Observer’s Top Five Pieces Not to Miss at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—Art Basel Miami Beach time. After a potassium-rich auction season, dealers and collectors are hoping that healthy sales at America’s biggest art fair can pull the art market out of its years-long slump. But even if you’re not shopping, Art Basel Miami Beach is always worth a visit. This year’s edition offered more to like than usual, a reflection perhaps of its being the first under the directorship of the wise and tasteful Bridget Finn. And with that said, if you’re down in South Beach, here are five works that you should absolutely seek out.

David Salle, New Pastoral with Ladder (2024), Gladstone

When the latest stock market bubble bursts, I think we’ll all be a little more realistic about the genuine possibilities of artificial intelligence compared to all the wild stuff we’ve been promised. It won’t ever be able to book you a vacation, for example, but it could be used to populate the parts of a map in a video game where you’re not supposed to go. David Salle is already thinking along these lines and, as ever, pulling the real world into his paintings. The background for this work was created by an A.I. trained on his Pastoral series, though he’s used his skilled hand—and there are many hands in this new body of work—to populate the painting with the majority of the elements you see, so these are not A.I. but make you wonder about just how much of your visual cortex is assembled in the same way. How about those french fry sun rays?

Virginia Overton, Untitled (XLT) (2024), Bortolami

There are few upsides to living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but Virginia Overton’s new installation at the Domino Sugar Factory makes it feel less oppressive—like, perhaps there is a way for humanity to exist under conditions of extreme branding. I get the same feeling when I look at this ambitious new sculpture, which is crude and mysterious in all the ways you’d never expect something to be in Miami. Perched atop its plinth of cinderblocks, we’ve seen work like this from her before, but this represents a particularly ambitious example. It folds in on itself, not like John Chamberlain but in ways where you can still recognize all the constituent parts. It’s the problem of modern life in many ways: self-obsessive and still far too reminiscent of what it no longer is.

Rachel Feinstein, Metal Storm (2024), Meridians section

I’ve always liked Rachel Feinstein’s intense femininity and was drawn to this latest sculpture right away. It depicts three witches in “an ecstatic ritual” and represents the culmination of the artist’s engagement with Hans Baldung Grien’s New Year’s Greeting with Three Witches (1514). The patina captures the drawing’s roughness, and this may be the rare case in which Feinstein has made something less sexual than its inspiration, though, despite all its points, it’s still pretty kinky. Walk around it, and it’s easy for everything to become abstracted. If the point of the ritual was the disintegration of reality, then bringing it into three dimensions has achieved that. Later, some colleagues and I would take in Feinstein’s survey at the Bass Museum of Art, “the first to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping oeuvre,” as the wall text puts so well.

SEE ALSO: Observer’s Guide to This Year’s Must-Visit December Art Fairs

Tacita Dean, Duck Brush (2012), Marian Goodman

How charming is this? This cabinet contains a series of vintage postcards into which Dean has inserted a little white brush in the shape of a duck-shaped shoe polisher, apparently found in the home of Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka. Some of the postcards she has collected here must be over a century old, and all are concerned with childish or Sylvanian themes. The duck appears to be made out of Tipp-ex/Wite-Out, but rather than defacing the work, she manages to fit right into the scene despite being artificial on every level. I’m an established Dean-head, and I love how this work fits in with her other efforts to depict nature in an unnatural way. Plus, it’s cute—the perfect piece for the bedroom of a fantastically wealthy and intellectual child.

Louise Bourgeois, Woman With Blue Necklace (2005), Hauser & Wirth

Whenever there’s an important show at the Museum of Modern Art or a big lot at an auction, you tend to see a lot of souvenirs at the art fairs that occur in their wake. Last year, there were tons of Ed Ruschas following his stellar retrospective at MoMA, and this year, you saw a lot of René Magritte following his record-making sale at Christie’s. Now we see a lot of Thomas Schütte with the current show at MoMA; his United Enemies series is a perennial fair favorite. This long introduction leads me to Louise Bourgeois, whose late work here would seem to respond to that series. It has the same glass container and the same idol form. It is different from the United Enemies in many compelling ways, though. This woman is nude and alone, her body on view as she stands defiant. Where the Enemies are rueful, she may be shocked. She lacks their discomfort to the extent that her jar even warps around her. It’s a totem of bizarre optimism, perhaps, but you have to love that necklace.