Vertical Gallery’s all-star roster brings the heat back to Aqua Art Miami 2025
Vertical Gallery, a recognized leader in the world of urban-contemporary art, makes its return to sunny South Florida for the 19th annual installment of Aqua Art Miami, running December 3-7 in conjunction with the citywide Miami Art Week contemporary and modern art fair.
Vertical will feature 13 artists at Aqua Art Miami 2025 — an all-star lineup spotlighting talents from around the globe, some exhibiting on U.S. shores for the first time. Miami Art Week attendees can view all work presented by Vertical inside Room 124 of the Aqua Hotel, located in the heart of Miami Beach.
Vertical is no stranger to Aqua Art Miami, one of more than 20 art fairs under the Miami Art Week 2025 banner. The gallery first showed at Aqua in 2015, returning the following year and again in 2024. This year’s Aqua event, which brings together more than 30 galleries from across six countries, marks Vertical’s 11th overall Miami Art Week showcase since opening for business in April 2013.
“We are thrilled to return to Miami Beach, and looking forward to seeing some familiar faces as well as meeting first-time Aqua Art Miami attendees,” says Vertical Gallery owner Patrick Hull. “This time around, we’re focusing exclusively on works priced between $350 and $4,800, making collecting accessible to all audiences.”
Vertical’s Aqua Art Miami 2025 roster, in alphabetical order:
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Adam Augustyn conjures candy-colored dreamscapes inspired by animation, mythology, music, horror movies and the obsessions of his three daughters.
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Andria Beighton reinterprets midcentury design aesthetics for a new millennium, fusing archetypal atomic-age shapes and motifs with bold, flattened perspectives and ultra-contemporary color palettes.
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Blake Jones’ whimsical, wide-eyed characters are woven into the fabric of Chicago life, multiplying like rabbits in galleries and public spaces across the city and beyond.
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CABNOV’s sublimely surreal paintings transport viewers to a playfully stylized realm somewhere beyond the scope of human experience.
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Collin van der Sluijs’ searchingly personal, slyly political paintings and illustrations emerge from the deepest reaches of the subconscious, resisting both interpretation and categorization.
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Flog sees people for who they really are, exposing the emotions swirling below the surface to visualize the true essence of our beings.
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Jamie Jones tears off the mask of adulthood to depict the child within, portraying preteens costumed as pop culture icons — imagined identities that conceal the true self.
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Jennifer Cronin makes the mundane magical, capturing the intrinsic otherness of everyday life and foregrounding the phenomena we so often take for granted.
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Jerome Tiunayan synthesizes personal storytelling, comics-inspired illustration and gallows humor to recast the Hero’s Journey for our postmodern age.
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Joseph Renda Jr. juxtaposes painstakingly realistic images against audacious surrealistic flourishes to illuminate the interconnectedness of all living things.
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Laura Catherwood’s mysterious, often mournful paintings and pencil illustrations map the landscape of her inner world, where fauna, flora and the fantastic coalesce.
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Sergio Farfán’s dizzyingly colorful, reality-warping paintings and sculptures hold up a mirror to reflect the angel and devil at war inside each one of us.
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Troy Lee’s soul-baring paintings aggressively interrogate the perceptions and realities of Black life in contemporary America.
Vertical also will launch “The Usual Suspects,” an exclusive stencil edition from Mau Mau based on sold-out canvases from the UK street art legend’s July 2025 solo exhibition ‘#wishyouwerehere..’ There are two versions of “The Usual Suspects,” both limited to 15 copies.
“Aqua Art Miami is the anti-art fair,” says Hull, who will be joined in Miami by Adam Augustyn, Jerome Tiunayan, Laura Catherwood, Sergio Farfán and Troy Lee. “A traditional art fair is just rows and rows of dealer booths. Everything looks the same — you don't even remember which galleries you’re visiting. Aqua is different. All the rooms in a historic Art Deco hotel become galleries, and each gallery customizes their space exactly the way they want it. It’s the art fair for people who always say they hate art fairs. All art enthusiasts in and around Miami owe it to themselves to attend.”