Miami Artwork and Design Week 2021: A Bellini Couch Turned Paintings, Chanel’s Plant-Crammed Set up, and extra

This week, the AD team is in sunny Florida to report from the ground at Miami Art and Design Week. Get your bearings in our preview article and be sure to catch up on all the happenings from day 1 and day 2.

Art, Abridged

The scope of Art Basel Miami Beach can be overwhelming, especially for a first-timer like me. Fortunately, art advisor and historian Sharon Zoldan, founder of SZ Advisory in Los Angeles, was available to shepherd me through the zaniness. Touring a group of us through some of the fair’s more exciting minimalist holdings, Zoldan highlighted several pieces expected to fetch tidy sums—among them, an untitled work by Claudio Parmiggiani shown by Simon Lee Gallery. A member of Italy’s Arte Povera movement, Parmiggiani created the cinder-coated panel this year by capturing residual soot from a bonfire in his studio. The result is a ghostly, poetic image that speaks to themes of memory, time, and destruction.

Los Angeles’s Kayne Griffin Gallery, meanwhile, exhibited work by another undersung artist of a trending movement. Mary Corse is one of the few women recognized as a part of the West Coast Art and Space movement, and her Untitled (Beams) at Art Basel is a testament to her ability to keep up with fellow members like Richard Serra and Larry Bell. Like other pieces by Corse, the work features light-reflecting paint used on highways—a choice that not only adds dynamism and depth, but in this case also makes the sculptural work suitable for the outdoors.

Another favorite on the tour with Zoldan was Samira Yamin’s All the Skies Over Syria, a touching, abstract reconstruction of Syrian skies as portrayed over the course of eight years by Time magazine. The work can be seen in Patron Gallery’s booth, so mark your maps, and keep Yamin in mind as one to watch. —Lila Allen