most surreal entanglements of drug history and ecology. The story begins with Pablo Escobar’s decision to import African animals, including hippos, to his private zoo; finding the climate nearly identical to their native habitat, the hippos reproduced uncontrollably and now constitute an ecological crisis. In a final twist, their waste hosts a mushroom traditionally used to treat addiction. Restrepo transforms this saga into a distorted psychological fable—a visionary ecosystem in which animals, humans and landscapes circulate and entangle within the same extractive logic, revealing how devastation and repair can emerge from the same source as nature attempts, however unevenly, to restore balance.

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