Art News

3 Trends That Defined Art Basel Miami 2025

Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 revealed a fair energized by playful experimentation and cultural storytelling. Here’s a closer look at the ideas and trends shaping contemporary art and the Saatchi Art artists who are making them collectible today.

Reimagining Materiality

Over the past few years, a clear trend toward cross-disciplinary practices has emerged. These practices blend fine art and craft, from textiles to purely unexpected materials. Work built through labor-intensive, historical processes signals refined technique and craftsmanship, qualities that feel increasingly rare. Tina Kim Gallery’s presentation of Lee ShinJa’s monumental wool-and-copper abstract exemplifies the shift beautifully. 

At Saatchi Art, this movement is found in the works of artists like Malgorzata Krakowiak and Vanessa Valero. Malgorzata works across textile and painting, with textiles informing the language of her pattern-dense mark-making. Vanessa traverses the Colombian landscape through tapestries that transform traditional weaving into bold abstraction.

Latine and Indigenous Perspectives

We saw a meaningful expansion of narrative-rich work by Latine and Indigenous artists whose voices are shaping a global conversation around ownership. Themes of ancestry, land, and migration appeared in presentations such as Widline Cadet’s exploration of diasporic identity and Roberto Márquez’s emotionally charged figurative scenes at Paul Soto Gallery.

These perspectives find a potent echo in Zhanna Tsytsyn, an Indigenous Siberian multidisciplinary artist. Her paintings merge landscape and body to tell mythic and ecological narratives. Mexican artist Yanin Ruibal navigates personal narrative and cultural identity in offbeat, Surrealist landscapes.

New Surrealism & Psychological Figuration

If you stopped by Carbon 12’s booth or discovered newcomer Kelsey Issacs, you’ll have noticed a major market shift exploring the current human condition through a distorted reality. Across Basel, dreamlike distortions, fragmented bodies, and emotional psychological landscapes took center stage. 

We’ve found this momentum in the work of Elize Sokolova and Liviu Mihai. Between Elize’s saturated colors and metaphor-laden imagery, and Liviu’s tense, figurative abstraction, the complexity of human experience is charged, theatrical, and vivid.

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