I had the chance to experience Art Basel at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I spent some time with about a third of the works exhibited there with a third of the amount of time needed to even appreciate the works I got to. So to fully appreciate what seemed like a pretty great (for what I expected due to the kind of gussied up crowd that tends to parade over to this event) curation of artworks of artists new and old, alive and dead, from Miami and beyond, it'd take about 36 hours. 10 quid to the one who can figure out how much time that means I spent. During this time I documented each work I was moved by or interested in so that I could go home and then research each of the works and the artist(s) involved with them. In doing so, I got to journey through the bewildering, frustrating, beautiful, inspiring, fried, and comprehensive experience that is the commercial art scene of today. Seeing the charming draughtsmanship of a Matisse from a foot away and then also a prosthetic Mark Zucky head grotesquely bobbling around on a mecha-dog-bot bemused me beyond words. Except, on a recent journalistic kick, I did put some words towards the work I admired and even grew more fond of in my research of them since that week. You can read my thoughts on five of the works I found absorbing (that I had time to write about) and an archive of every other work I admired here.
1) Peter Halley
Stander, 2003
Acrylic, Day-glow, and Roll-a-tex on canvas
Geometric cells and conduits.
I keep thinking about Halley’s work as a way of representing modern social isolation, digital networks, and architectural space all at once. The rough textures really do mimic suburban walls, while the glowing colors feel artificial, like something lit from within, by systems rather than nature. From the very start of his career, Halley seems to be responding to the intricate and expansive structure of the urban environment. His paintings, drawings, and Kodaliths read like diagrams of the city’s systems of movement and communication.
Instead of holding onto the utopian impulse of other artists’ geometric abstraction, he reimagines it as something closer to isolation and confinement. The vocabulary is extremely concise: prisons, cells, conduits. Boxes connected by straight lines. Through these symbols, he’s trying to show how regimented the spaces we occupy really are, and how much they are shaped by forces beyond our control.
What sticks with me is that he’s essentially been working with one idea the entire time: that human culture exists within prisons and cells connected through conduits. The example of the apartment makes it very clear. An apartment building as a prison, the apartments as cells, the utility lines as conduits. Or zoom in further and the apartment becomes the prison, each room a cell, and the wires and vents the conduits. And it keeps going until it reaches the body itself. Each of us as a prison. Our brains, hearts, and organs as cells. The biological networks connecting us as conduits.
But I don’t experience this as purely negative. Humans are busy transmitting information and resources back and forth between their architectonic environments all the time. An apartment is no more a prison to me than a brain is a prison. Both have limits, but both also have escape routes. That’s where the joy comes in for me. The glowing luminosity of a large Halley painting feels genuinely joyful, almost like an icon showing the natural way of the universe.
Seeing this one specific piece up close, I really feel its teeming vigor. There is a sense that Halley himself has been consumed by this thesis, which becomes even clearer when you see the sheer number of similar works he has produced. They all seem to orbit this same central idea, circling again and again around different modes of spatial imprisonment.
It also feels important that he talks about the geometricization of space that pervaded the twentieth century. Geometry keeps pulling artists in, for different reasons, and there is something about Halley’s shapes that feels especially precise. They are self-contained, abstract and concrete at the same time. They work as starting points for contemplation, but they are also very literal, almost utilitarian things.
Sometimes it feels like Halley is warning us about something sinister, about confinement and control. But I’m not sure I believe that reading. Most of us do not actually live our lives thinking of the world as an amalgam of prisons, cells, and conduits. I would rather sit with the happiness I feel from these paintings, from their Day-Glo luminosity and their monumental scale. For some reason, they feel alive to me.
2) Bruce Nauman
Double Poke in the Eye II, 1985
Neon tubing mounted on aluminum monolith
Nauman’s sculptures often play humorously with symbols and language, but that humor always feels tied to something socio-political and uneasy. In Double Poke in the Eye II, he uses neon tubing and static animation borrowed from commercial advertising to stage a small vignette of human action and response. It can read as playful at first, but it quickly tips into something vengeful or violent. Knowing that his first studio was a San Francisco storefront, where he looked out at neon signs in bars and shops, makes this feel intentional. Like many American artists of the 1960s and 70s, Nauman wanted to bridge everyday surroundings with the materials and concepts of art.
The piece is simple but relentless. Two neon faces look at one another while hands between them light up in alternation. There’s a slight delay, yet both figures are always poking each other in the eye at the same time. No one is innocent. The fingers barely touch the eyes, one mouth hangs open as if arguing, and the action never resolves.
