NADA Miami 2025 opens with a distinct charge in the air — a fair buzzing with excitement around the clarity, rigor, and depth of its presentations. Across the booths, artists are leaning into atmosphere, instinct, and finely tuned material sensibility, creating works that pull viewers into intimate, self-contained worlds. There is a sense of precision everywhere: ideas distilled rather than overstated, gestures sharpened rather than embellished. From fractured digital imaginaries to mythic interiorities and quiet ecological poetics, the strongest booths feel both deeply personal and acutely attuned to the present. These are the presentations shaping the fair’s inner rhythm — the ones where vision, craft, and future promise align with uncommon clarity.
The Locker Room — Surreal Nocturnes and Suburban Unease
Eric Diehl, “Night Flyers,” Courtesy of the artist and The Locker Room.
Eric Diehl’s solo presentation for The Locker Room is a riveting study in American psychological topography — a sequence of surreal nocturnes that oscillate between seduction and dread. His desert dreamscapes, suffused with sodium light, false quiet, and ambiguous flickers of motion, feel lifted from a collective subconscious shaped by highways, surveillance, suburban mythology, and Hopper-like emotional isolation. Diehl channels the atmospheric mysticism of Agnes Pelton, yet grounds it in the infrastructural banality of the American Southwest, creating paintings that hum with tension: unresolved stories, half-seen figures, and landscapes caught between spiritual longing and infrastructural collapse.
What we love: Diehl captures the emotional dissonance of the American night — its loneliness, its seduction, and its uncanny stillness.
gratin — A Cross-Generational Study in Sensuality, Structure, and Material Memory
gratin’s presentation unfolds like a cross-temporal essay on the body, memory, and abstraction. From John Kacere’s photorealist precision — sensual, cool, and impossibly controlled — to Brice Guilbert’s volcanic abstractions painted from memory, the booth bridges photographic rigor and spiritual landscape. Manuel Goetz introduces industrial poetics through steel constructions shaped by his early experiences with machines; Sonia Gechtoff brings a Beat-era sensibility alive through graphite-charged expressionism; George Dureau celebrates queer embodiment with tender clarity; while Max Jahn’s copper-panel still lifes glimmer with quiet intensity. The booth coheres through a shared sensibility: a belief that material carries memory, and that precision can reveal intimacy as powerfully as gesture.
What we love: A rare booth where every work feels essential — a conversation across decades about form, desire, and perception.
EUROPA at NADA Miami — Shattered Realities and Kaleidoscopic Time
Milly Skellington artworks, Courtesy of the artist and Europa.
EUROPA’s solo presentation of Milly Skellington is among the fair’s most intellectually charged. Skellington fractures digital-age imagery — watches, celebrity memorials, screens, language — and reconstitutes them through the slow, almost devotional labor of oil painting. The works hover between glitch and apparition, refusing stable meaning and instead dissolving into kaleidoscopic shards. Skellington interrogates what it means to see, remember, and feel in an age where shared reality is splintered into individualized feeds. The result is a series that is dizzying, seductive, and deeply contemporary: paintings that shimmer with technical virtuosity while probing the psychic dissonance of the now.
What we love: Skellington translates digital fragmentation into a tactile, painterly language — revealing both its beauty and its existential unease.
Sea View — Fluid Ecologies, Emotional Terrain, and Transcultural Poetics
Jamui Agboke, courtesy of SeaView.
Sea View at NADA Miami brings together one of the fair’s most conceptually rich and materially diverse presentations, spanning sculpture, copper-based painting, diaristic abstraction, and psychological figuration. Jamiu Agboke’s copper works shimmer with transience, tracing shifting climates and displaced memories; Alessandra Acierno stages encounters — tense, tender, abrupt — that explore the fragility of human connection; Yu Kobayashi channels elemental forces into calligraphic marks shaped by wind, sand, and movement; Zenobia Lee’s carved wood sculptures meditate on desire, chaos, and colonial afterlives; and Lucas Fernando Rubly’s quiet, dissolving architectures evoke ecological erosion and cultural impermanence. Together, these works map an emotional and material landscape where nature, memory, and identity are intertwined.
