The American iteration of Art Basel feels like commercial art world excess turned up to 11. Held in the Miami Beach Conference Center in South Beach, it’s maybe the world’s biggest, balmiest and most palm tree-festooned art fair in the world. But with over 280 galleries from 43 countries, it’s a vast undertaking. So we’ve put together a select list of galleries and exhibitions to look out for as you navigate the colossal and action-packed fair...

NANZUKA

Celebrating its 20 year anniversary, Tokyo-based gallery Nanzuka returns to Art Basel Miami Beach with a group show highlighting the gallery’s pop and underground lineage. This year, their presentation features a wide selection of works, including many new pieces, such as Javier Calleja, Christian Rex van Minnen, Jonathan Chapline, Kasper Sonne, Masato Mori, and Hiroki Tsukuda. There’s a distinct science fiction thread running through their booth, from an Alien sculpture by the late great HR Giger to Raymond Lemstra’s hypontic, otherworldly portraits and Hajime Sorayama’s Sexy Robot.

JEFFREY DEITCH

Jeffrey Deitch presents The Great American Nude, a thematic group presentation inspired by Tom Wesselmann's iconic painting The Great American Nude VIII (1961). Expect to find the nude maifesting itself in a range of guises, from Isabelle Albuquerque’s Orgy For Ten People In One Body to Aleksandra Waliszewska’s uncanny semi-human creatures and the prone yellow figure of Vanessa Beecroft’s Elizabeth (2008), replete with real human hair.

BEEPLE, REGULAR ANIMALS

If Banksy were a tech bro, he’d probably be Beeple. Damning words, but in a list of sights that deserve to be included in a round-up of must-see exhibits at Art Basel Miami this year, it would be peverse not to include his latest work, Regular Animals. The controversial artist continues to provoke debate with his robot “dogs” adorned with grotesquely hyper-realistic human heads bearing the likenesses of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the artist himself and, somewhat unfairly, Andy Warhol. It definitely promises to be a compelling spectacle.

NICOLETTI

London-based contemporary gallery Nicoletti presents work by Josèfa Ntjam. Drawing on mythologies, ancestral stories, and futurology, Ntjam’s ambitious practice combines AI, 3D animation, film, sound, text, light, sculpture, spoken word, performance, and photomontage. In a new development, Hydro-Diaspora, features a free-standing altarpiece with a triptych of photomontages printed on paper and set within a movable wooden structure, with elaborately engraved outer panels. Here, Ntjam’s use of water imagery symbolises movement, connection and resistance, celebrating collective struggle, migration and the resilience of global diasporic communities.

MARUANI MERCIER

In the Meridians sector, Maruani Mercier presents Lyle Ashton Harris’ The Watering Hole (1996) – nine compelling prints featuring collage-style constellations of tabloid and magazine imagery exploring themes of desire, power, complicity and consumption. Initially inspired by the media frenzy surrounding the Jeffrey Dahmer case, Harris expands into “a broader meditation on the psychological and societal mechanisms through which we consume and are consumed by one another”. This one is not to miss. 

Art Basel Miami Beach is running at the Miami Beach Convention Center from December 5–7, 2025.