From surreal self-portraits set in apocalyptic landscapes to sculptural glass collages, Art Basel Miami Beach is full of discoveries this year. Newcomers to the fair’s dynamic Positions and Nova sectors will present deeply personal works alongside socially engaged pieces confronting topics such as war, climate change, and the abuse of power.

Debra Cartwright
Welancora Gallery, United States, Nova sector

When the New York-based artist Debra Cartwright was young, she would leaf through medical books in her mother’s gynecology practice and doodle on images of female anatomy. These early encounters left a lasting imprint. Her current practice probes the fraught history of American medicine, which has long exploited the Black female body, her tempestuous paintings intertwining abstraction and figuration in spontaneous compositions. At Welancora Gallery, Cartwright unveils a new series of ethereal watercolors and oil paintings that explore birth, caregiving, and hidden rituals that have nurtured Black women across generations.

Nour Malas
Carbon 12, United Arab Emirates, Positions sector

A monumental painting grappling with the recent war in Syria unfurls across the walls of Carbon 12’s booth. The Syrian-Canadian painter Nour Malas’s gestural four-panel work moves from scenes evoking destruction to more hopeful imagery suggesting renewal. Inspired by Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s iconic anti-war painting, Head Held High (2025) reflects on the scars the war has left Syrians with and its indelible impact on their collective identity. Malas builds up each canvas through an accumulative process, layering gestural marks – a fitting parallel to how bodies and countries are scarred by repeated conflict.

Roberto Márquez 
Paul Soto Gallery, United States, Nova sector

The Mexican artist Roberto Márquez often paints self-portraits that place his body within surreal, dream-like environments. His strange landscapes range from suffocatingly dense forests with menacing flora to ominous oceans dotted with barren trees. Balancing humor and dread, his latest works explore ecology, the climate crisis, migration, and border politics. In addition to depicting himself, several works feature other figures, inviting viewers to empathize and consider their own place within these unsettling scenarios.

Ana Navas
Crisis, Peru, Positions sector

The Amsterdam-based, Ecuador-born artist Ana Navas unearths the genealogy of images and objects and traces their circulation across different disciplines. Her new series of glass collages, ‘Amulet’ (2025), investigates how abstraction – once a radical art movement – has been assimilated into commercial design and domestic objects. While subtly evoking the aesthetics of home decor, her fluid, vibrant glass works also take inspiration from the visual languages of Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Renata Petersen
Pequod Co., Mexico, Nova sector

Upon entering Pequod’s booth, visitors are transported to Villa Paraíso (Paradise Villa) (2025), a kitschy, quasi-devotional environment. The Mexican artist Renata Petersen presents a range of objects for veneration, such as ceramic-tiled murals and vases adorned with dense comic-book-like imagery. The installation also includes mirror-finish handblown glass sculptures in temple-like forms. A continuation of her recent solo show at the Hammer Museum, LA, the work interrogates the dynamics of power, exploitation, and control underpinning cults, sects, and new religious movements.

Daid Roy
56 Henry, United States, Positions sector

A multidisciplinary artist and educator, Daid Roy has developed a solution-oriented practice that responds to pressing environmental and sociopolitical issues. Long preoccupied with sustainable modes of transport, the artist has been developing their Speculative Vehicle (SV) project, creating unconventional vehicles as alternatives to gas-powered and electric cars. On view in Miami Beach will be their Showroom of Possibilities (2025) – an installation comprising three imagined vehicles, a diagrammatic oil painting (showing the conceptual framework behind the vehicles), and images of a recent performance work.

Mohammed Z. Rahman
Phillida Reid, United Kingdom, Nova sector

Born to a working-class Bengali family in London, the self-taught painter Mohammed Z. Rahman began cooking and creating art as a young teenager. Their latest body of work, Hearthside (2025), unfolds as a carnivalesque feast of images. The installation consists of a series of exuberant wall paintings and wooden crates embedded with paintings. Drawing on cooking memories and ancestral ties, Rahman’s work acts as a living repository of inherited culinary knowledge and transnational food culture. Seen together, the works create a welcoming atmosphere that celebrates community, solidarity, and cross-cultural exchange.

Adriel Visoto
Verve, Brazil, Positions sector

The Brazilian artist Adriel Visoto’s Common Estranger (2025) is an intimate suite of oil paintings depicting everyday rituals in domestic spaces. An undercurrent of loneliness pervades these tender scenes, drawn from Visoto’s personal and professional life. Each painting is bathed in its own color of light, contributing to the brooding atmosphere. In stark contrast to the slick, flattened images that we consume rapidly on social media, these cinematic pieces – mounted on thick supports – invite slow contemplation.