What we love: A booth that feels like an ecosystem — unified not by style but by a shared sensitivity to time, fragility, and the poetic instability of the world.
Moskowitz Bayse — Abstraction and Pop-Psychology
Eleanor Swordy, “Blessed,” 2024, oil on canvas, 71 x 87 x 1 ½ inches, courtesy of the artist and Moskowitz Bayse.
Moskowitz Bayse delivers a dynamic, multi-artist statement on the contemporary image: how it mutates across material, perception, narrative, and symbolic charge. Ryan Flores reanimates the still-life tradition through exuberant ceramic florals inspired by Rachel Ruysch — lush, sculptural, and tactile. Alexa Guariglia’s intimate works explore the tension between gradient and pattern, creating perceptual fields that flicker between stability and drift. Michael Henry Hayden’s optical investigations use highlight and shadow as conceptual propositions, questioning the reliability of perception. Aaron Elvis Jupin brings pop-cultural surrealism into psychological terrain, using flowers and butterflies as emotional surrogates. Noah Schneiderman’s earth-dyed canvases embrace chance, mysticism, and material clarity; and Eleanor Swordy pushes figuration into architectural abstraction, building worlds guided by spatial rhythm rather than anatomy.
What we love: A rich, multi-voiced presentation where each artist contributes a distinct chapter to the story of how images live, fracture, and feel today.
Hesse Flatow — The Politics and Poetics of the Tablescape
Courtesy of Hesse Flatow.
Hesse Flatow at NADA Miami presents a thoughtful meditation on the still life as a site of cultural, emotional, and political tension. Lizzie Gill’s piped-surface compositions reinterpret the domestic tableau through symbolism and generational memory; Katherine Vetne complicates taste and morality through metalpoint and sculptural distortion; Xiao Wang offers lush, hyper-real tableaus that oscillate between abundance and vanitas; and Katie Butler weaponizes humor and Americana to critique economic disparity and systemic decay. Together, they recast the tablescape not as a decorative motif but as a stage on which power, desire, decay, and continuity play out.
What we love: A sharp, conceptually unified booth that transforms the familiar table into a site of revelation.
Halsey McKay Gallery (C106) — Material Experimentation and Mythic Atmospheres
Halsey McKay Gallery, NADA Miami 2025, Installation; Courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery.
Halsey McKay’s booth at NADA Miami unfolds in layers, moving from landscape-based introspection to material choreography to mythic abstraction. Drew Bennett’s quiet vertical landscapes pulse with emotional weather; David Kennedy Cutler’s sculptural canvases blur photography, collage, and objecthood; Henry Glavin’s architectural scenes examine memory and intimacy; Elias Hansen’s illuminated glass works evoke fragility and ritual; Joseph Hart’s botanical abstractions collapse drawing and painting into rhythmic systems; Timothy Hull reinterprets art historical motifs through queer futurity; Matthew Kirk’s sheetrock works operate as coded mapping; Andrew Schoultz’s vessels unravel symbolic mythologies; and Martha Tuttle’s textile-based works meditate on the cosmic and the handmade. The result is a booth that feels like a constellation — diverse but anchored by material sensitivity and mythic undertones.
What we love: A presentation that rewards slow looking, offering an almost narrative progression through material, memory, and myth.
SHANKAY at NADA Miami — “A Kind of Numbness”
SHANKAY’s “A Kind of Numbness” at NADA Miami brings Starkey Fossgreen and Chavis Mármol into a shared emotional register shaped by stillness, instinct, and a gradual dulling of responsiveness. Mármol’s feline sculptures — cast in aluminium or draped in fragments of his own clothing — activate the space with a quiet vigilance, their domestic scale masking impulses, fears, and tensions held just beneath the surface. Fossgreen’s oil-pastel scenes unfold within a suspended psychological atmosphere, where identity, perception, and expectation subtly fall out of alignment. Narratives flicker without resolution; time feels blurred, almost stalled. Together, the two artists create a muted yet charged environment in which stillness conceals intensity, and every moment becomes a threshold between what is seen and what is felt.
What we love: A beautifully calibrated atmosphere where instinct, vulnerability, and emotional suspension gather in a single, quiet pulse.
