Art Boca Raton is currently in the midst of its third year of bringing emerging, postwar and contemporary art to Boca Raton, from its pop-up confines at FAU’s Research Park. The five-day shindig (the first public day is Thursday) welcomes nearly 40 galleries from Europe and the Americas to our favorite city. To help you navigate such a generous surplus of art, we thought we’d spotlight five not to miss.
Connect Contemporary Art
This Georgia gallery is home to Craig Alan, a painter whose “Populus” series features tiny people forming vast collective images, from Darth Vader to the Statue of Liberty to Marilyn Monroe. A kind of figural pointillism, the artist discovered the style in 2007 from the sixth-story balcony of his mother’s condo in Alabama, after noticing a wedding party whose various guests seemed to congregate in the shape of an eye.
Oliver Cole Gallery
This cavernous space in Miami’s Wynwood district is a prime destination for contemporary, modern, Pop and street art. It’s home to the Basquiat-style primitivism of Niclas Castello, the graffitied pop-culture vibrancy of The Producer BDB, the cinematic dreamscapes of photographer David Drebin (pictured), and Los Angeles sculptural provocateur Christopher Schulz.
Markowicz Fine Art
Home to numerous legends of the art world—it sells Andy Warhol, Fernando Botero and Roy Lichtenstein—this Miami space features, among other things, vivid large-scale sculptures such as Idan Zareski’s “Bigfoot” (pictured) and Carole Feuerman’s meditative “Chrysalis Swarovski Crystal Cap.” Animal lovers will warm to the hand-painted photography of Arno Elias, whose works such as “Mtoto” and “Jumbo” feature wild elephants artfully festooned with colorful symbols.
Evan Lurie Gallery
This Indiana gallery is one of several homes of Hallandale Beach’s Pablo Dona, whose massive sculptures composed of thousands of individual animal erasers were a smash at this year’s Palm Beach Art + Contemporary Fair. It also includes the striking, wildly imaginative paintings of Cuban émigré Alexi Torres, whose fraying images of meditating firefighters and “enlightened” soldiers are full of surprises.
Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts
A stellar contemporary-art gallery in upstate New York, Brunelli houses Austria’s Martin C. Herbst, whose tricks of the eye include cosmic portraits, painted on spheres, that distort when viewed from different angles; and faces painted on mirrored, folded aluminum panels. Brunelli is also home to South Florida’s Ray Gross, who creates hand-painted, hyper-realistic sculptures of everyday art objects.
For a list of some participating galleries, visit nextlevelfairs.com/artbocaraton. Visit the fair, located at 3450 N.W. Eighth Ave., Boca Raton, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday through Friday. Tickets are $8 to $15. For information, call 305/490-4584.
