Part 1: Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, 5 – 7 December 2025
Part 2: Ingleby, Edinburgh, 20 June – 5 September 2026
Our booth for the 2025 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach is built around the work of Carribbean artist Frank Walter whose centenary we will be celebrating in the summer of 2026.
In 2013 we staged the very first exhibition of Walter’s work. That exhibition, which we called Songs of Innocence and Experience, borrowed its title from William Blake, and marked the very first time that Walter’s paintings had been hung on a gallery wall. To provide a context we included two other artists with whom we felt his work had sympathy – the reclusive Cornish fisherman-turned-rag and bone man Alfred Wallis, and the eccentric Texan shrimp fisherman Forrest Bess. The first people who responded to this newly discovered artist were, not surprisingly perhaps, other artists - with works being acquired from that first exhibition by a number of prominent painters.
Later that year we staged a first international showing of Walter’s work with a solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach, and, in the dozen years since, Frank's reputation has grown exponentially, representing Antigua and Barbuda at the Venice Biennale in 2017, followed by major solo exhibitions in museums such as MMK, Frankfurt and the Drawing Centre, New York, not to mention gallery exhibitions in London, Paris, Brussels, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong and New York. In short, he is now, deservedly, recognised as one of the key figures in 20th Century Caribbean art.
As we approach what would have been Frank's 100th birthday in 2026 we are planning to celebrate his memory with Songs of Innocence and Experience, part II – an exhibition that extends the context for his work to include a number of living artists who have either responded directly to his paintings, or whose own work has something to say in conversation with his. Frank Walter and Friends in other words… the kind of exhibition he never got to take part in during his life, but which we think he might have enjoyed.
Fittingly, given that Frank’s work first found an international audience at Art Basel Miami, we will make this exhibition in two stages, the first being a preview at our booth for this year’s fair, before bringing a larger version of the exhibition home as our centrepiece exhibition for the Edinburgh Art Festival in the summer of 2026. Alongside Frank Walter, our artists for Art Basel Miami 20205 include: David Austen; Hayley Barker; Robert Coutelas; Andrew Cranston; Nick Goss; Mia Kokkoni, Aubrey Levinthal; John Joseph Mitchell; Christopher Colm Morrin; Craig Murray-Orr; Catherine Ross; Ellen Siebers and Joel Tomlin.
