For the last two decades, Art Basel in Miami Beach has set up shop in the Miami Beach Convention Center each December. Since its first edition in 2002, the fair has ballooned into one of the biggest art weeks in the world and perhaps North America’s premier global art fair, with myriad satellite fairs, brand activations, art exhibitions, and, of course, parties. Nowadays, the circus surrounding Art Basel and Miami Art Week attracts not only the wealthiest art collectors, but practically every luxury brand and big-name celebrity who can get down to Florida for the week.
Lavish parties, fashionable looks, and celebrity gossip aside, Art Basel’s Miami edition remains a launching pad for many artists. Kim Jones famously discovered Amoako Boafo’s work at the Rubell Museum opening during Miami Art Week in December 2019 and subsequently offered him a Dior Men collaboration. As the 2022 fair gets underway, Highsnobiety selected 11 emerging artists to watch who will be exhibited at Art Basel in Miami Beach this December.
Anna Park
Anna Park uses charcoal to create large-scale, black-and-white drawings that blur the line between abstraction and figuration, resulting in highly energetic works that provoke the viewer to consider the interior world of her subjects. The artist left her native South Korea with her family at a young age, moving to Southern California before settling in Utah. She moved to New York for art school, and KAWS became once of her first supporters after he noticed her work in an exhibition at the New York Academy of Art while she was receiving her MFA there. That led to an opportunity to create the artwork for the poster of the Academy Award-winning film Mank.
Currently based in Bushwick, Park is drawn to themes like celebrity, politics, and gender—enmeshing figures within chaotic gestural shapes that evoke the movement and complexity of the subjects. Following her first two museum shows at the Aldrich in Connecticut and the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, as well as her first exhibition with Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Park will be showing her new style of figuration at Art Basel in Miami Beach with the gallery, which also has spaces in Tokyo, and New York.