What to see at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 – nine brilliant booths

With 2025’s Frieze London and Art Basel Paris in the rearview mirror, it’s roll on Art Basel Miami Beach, opening with two VIP preview days from Wednesday 3 December and welcoming the public from Friday 5 December to Sunday. This year’s edition promises to be as eventful as ever, with more than 280 leading international galleries representing 43 countries and territories. The fair will also debut a new digital art platform in partnership with OpenSea, a sign of the momentum that new media has in the broader art world. Embracing the city’s vibrant community ties, Art Basel Miami Beach will see standout presentations of artists exploring Latin America and the Caribbean. As always, the glitzy event rounds out 2025 on a celebratory note as dealers, collectors and everyone in-between flock to Miami for the art, the beaches and, of course, the parties.

From a major display of works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on view at chic hotel The Betsy to monumental, pink inflatable creatures by Philippe Katerine suspended over Lincoln Road, there’s no shortage of pop-ups around town. This year, the most anticipated special event is from American artist Alex Prager, who will transform a historic Miami Beach movie theatre into an immersive installation exploring the glamour and artifice of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Called the Mirage Factory, the mise-en-scène, complete with an artificial orange grove, is a collaboration between The Cultivist and Capital One that will be activated throughout the week with dinners from renowned chef Dave Beran, as well as special performances and public experiences. Fresh from Prager’s having photographed Billie Eilish for the cover of WSJ. Magazine, the event marks a significant moment in the artist’s illustrious career.

To help you get the most out of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, here are the must-see booths. (And while you’re in town, check out Design Miami 2025 too.)

Lehmann Maupin

Speaking of Alex Prager, the artist’s work will also grace the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Lehmann Maupin’s booth. The gallery is showing new photographs that exude glamour and drama as impressive as that of the pop-up installation; among them is Hidden Hills (Echoes) (2025), in which a housekeeper weeps as a buff man in a bathing suit stands outside the window behind her, posing as if in a body-building contest. He, in turn, looks through another window at a woman in a red satin dress sitting in front of a house of cards precariously stacked on a table. Masks hanging along the wall allude to deceit, and an open flip phone sitting on the sill hints at a fraught message, perhaps an image of betrayal on the brink of being revealed.

Jessica Silverman

With Woody De Othello’s impressive solo show of anthropomorphic sculptures and tile wall pieces on view across town at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, it’s particularly apt for Jessica Silverman to bring the Miami-born artist’s work to the fair. Included in the gallery’s presentation is a large-scale patinated bronze sculpture called inner knowing (2025). While little is needed to entice visitors to see De Othello’s museum show, the sculpture offers a glimpse of what to expect in his equally contemplative and expressive investigations of the transformative power of spirituality and both ritual and everyday objects. Though he often explores themes of heritage and place, De Othello leaves his work open to the viewer’s interpretation, inviting deep personal connections with whatever emotions the audience brings.

Uffner & Liu

With a roster full of women artists, it’s no surprise that Uffner & Liu should impress with an equally female-forward booth. Visitors familiar with the gallery will see recognisable names like Anne Buckwalter, whose Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired domestic scenes are filled with salacious details, like fornicating figures, and Bernadette Despujols, who paints intimate, textured portraits often centred on the body and exploring resilience and the Latin American diaspora.

The gallery will also show recent and historic works by Reginald Madison, a self-taught painter and sculptor who just joined Uffner & Liu’s roster. Now in his mid-eighties, Madison began working at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from jazz and his fellow artists to explore the Black experience.

Gemini G.E.L.

A titan of the world of printmaking, Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. is returning to the fair with a rich selection of editions that it has made with leading artists over the decades. Included in the booth will be several prints and sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg to coincide with the global commemoration of what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. Rauschenberg collaborated with Gemini for four decades, pushing the boundaries of printmaking with works like the Hoarfrost series (1974), on view, comprising ethereal textiles with images transferred from newspapers and other media.

Among the newest editions that Gemini is bringing will be a monumental lithograph by Toba Khedoori featuring meticulously rendered, ghostly tree branches. The elegant image spans three sheets of paper, a testament to the skill of the printmakers at Gemini’s studio, which will celebrate its own milestone next year, its 60th anniversary.

Tina Kim Gallery

Always staging elegant presentations is Tina Kim Gallery, which is bringing a selection of artists from its primarily international roster with a keen eye for Asian-American and Asian artists. A highlight of the booth will be an abstract textile piece by 95-year-old Lee ShinJa. Called Hill (1996), the stunning wool and copper piece spans over 7ft in length and features a vibrant, geometric landscape. While she’s been working since the 1950s, Lee has been on a renewed rise in recent years, with a current solo show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California and a glowing profile in The New York Times.

Erin Cluley Gallery

To tease Nic Nicosia’s solo show that opens next year at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Erin Cluley Gallery is presenting a selection of photographs from the artist’s celebrated Real Pictures series (1987-89) in the fair’s Survey Sector. Dedicated to under-recognised artists of historical importance, the section offers visitors a chance to broaden their art historical lens and see rarely exhibited artworks. Nicosia’s Real Pictures series is exemplary of such work. Inexplicable scenes, such as children setting fire to a tree, and a clown preparing to brawl with a passing driver, fill these quirky and unsettling photographs, showing moments of everyday suburban life in Dallas. While the works are crucial to the history of photography, they haven’t been exhibited together since a 1999 retrospective at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.

Voloshyn Gallery

Also exhibiting in the Survey Sector is the Miami and Kyiv-based Voloshyn Gallery, which is bringing a series of paintings and works on paper by Janet Sobel. The self-taught, Ukrainian-American artist, who died in 1968, depicted anxiety-filled images of battlefields, prisons, and refugees, revealing the trauma and tragedies of the Second World War and its aftermath. These scenes combine Sobel’s memories of her life in Ukraine with the complexities of post-war America, where she was living. Often intimate in scale, the artworks on view reveal Sobel grappling with the duality of the immigrant experience and the transformation of the US in the mid-20th century.

Marianne Boesky Gallery

Bringing a selection of strong works from artists on its roster is Marianne Boesky Gallery, a long-time exhibitor of the fair. Included in the gallery’s booth will be a new, expressionistic painting by French artist Dora Jeridi. Titled Imperfect (2025), the work contains a vibrant yellow abstract drape inspired by the runway shows of designer John Galliano. Taken by the textures and theatricality of these events, Jeridi reimagines the dramatic shapes of Galliano’s designs to comment on the luxury of high fashion and aristocracy. She juxtaposes this with mangled feet and hints of a distorted face in charcoal, alluding to something darker beneath the glamorous surface.

Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery

In the Meridians Sector, artists can flex their creative muscles with large-scale and immersive artworks that wouldn’t otherwise fit the format of an art fair. Co-presenting in the buzzworthy section are Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery, which are showcasing an installation resembling an oversized vanitas by Stephanie Syjuco. Born in Manila, Philippines, Syjuco is known for her research-based practice exploring authenticity as it relates to race, labour, and history.

Her project in the Medians Sector, Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) (2016), features an array of readymade objects alongside digital prints and laser-cut images, blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is artifice. Symbols related to psychoanalysis, the Philippines, and the Black Panthers are among the themes Syjuco introduces in the work. Together, they question the construct of historical narratives, including in relation to American colonisation in the Philippines.

Art Basel Miami takes place December 5 - 7, artbasel.com