With Art Basel Miami Beach in full swing, galleries across all sectors of the fair are reporting impressive sales. Private collectors and institutions are acquiring works from historic figures such as Keith Haring and Emily Kam Kngwarray to more emerging talents like Jordan Nassar and Jin Han Lee.

At Gladstone Gallery (New York, Brussels, Seoul), a historic large-scale Keith Haring painting sold for USD 2 million. Untitled (1984) features an array of Haring’s iconic figures painted in white acrylic on glass, placed atop a black background: Some figures dance, some sit on each other’s shoulders, one has a television for a head. A cartoonish snake also emerges from the top edge, its mouth open, ready to bite a nearby figure with wings. A snake also appears in Wangechi Mutu’s bronze sculpture Nyoka (2022), meaning ‘serpent’ in Kiswahili. Here, the artist depicts the eponymous reptile coiled in a basket, an image loaded with symbolic meanings ranging from associations with snake charming to the serpent in the Bible. Gladstone sold the sculpture for USD 750,000.

Throughout her career, the American artist Suzanne Jackson has consistently related Blackness to the natural world. Her early painting Triptych for Steven (1974) melds motifs from nature – birds, flowers, trees, roots – with the profiles of human faces with dark skin. The gallery Ortuzar (New York) sold the work, made with diluted acrylics to create an aqueous, watercolor-like effect on canvas, for USD 1.5 million.

More recently, Jackson has created ‘anti-canvas’ paintings by layering acrylic paint directly onto a table covered in plastic, which she then peels off and hangs to dry like a tarp. Using tarps directly is the artist David Hammons, who once created a series of abstract painted canvases obscured by tarps and other found materials to poke fun at the canon of Abstract Expressionism and its desirability within the market – a thought that becomes poignant in light of one work from this series, Untitled (2014), being sold by Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, Basel, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Somerset, St. Moritz) for USD 4.75 million.

At Pace’s (New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Seoul) booth, a painting on linen from the 1990s by Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, who frequently drew inspiration from the wildlife and traditions of her native landscape in Australia’s Western Desert, was acquired for USD 450,000. The untitled 1992 work comprises pink, ochre, and rust-red dots applied in a way that resembles awely, an Aboriginal ceremonial practice that includes daubing women’s bodies with oil and organic pigments. Notably, Kngwarray will be the subject of a major exhibition opening at London’s Tate Modern in July 2025.

Also tied to a major institutional show, White Cube (London, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul) is presenting a selection of works by Marguerite Humeau in its booth to coincide with the French artist’s current solo exhibition ‘\*sk\*/ey’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. One work, Life in a Pile of Compost II (2024), an abstract drawing of what might be crimson leaves swirling against a starry night sky, rendered in pigment and charcoal on paper, sold for GBP 40,000.

Elsewhere, Brazilian artist and theorist Hélio Oiticica, best recognized for his participation in the Neo-Concrete movement, is represented in the Lisson Gallery (London, Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai) booth with the work Untitled (1955), a geometric abstraction rendered in gouache on Masonite. In his Neo-Concrete period, Oiticica sought to ‘escape the constraints of painting while remaining in dialogue with it’ by utilizing color in new ways. The gallery sold the work for USD 400,000.

Although similar to Oiticica’s work in their formal abstractions, pieces by Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez employ a minimal use of color. Sánchez began her career as a set designer for theater groups in Havana before moving to New York and eventually settling in San Juan. Her sensually curved marble sculptures Sin título (Untitled, 2023, conceived 2007–08; edition of two) and Lunar Blanco (White Moon, 2019, conceived 2000; edition of three) were sold by Galerie Lelong & Co. (Paris, New York) for around USD 150,000 and USD 85,000, respectively.

With a dark sense of maximalism-meets-fantasy, the late Swiss artist H.R. Giger is perhaps most well-known as the creator of the monster in Ridley Scott’s film Alien. In recent years, however, his menacing body of work has gained renewed attention, specifically due to his blurring of the lines between life and death, man and machine. The black-painted aluminum sculpture Necronom / Alien III (1990–2005) is a hybrid animal-machine posed on all fours in a way that it looks ready to pounce – and kill. Mai 36 Galerie (Madrid, Zurich) sold one of six editions of the sculpture to an American collector for an asking price of USD 1 million.

Finally, galleries have also reported significant institutional acquisitions of works by younger artists, such as Jordan Nassar and Jin Han Lee. Born in New York City to a Palestinian father and a Polish American mother, Nassar’s artistic practice largely focuses on textiles and traditional Palestinian embroidery. In Miami, James Cohan (New York) sold Nassar’s monumental hand-embroidered work Song of the Flowers (2022) for USD 220,000 to an Asian foundation. The work, which measures 305 cm tall and 622 cm wide, is composed of 57 individually embroidered panels in warm and cool colors, introducing motifs and patterns that might suggest a sun rising over a mountain or a moon shining across a valley. Meanwhile, Lee, who is based between Seoul and London, abstracts and reframes quotidian details of life in different parts of the world through the use of psychedelic colors and by imbuing his paintings with a sense of movement. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami acquired Our Time (2024), an oil and acrylic painting on linen defined by vivid yellows and reds, from Union Pacific (London) for GBP 18,500.