Nauman had already been working with neon in the 1960s, using wordplay and figurative imagery to address what he grouped together as “pain, life, death, love, hate, pleasure.” Neon usually exists to attract consumers, but here it’s twisted into a philosophical device. Even though Double Poke in the Eye II isn’t a performance, it echoes his filmed studio actions and repetitive tasks. The endless loop pulls you into watching the same bodily gesture again and again, raising questions about voyeurism, bodily limits, and what qualifies as art.
The title matters. A “poke” feels silly, less severe than a punch or a stab. We poke fun at things. That imprecision in language feels deliberate, especially given Nauman’s interest in where language breaks down and becomes poetic. Even “double poke” is unstable. Is it double because there are two figures, two eyes, or because the action repeats endlessly?
The focus on the eye feels especially charged. To damage vision is to limit how someone engages with the world. Formally, the work reinforces this tension. The two heads are symmetrical and equally weighted. The neon colors sit in primary and secondary triads, contrasting but complementary, giving neither figure dominance. The hands move in a sideways figure-eight, an infinity loop.
The piece feels tragic in its implications. It evokes “an eye for an eye” and the futility of endless revenge. The repetition makes that clear, but it also suggests we haven’t learned anything. There’s something fitting about the simplicity of the forms and colors, since revenge itself is such a base impulse. What stays with me is how something so bright, cartoonish, and easy to look at can hold so much violence inside it.
3) Harumi Yamaguchi
Black Underwear, 1975
Acrylic on board
Harumi Yamaguchi is a personal legend. The depth of style, the purity of sexual expression, the virtuous devotion that her work embodies colors a lot of how I have always felt about art, people, and sexuality. Her images feel righteous without being moralistic, erotic without being repentant.
What stands out is how different her women feel from the typical male-oriented pinup tradition. These figures aren’t posed to be looked at so much as to exist. They seem to celebrate their own sexuality and presence without embarrassment. Even when they’re dressed in glossy lingerie or stockings, there’s a confidence that feels self-directed. And then there are the moments where she places them in “male/masculinized” sports like skateboarding, boxing, or baseball, which feels ironic and pointed given the time. It’s playful, but also quietly confrontational.
I’m using Black Underwear as a way into thinking about Yamaguchi in general, because so much of her work feels like part of a continuous world. Seeing this piece, the figure feels suspended, almost floating, fully formed but strangely cut out from any real environment. The black lingerie sharpens the contrast between flesh and ground. The body is cleanly delineated, almost graphic, while the hair blooms outward in soft, voluminous waves. That hair always feels like the emotional excess of her images, radiating energy while the body stays controlled and precise. The pose is overtly sensual, but it doesn’t feel submissive. If anything, it feels declarative.
Her use of airbrush is crucial here. She relies on it to create seamless layers of color and softened lines without visible brushwork, pushing toward a kind of photorealism. But unlike her American predecessors, her colors are often more opaque, less graded, more candy-like. The flesh is modeled subtly and sometimes even harshly outlined against the background, making her figures less voluptuous and more graphic. The eyes and lips are rendered sharply, pulling the viewer in. These faces feel fetishized, but also idealized in a very classic way, echoing Hollywood conventions and figures like Marlene Dietrich, who even received the Harumi Gal treatment herself.
The Harumi Gals usually appear in aqua, fuchsia, lemon, lime, striking exaggerated poses that recall American pinups from Esquire in the 1930s through the 1950s. Those pinups were tied deeply to consumerism and nationalism, but Yamaguchi’s figures operate differently. They’re almost always white, which complicates any sense of Japanese nationalism. Instead, they point to the dominance of American visual culture in postwar Japan and the rise of an advanced consumer imagery that replaces national aesthetics with something more global and commercial.
This connects directly to advertising and department store culture. The image of the beautiful woman has always been central to how consumption is framed in Japan. Mitsukoshi’s early use of photorealist women to define the modern female consumer feels like a precursor to Yamaguchi’s role at PARCO (major Japanese fashion department store chain). Her stated goal of targeting energetic young women by illustrating contemporary pinup girls makes sense here. The Harumi Gals feel like the necessary image of a late-20th-century woman. Unapologetic, dynamic, self-possessed.
