Miami Art Week 2014: SCOPE Recap

This year’s rendition of SCOPE Miami Beach, coinciding with Miami Art Week festivities, features many galleries that will be familiar to Hi-Fructose readers as well as dozens of artists who have appeared in our print issues. An enormous installation by Swoon featuring a cut-out portrait of a majestic woman charging triumphantly forward greets viewers as they enter the fair, ushering them into the many collections of figurative, Pop Art-inspired, and streetwise art that lies ahead.

Thinkspace Gallery’s large booth features a diverse collection of small-scale works by artists such as Audrey Kawasaki and Marco Mazzoni, mini-solo shows by Glenn Barr and Andy Kehoe, as well as works by Margaret Keane (the subject of Tim Burton’s biopic Big Eyes, which details how Keane’s husband Walter took credit for her work for decades).

Hailing from Rome, Dorothy Circus Gallery presents a variety of dreamlike, Pop Surrealist work from artists like Joe Sorren and Kazuki Takamatsu, whose haunting, monochromatic gouache paintings are in our current issue, Hi-Fructose Vol. 33. At Mexico City-based gallery Fifty24MX’s booth, Victor Castillo’s paintings of diabolical, Pinocchio-like children hang beside Miss Van’s portraits of voluptuous ladies clad in masks and other ritualistic, folkloric attire.

Rome’s Wunderkammern features Aakash Nihalani’s neon, geometric paintings — which he frequently installs on the streets of New York to create optical illusions that play off the city environment. Jonathan LeVine Gallery’s booth is devoted to Dan Witz’s hyperrealist paintings of bodies thrashing in moshpits, paying homage to the original New York punk scene in which Witz came of age.

For lovers of figurative art that dabbles in surrealism, pop culture, and kitsch, SCOPE is the place to be during Miami Art Week. The fair is on view through December 7. Take a look at our photo highlights below.

Aakash Nihalani at Wunderkammern