15 Art Basel Miami 2015 galleries you must see

NYC gallery Lehmann Maupin expanded beyond Chelsea and the Lower East Side to Hong Kong in 2013. Its Kabinett booth (one of 27 curated exhibitions scattered thoughout the fair) will feature an installation by Nari Ward, whose mid-career survey exhibition, “Sun Splashed,” runs through February 21 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Ward’s sculptures and installations, often incorporating found objects, employ a wealth of historical and contemporary references to reflect on the lives of African-American and Caribbean people. His 1993 work Amazing Grace, installed in a former firehouse in Harlem and involving hundreds of abandoned baby strollers and discarded fire hoses, is still one of the most elegiac portraits ever made of a community in crisis. Don’t miss the opportunity to see a new piece here.

Opened in 2013, New York’s Garth Greenan Gallery has made a name for itself reviving the careers of neglected artists like Paul Feeley, Nicholas Krushenick, and Howardena Pindell. Its booth in the Survey section of the fair will present five canvases from the mid-1960s by Pop artist Rosalyn Drexler, whose paintings—made by enlarging images from magazines, newspapers, films and TV and overpainting them with acrylics—were darker and more surreal than those of her male peers.

While representing a roster of international stars, German-born dealer Susanne Vielmetter has also established herself as a champion of California’s emerging talents, showing artists you might not see elsewhere. Seek out Sadie Benning’s jigsaw-puzzle-like abstractions, as well as works with political overtones by L.A. artists Andrea Bowers and Rodney McMillian.

Also located in the Nova section, London gallery Pilar Corrias will present a trio of younger, of-the-moment video artists: Rachel Rose, Ian Cheng and Ken Okiishi. Rose’s videos, addressing such subjects as the environment and 20th-century modernism, incorporate found and original footage; Cheng’s meditations on human-ness are created using computer simulations; and Okiishi’s recent abstract oils, done on flatscreen monitors that play clips from amateur videos, combine the act of painting with that of viewing.

With three spaces in Paris and a program that goes far beyond the usual suspects, fast-rising Galerie Kamel Mennour is one of the most exciting art venues in the French capital. In addition to representing the estates of modernist sculptor Alberto Giacometti and surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier, as well as established names from the 1960s like Mono-ha painter Lee Ufan and conceptualist Daniel Buren, Mennour also handles such breakout talents as visual artist and dancer Lili Reynaud-Dewar and installation artist Camille Henrot.

Opened in 1986 in Cologne, Galerie Buchholz was at the center of that city’s art scene of the 1980s and ’90s, showing work by then-unknowns Isa Genzken, Kai Althoff, Jutta Koether and Michael Krebber. The gallery has since evolved into a major international player, with two spaces in Cologne, a branch in Berlin, and an outpost on New York’s Upper East Side. Nevertheless, it still makes room for leading-edge younger artists like Simon Denny and Loretta Fahrenholz alongside the now-famous members of its original stable.

Since the 1990s, Mexico City has been an important center for adventurous contemporary art. One of the mainstays of its gallery scene is Kurimanzutto, whose installation- and sculpture-heavy program features work by internationally renowned Mexican artists like Gabriel Kuri, Mariana Castillo Deball, Dr. Larka and Daniel Guzmán, as well as by global stars such as Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Native American artist Jimmie Durham, and Puerto Rico–based duo Allora and Calzadilla.

Although galleries such as Skoto gallery in New York have helped make artists like Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui recognizable names in America, there are still far too few places in this country where you can see modern and contemporary African art. Let South Africa’s Stevenson Gallery, which specializes in current art and photography from the region, broaden your vision with works by the likes of photographer Pieter Hugo, painter Portia Zvavahera and installation artist Serge Alain Nitegeka.

Founded in 2004, Beijing Art Now Gallery shows the work of Chinese contemporary artists. Its booth in the Survey section of the fair will be devoted to post-Tiananmen artist Wang Jinsong. Wang is best known for his 1990s conceptual photography, which often addresses social conditions in China. Works such as A Standard Family (1996), comprising 200 images of single-child families, will be displayed alongside the artist’s gouache and acrylic paintings—reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica in style—from the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Last year Sao Paolo’s Mendes Wood DM—run by one American and two Brazilian dealers—held forth in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Nova section, devoted to emerging galleries. Newly graduated into the main fair, the gallery will likely present a wider range of its program this year. Look for work that has a conceptual or political (or sometimes simply poetic) aspect by Brazilian artists Celso Renato and Paulo Nazareth.

Bleeding-edge Berlin gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler will dedicate its Positions booth to the work of Berlin-based American Daniel Keller, who is also, with Nik Kosmas, one half of the artist duo AIDS-3D. Keller’s solo production focuses on the intersection of technology, commerce and culture, and particularly on the role of the artist in today’s networked global economy. He is known for exquisitely crafted sculptures based on those wiggly security CAPTCHAS used by websites to tell human users from bots, and for AIDS-3D’s corporation-sculpture Absolute Vitality, Inc. (2012).

In the Nova section, the young Madrid gallery Maisterravalbuena will show American B. Wurtz’s assemblages with Spaniard Néstor Sanmiguel Diest’s geometric abstractions. The combination of the two artists (both in their mid-60s) is felicitous: Both artists make apparently straightforward work that belies its visual and intellectual sophistication—Wurtz with arrangements of such everyday objects as plastic shopping bags, shoelaces and net produce sacks, Diest by layering simple patterns, words and images.

Established in 1997, Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery Foundation is an outgrowth of the city’s pioneering Foksal Gallery, which opened in in 1966. In the spirit of the original, the gallery shows innovative work by both international and Polish contemporary artists—among them Pawel Althamer, Monika Sosnowska, Paulina Olowska, and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski—many of whom it has supported from early in their careers. Foksal also conducts research into Polish art of the 1960s and ’70s and preserves the Warsaw studio of avant-garde artist Edward Krasinski (1925–2004).

In the Public section of the fair, African-American artist Hank Willis Thomas—represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York—will present a rolled-steel speech bubble bench from his public art series “The Truth Is I See You.” Thomas’s work often repurposes images from advertising and branding campaigns to comment on societal structures in America, particularly as they pertain to race. In this series, the cartoon speech balloon acts as a container for different voices and versions of the truth.

The almost-ten-year-old Palm Beach gallery Gavlak, which opened a branch in Los Angeles last year, reflects the taste of owner Sarah Gavlak for stuff that is poppy, sexy and super smart. The gallery shows work by such contemporary artists as Elisabeth Kley, Marilyn Minter and Betty Tompkins, as well as the self-portraits of 1950s and ’60s pinup photographer and model Bunny Yeager. Although Gavlak also represents the likes of Jack Pierson and Wade Guyton, girl power rules here.