Looking at Black Underwear within that larger body of work, it doesn’t feel like a single standout image so much as another articulation of the same thesis. The sexuality is direct, but never desperate. The figure feels complete, even while floating in isolation. It’s less about seduction and more about presence. That’s what keeps pulling me back to her work as a whole.
4) Lonnie Holley
Untitled (Horn & Wine Bottle), Floor Piece, 2002-03
Mixed media assemblage
There’s something about this sculpture that feels immediately honest. It’s simple, but not casual. Expressive without being loud. The melancholy is there, but it breathes alongside a real sense of wonder in how it’s put together. The horn, the chain, the fabric, the wine bottle, the case. None of it feels arranged to impress. It feels arranged because it had to be.
Looking at Untitled (Horn and Wine Bottle), I keep thinking about Holley’s comfort with grit, with things that have already lived a life. The horn stands upright like a body or a sentinel. The case slumps, open, heavy, exhausted. The bottle leans, emptied or abandoned, while the flowers feel like a brief tenderness placed into an otherwise hard structure. The chain reads as both restraint and connection. Nothing here is symbolic in a clean, academic way, but everything carries weight. It feels like a portrait made of objects that know something about survival.
Holley talks about being most at home in ditches and creeks, among animals that burrow into the dirt and whatever people throw away. That stays with me. This sculpture feels like it comes directly out of that space. Not the romantic idea of poverty or struggle, but the actual material reality of it. The horn could sing, but it doesn’t. The wine bottle suggests celebration or escape, but it’s inert. There’s music implied, but silence dominates.
His childhood was chaotic. No real sense of stability, no protected space to be a child. Working from the age of five, living in whiskey houses, fairgrounds, foster homes. When I think about that, the fairground imagery starts to creep into this piece. The horn feels like something that could have belonged to a band passing through town. The case suggests travel, impermanence. Everything feels temporary, assembled, ready to be moved or abandoned.
Holley insists that he didn’t set out to make art, that he didn’t even know what art was. That matters here. Untitled (Horn and Wine Bottle) doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be art in the traditional sense. It feels like a record of thinking through objects. His first sculptures came from grief, from making a tombstone for his nieces, using fragile sandstone and whatever tools were available. That sense of necessity still lives in this work. The materials feel chosen because they were there, because they were possible.
There’s also something musical about the piece, even in its stillness. Holley’s life has always moved between sound and object, between improvisation and structure. The horn feels like a spine for the sculpture, while everything else leans and responds around it. The arrangement feels improvised, but not careless. Like jazz, where repetition and variation coexist.
I keep returning to the idea that Holley sees art as a power current of cultural output. This sculpture feels plugged into that current. It commemorates something without naming it. It holds memory, labor, loss, curiosity. It feels like a quiet monument to living through things and continuing anyway. There’s no spectacle here, just presence.
What I love most is that the piece doesn’t resolve. It doesn’t explain itself. It just exists, carrying its history in its materials. The melancholy isn’t performative. It’s lived-in. And somehow, despite everything, there’s still a sense of care in how it’s held together. That balance between hardship and wonder feels like the core of Holley’s work, and this sculpture captures it perfectly.
5) Kaspar Sonne
The Gate, 2025
Oil on canvas
After seeing hundreds of works in a kind of visual blur, I almost passed this painting by. It felt quiet, even unassuming at first, but something about it caught my eye and made me stop. I stayed longer than I expected. The longer I stood there, the more its stillness took hold. There’s a hypnotic quality to it, a sense that nothing is happening and yet everything is suspended.
The painting carries a real darkness and solitude. The tall purple forms feel like barriers more than trees, thick and impenetrable, closing in on the narrow view beyond them. The gate sits at the center like a pause or a refusal. It promises access but doesn’t quite allow it. Beyond it, the ocean is there, calm and luminous, but distant and unreachable.
Even with that melancholy, the color composition is striking. The purples, greens, and blues are rich and deliberate. There’s a careful balance between somberness and beauty. The heaviness of the foreground is softened by the openness of the sky and water, and that tension between isolation and connection is what really holds me. The painting feels weighted, but not hopeless. It’s restrained rather than oppressive.
I can’t separate my reaction from my own experience that week. Being by the beach the entire time, yet never actually going to it because I was constantly inside the glass-and-steel convention center, made this image feel utterly personal. I was physically near the ocean but denied the mystery of contemplating it. Here, too, the sea is present but obstructed. Something definite and constructed stands in the way of something vast and unknowable.
