Art Basel Miami Beach

December 3rd - 7th, 2025, Art Basel Miami Beach

For Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Richard Saltoun presents a group display centered around three pioneering Latin American artists: Elizam ESCOBAR (1948–2021, Puerto Rican), Cossette ZENO (b. 1930, Dominican / Puerto Rican) and Olga DE AMARAL (b. 1932, Colombian). This marks the first-ever art fair presentations of Puerto Rican artists: Elizam Escobar, whose pioneering political works, made while imprisoned in the United States, use the human figure to critique colonialism and power, and Cossette Zeno, a 95-year-old post-war Surrealist artist, whose erotic, psychological paintings took the Parisian art world by storm in the 1950s. 

Bringing together these three artists, this display examines cultural heritage, memory, resistance, and freedom through Surrealist and tactile material languages. Together, their practices reflect a shared interest in defining personal and collective identity, exploring the terrain between history, authority and homeland. 

Cossette Zeno, described by the famed exiled artist Eugenio Granell, as making 'scorching inventions', produced biomorphic and proto-feminist works exploring space and the human and feminine in the surreal. Recently included in Surrealism Beyond Borders at the Tate and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Surrealism and Us at The Modern Art Museum (The Modern), Fort Worth, Texas (2024), her work is currently being reappraised within the wider Surrealist movement.

Cossette Zeno, Te Busco En Mis Sueños [I look for you in my dreams], 1958