This year, Art Basel Miami Beach will celebrate five years of Meridians, the show’s sector dedicated to large-scale works that might not otherwise have a place at the fair or in gallery settings. The 2024 selection, curated by Yasmil Raymond, offers a global and intergenerational mix of artists and installations that are ambitious in both scale and concept. Here below, five works not to be missed at this year’s fair.

Anastasia Bay
Maestra Lacrymae, Acte V, 2024
Presented by Venus Over Manhattan

Paris-born, Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Anastasia Bay (b. 1988) will present an installation and performance composed of five irregularly shaped paintings, roughly resembling Parisian street signs, arranged around a monumental Harlequin puppet. This nearly six-meter-tall figure, clad in a jester’s blue diamond-patterned outfit, rests atop a pedestal. He recalls the towering mythical characters paraded in festivals such as the Carnaval de Dunkerque – a historic carnival unfolding in northern France. Bay’s work is marked by its use of bold shapes and lines, as it oscillates between figuration and abstraction. In her Meridians work, Bay steps deeper into the world she has created, drawing inspiration from Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) by Belgian artist James Ensor – a sweeping Post-Impressionist painting that draws inspiration from Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, reimagining it in 19th-century Belgium. A 15-minute performance will animate Bay’s work, as the artist leads masked figures in a riotous parade that oscillates between celebration and protest.

Roberto Huarcaya
Amazogramas, 2014
Presented by Rolf Art

Amazogramas (2014) by Peruvian photographer Roberto Huarcaya (b. 1959) was previously featured in the Peruvian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Using nothing but a small flashlight and the light of the full moon, Huarcaya captured the complexity of the Peruvian jungle to create a 30 meter-long photogram. The resulting work is a literal and metaphorical footprint of the Amazonian tropical forest. Developed in a makeshift darkroom nearby, Huarcaya used river water to add mineral sediment and pigmentation, further embedding the landscape into the work itself. A trained psychologist, the artist found traditional photography techniques were not able to capture the forest’s mysterious atmosphere and vegetation, and instead turned to photograms; the technique’s pioneer, William Henry Fox Talbot, once proclaimed with wonder, ‘Nature draws her own picture.’

Alice Aycock
Goya, 2024
Presented by Galerie Thomas Schulte

Like a swirling finger or a spinning top, Goya by American sculptor Alice Aycock (b. 1946) harnesses the turmoil and emotional intensity of nature, capturing both its fragility and capacity for sudden change. This new work, presented by Berlin-based Galerie Thomas Schulte, depicts a tightening gyre of twisting ribbons made from powder-coated aluminum steel, tense at times and loose at others. Named for the eponymous Spanish painter and the intense, emotional charge within his paintings, this four-meter-high sculpture is part of Aycock’s ‘Turbulence’ series, the first outing of which saw seven Twister sculptures installed along New York City’s Park Avenue. Like these, Goya evokes the chaos, beauty, and precarious ambition of modern life, balancing fragility and resilience in unpredictable forms, like an unannounced gust of wind.

Lee ShinJa
Legend; Dawn; Image of Light; Retrospective of Autumn, 1980s
Presented by Tina Kim Gallery

Tina Kim Gallery will show an installation of six woven tapestries by the pioneering Korean fiber artist, Lee ShinJa (b. 1930). This body of work, produced in the 1980s, captures Lee’s immense grief and despair following the 1982 death of her husband, the artist Jang Woon-Sang, while simultaneously embodying her resilience and will to persevere. The conflicting emotions coexist – dark hues of black and red absorb and reflect her pain, while magnificent pinks and oranges evoke sunrise over mountain ridges, recalling the landscape of her childhood. First exhibited as part of a 2023 career retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Korea, this body of work captures a profound emotional duality – grief and hope sit in intricate, luminous harmony.

Yuan Fang
Three Moves, 2024
Presented by Skarstedt

Shenzhen-born, New York-based painter Yuan Fang (b. 1996) will debut her largest canvas to date at Art Basel Miami Beach. At seven meters long, this work is an entangled network of wave-like shapes with no clear beginning or end; Fang fills every corner of the surface with layers of lyrical, sinuous brushstrokes that serve as metaphors for the complexity and anxiety of the human condition. For Fang, who neither plans or sketches her works in advance, preferring instead to let each mark guide the next, painting is a series of decisions and risks that mirror the uncertainty of the human condition, balanced somewhere between freedom and possibility. Though abstract, the composition hints at a central entity, evoking a tension between serenity and turbulence. This piece sees Fang expand her practice with a shift in medium to oil; strokes are soft and watercolor-like in places, rising into thick, textured ridges in others.