A booth within a booth: such is the premise of the Kabinett sector, offering concisely curated exhibitions by 29 galleries within the fair. Among this year’s presentations, visitors will find stunning new work as well as rarely seen or rediscovered artistic practices from the art world’s margins. We shed light on seven of them.

Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados)
Presented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow

The Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle works across different media to address structural racism and systems of oppression, citing self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-Blackness. Most recently, she represented Scotland at the 59th Venice Biennale with the exhibition ‘deep dive (pause) uncoiling memory’, which turned a former boatyard into a jewel-toned environment of tapestry, film, and sculpture that sought to ‘enable restorative justice and self-healing’. In Miami, a newly created body of work using painting and tufting references Bajan folk characters. By drawing on the traditional stories of her native island of Barbados, Whittle alludes to ideas of assimilation, resistance, and healing as experienced by her ancestors.

Emanoel Araujo (b. 1940, Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, Brazil – d. 2022, São Paulo)
Presented by Simões de Assis, São Paulo and Curitiba

Brazilian artist Emanoel Araujo may be best known abroad as the founder of the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo, having made it his life’s mission to collect, preserve, and exhibit afro-Brazilian art. His own artistic practice, too, explored the presence of African heritage in Brazilian culture through sculpture. He drew on geometry by way of Nigerian abstraction and symbolism, as in his ‘Orixás’ series titled after the afro-Brazilian divinities related to natural phenomena. Araujo worked up until he passed away in September 2022 and the Kabinett presentation ‘A Living Legacy’ features reliefs and wall sculptures from four different decades of his long career.

Margot Bergman (b. 1934, Chicago)
Presented by Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Active in the Chicago art scene since the 1950s, Margot Bergman has developed a unique mode of ‘collaborative’ painting despite working mostly in seclusion. For this, she sources canvases in thrift stores, using them as the base for her expressionistic brushwork that playfully renders faces, figures, and objects in varying degrees of realist representation. With sections of the paintings underneath peeking through, compositions like Joy Gaye (2008) recall Dadaist collage as well as Surrealist personification: by inserting eyes, hair, and a mouth into a kitschy landscape, Bergman grotesquely subverts the stereotypically feminine figure of a girl posed von Trapp-style. Her Kabinett presentation introduces a selection of never-before-seen flower paintings from around 2009.

David Hockney (b. 1937, Bradford, UK)
Presented by Gray, Chicago

While David Hockney has gained cult status for his swimming pool paintings and large-scale portraits he has always kept up-to-date with new technologies. Interested in the painterly qualities of photography and video, the 85-year-old British artist has been using an iPad as his main tool in recent years. He has been keenly working on digital paintings, exploring innovative ways to draw colorful landscapes of the British and French countryside, and expanding them through collage. His large-scale works on show in Miami were created by combining several iPad paintings, allowing the viewer to fully experience the artist's command of an unusual medium.

George Tooker (b. 1920, New York – d. Hartland, Vermont, 2011)
Presented by Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York

George Tooker was often called a symbolic or magic realist. Executed in egg tempera, his paintings of everyday scenes, like The Subway (1950), are imbued with a sense of mystery, anxiety, or alienation. After the death of his partner, Tooker converted to Roman Catholicism, where he found sanctuary and inspiration. Becoming involved with his local parish, he gifted its church several works. This a rare opportunity to see one of them outside Windsor, Vermont: On view in Miami, the 14-panel series Stations of the Cross (1984) shows both Tooker’s admiration and interpretation of Renaissance painting by narrating the Passion of Christ through the motif of the hand.

Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949, Detroit – d. 1990, New York)
Presented by P.P.O.W, New York

A pivotal figure of the New York downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Jimmy DeSana captured the era’s spirit in his photographs. He carefully staged images inspired by BDSM culture with a surreal touch and took portraits of cultural icons like Yoko Ono, David Byrne, and Debbie Harry. In the Kabinett sector, a selection of vintage prints from two of his most iconic bodies of work, ‘101 Nudes’ (1972) and ‘Suburban’ (1979–1985), will be on display. Having died of AIDS in 1990, the resurgence of DeSana’s oeuvre ‘could not come at a more opportune moment’, notes art historian William J. Simmons, as it ‘is exemplary of new outlets for reconstituting the Pictures Generation with Queer modes of vision and critique’.

Hedda Sterne (b. 1910, Bucharest – d. 2011, New York)
Presented by Van Doren Waxter, New York

Born in Bucharest in 1910, Hedda Sterne lived to the grand age of 100. Her sprawling and diverse oeuvre interprets the world around her through painting and drawing, akin to a form of diary. Having studied in Paris, where she exhibited with the Surrealists, she fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941 and was introduced to its art scene by Peggy Guggenheim. Sterne never committed to a signature style, yet paintings like her stylized portraits or geometric compositions reminiscent of landscapes are often rendered in similar earthy tones, dominated by browns, bluish-blacks, creams, and grays. Conversely, the selection of intricate drawings from 1965–1968 in her Kabinett presentation is executed in Rapidograph pen, a precise technical tool that enables uninterrupted, steady linework. In resembling organic forms, these drawings, too, bridge abstraction and figuration.

Kathrin Heinrich is an art historian and critic based in Vienna.

Top image: Emanoel Araujo, Ship, 2021 (detail). Courtesy of Simões de Assis, São Paulo and Curitiba.