What stays with me is how calm the obstruction feels. There’s no drama in it, no obvious violence. Just a quiet, immovable boundary. The painting doesn’t beg for entry or resolution. It simply sits with that feeling of being close to something meaningful and still held at a distance. That quiet denial is what made it linger in my mind long after I walked away.
Honorable Mention: I AM BASEL
This guy was outside of the convention center declaring his name to be “I AM BASEL” for all to hear. The spectacle and performance he includes with the handful of artworks he had on display seemed to be as a part of his art as the canvases themselves. There was an incredible, supreme confidence about the man that I found wonderful. He even proudly insulted and repelled the handful of cops standing around him hilariously pretending to not be there under the pretense of removing him and his art from the premises. Upon speaking to him, the one work on the sidewalk is his brother’s. The main “I AM BASEL” piece is an interesting meta-record of social, political, and racial dilemmas and their interconnections. It’s presented in such a simple and playful and irreverent manner that it begs us to consider the guiltlessness and love and intellect required to truly consider our place in society. Mr. I AM BASEL himself seemed a tidy representation of this.
Recycled Aluminium Slats
UNTITLED 4, 1997
Recycled Aluminium Slats
Paysage épisodique, 1974
Vinyl on canvas
Leon Tovar Gallery selected works
Femme Assise au Chapeau, 1961
Oil on plywood
Chevaliers en Parade, 1942
Oil on canvas
Double Poke in the Eye II, 1985
Neon tubing mounted on
aluminum monolith
Ginger, 2025
Heliogravure
Flickering/Humming, 2025
Acrylic, flashe, burlap on panel
Diasporic Dream Space Diptych
(Once Again... Statues Never Die), 2022
Inkjet print on Ilford Gold Fibre Gloss
Stander, 2003
Acrylic, Day-glow, and Roll-a-tex on canvas
Untitled (Collage Book 8_13), 1974
Ink, marker, and collage on paper
Jazz Stories: Mama Can Sing, Papa Can Blow
#8: Don’t Wanna Love You, 2004
Acrylic on quilted fabric
Lomita, 2025
Acrylic paint on canvas
Easy Mark Sucker - Coach, 1987
Color pencil and graphite on paper
Physichromie 1907, Paris, 2014
Chromography on aluminum, plastic inserts
LUVA, 2025
Acrylic on steel
The Verified Effect (III), 2024
Untitled, 2000-2001
Archival inkjet pigment print
Unfamiliar Way Back, 2025
Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, pencil,
and fabric collage on canvas
Flying over the Eaves and Walls, 2025
Oil on canvas
Floor Ringer, 2024
Stainless steel, patina, machined aluminum
Raster und Spektrum, 2025
Real-time animation, WebGL2/JavaScript,
no external dependencies
The Watering Hole, 1996
Nine duraflex prints
The Last Library IV:
Written in Water, 2020-2025
Paper, wood, ink, and acrylic paint
Untitled [Worthington Street], 2006
Pigment print
Retrato de lo Eterno, 1935
Gelatin silver print
Georgia O’Keeffe—Torso, 1918
Gelatin silver print
Walking Purse, 1988
Gelatin silver print
Invitation to Light Gallery opening, 1973
Gelatin silver print from Polaroid negative
Nu au Peignoir, 1933
Oil on canvas
Quij, 1985
Acrylic, silkscreen, and Xerox collage on canvas
The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1945
Oil on canvas
Sans titre (ville de jour pointilliste), 1980
Oil on canvas
Untitled, 1981
Acrylic, ink silkscreen on canvas
Dama felina, 1950
Pencil on paper
Untitled (Horn & Wine Bottle), Floor
Piece, 2002-03
Mixed media assemblage
Untitled (Horn & Gun), Wall Piece, 2002-03
Mixed media assemblage
Scalene Earthoid (Ophiuchus), 2025
Blow-molded acrylic
Dzibilchaltún, 1977
Oil on canvas
Berkeley #21, 1954
Oil on canvas
November 1956 (Pistoia), 1956
Oil on masonite
Great American Nude #73, 1965
Acrylic on canvas
Plakatentwur (Salammbo), 2001
Collage, colored printed cardboard.
Black-and-white and color copies, acrylic
paint on foam board
The Gate, 2025
Oil on canvas
Bride Doll, 1988
Color on silk
Necronom Edition, 1990-2020
Bronze
Black Underwear, 1975
Acrylic on board
Witch, 2025
Steel, enamel paint