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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:

• Adam Augustyn conjures candy-colored dreamscapes inspired by animation, mythology, music, horror movies and the obsessions of his three daughters. 

• 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.

• 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. 

• CABNOV’s sublimely surreal paintings transport viewers to a playfully stylized realm somewhere beyond the scope of human experience.

• Collin van der Sluijs’ searchingly personal, slyly political paintings and illustrations emerge from the deepest reaches of the subconscious, resisting both interpretation and categorization. 

• Flog sees people for who they really are, exposing the emotions swirling below the surface to visualize the true essence of our beings.

• 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.  

• Jennifer Cronin makes the mundane magical, capturing the intrinsic otherness of everyday life and foregrounding the phenomena we so often take for granted.  

• Jerome Tiunayan synthesizes personal storytelling, comics-inspired illustration and gallows humor to recast the Hero’s Journey for our postmodern age. 

• Joseph Renda Jr. juxtaposes painstakingly realistic images against audacious surrealistic flourishes to illuminate the interconnectedness of all living things.

• Laura Catherwood’s mysterious, often mournful paintings and pencil illustrations map the landscape of her inner world, where fauna, flora and the fantastic coalesce.

• 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.

• 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.”

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Shop artwork from Jennifer Cronin here.

Jennifer Cronin makes the mundane magical. The Chicago-based painter — one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami — captures the intrinsic otherness of everyday life, foregrounding the phenomena we so often take for granted.  

Jennifer made her Vertical debut as part of our 2022 group show ‘Atomic Number 13 Part 2,’ and we’re excited to present her newest collection to the Miami audience. The latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series reveals all. 

Vertical Gallery: Tell us about the work you’re exhibiting at Aqua Art Miami. 

Jennifer Cronin: It’s in line with the work that I've been making for the past several years: everyday landscapes infused with magic and mystery, reminding viewers there is beauty all around us. The pieces I’m showing in Miami bring in more experimentation and abstraction. I’m letting the paint be paint — letting a brushstroke just be a brushstroke, and not necessarily representing or trying to capture something else. 

There's a section in one painting that’s, like, this green scribble. I didn't know exactly what that was going to be, but after working on the painting and spending a lot of time with it, I knew I wanted it to be there. I don't think about it too much, because it's kind of automatic, but introducing these elements that are a little bit less predictable and a little bit stylistically different has been really, really fun for me.

An eerie green light recurs throughout your earlier work. Is the green scribble an extension of that motif? 

I definitely find myself returning to themes and colors, and yes, there are certain things that have shown up in my figurative work that are now showing up in these landscapes. I enjoy ambiguity, so [green light] is not necessarily something very specific. It’s more a symbol for something unexplained or something mysterious.   

Where does this emphasis on landscapes come from?

I did a show in 2019 called ‘Seen and Unseen’ that was inspired by my research into climate refugees — Alaska Native villages forced to move because the land literally can't support them anymore, and their houses are being swallowed by the sea. That work was really heavy, and it led to some art burnout. I spent about nine months not making anything.

When the pandemic came around, I got the itch to start working again. I did a couple of small drawings, and then I rethought my practice. I wanted to focus on creating work that came from a place of joy — work that was hopeful. So I brought together all of the aspects of my practice that I enjoy most, like landscapes and playing around with paint. 

I think a lot of people can relate to landscapes, because they’re kind of general. A landscape can represent a lot of different places. It's not something too specific.

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from experiencing your work?

I just hope they're drawn to it. I love the connections that people bring when they're looking at a painting: it's always fun to hear stories about how it makes them think of when they were young, a place that they know, or something like that. I always like seeing people spend time with my work, and getting lost a little. I like that a lot.

Shop artwork from Jennifer Cronin here.

Troy Lee’s expressive and intimate paintings interrogate the Black American experience. The Chicago native — one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami — was known as Troy Scat prior to March 2025’s powerful ‘We From the Heavens,’ a solo showcase inspired by subtle but significant moments nestled deep within his favorite movies, television series, music videos and viral clips. The latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series reveals how Troy’s return to the Windy City shaped his newest work, and identifies what being an artist really means. 

Vertical Gallery: What can we expect from the pieces you’re showing at Aqua?

Troy Lee: This new body of work mashes different things that I like to do within my artistic practice. For a long time, I've been trying to hone in on a style, and right now, I'm in a place where I'm starting to accept that it's best for me to not focus on style, but concentrate on the message and trust in my taste. Because everything that I do, no matter the style, has my hand and voice in it. 

I love illustration, and I love sketches — I love doing them, and I love when other artists do them. The work I’m bringing to Miami is mostly acrylic on canvas, but I'm also sketching on the canvas with pencil and graphite. For a long time, I considered that to be against the rules, so to speak. But I'm in a space where I'm gonna just do what I want, and make it work. 

It's a lot different from the ‘We From the Heavens’ show, where I pretty much knew what each piece was gonna look like at the beginning of the process. There was an overall idea, a scene that I liked, and a [reference photo] right there. With this new work, I’m starting with only about 30 percent of the idea. I might throw in a collage — I’ve also been finding ways to get a watercolor effect without using watercolor paints. That other 70 percent of the idea comes from what I'm feeling in the moment. I’m creating in a more intuitive way.

What themes and motifs are you exploring this time around?

This new work is mostly white backgrounds, but they're heavily layered, and you can see that. There's a red base to each painting, and I layer the background with different colors and abstract marks and stuff like that. Then I paint white over everything, but I purposefully leave some of those marks to bleed through. It symbolizes mistakes — you make a mistake, you fix it and you move on from it. Making mistakes and correcting them or attempting to correct them is a theme in most of my new work. 

In a few of the new works I’m using childhood anime and cartoon characters to express vulnerable ideas and cultivate a certain tone. A cartoon like ‘Family Guy’ uses the dog or the baby to say the craziest stuff, because when an adult says those things, you receive it a different way. It’s digestible if it's a baby saying that stuff. There's also arrows in this new work. I’ve been using that as a way to address some ideas on love, or connection.

Another motif in my newer paintings is the tallies [i.e., tally marks or hash marks for keeping count]. This is the “undefeated” symbol, you know? Every day that I wake up is a reminder that I'm undefeated — that as long as you're still breathing, you can keep going. I'm just tallying up everything… tallying up life. 

You were born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. Seven years ago, you relocated to Los Angeles, and then a few months ago, you moved back. How is returning to Chicago impacting the work you’re creating?

It’s playing a big part. I’ve been doing a lot of reflection. In L.A., I rarely made space or time to sit back and reflect, but being here at home… life hits a lot different. 

It’s why I’ve been creating more intuitively — just doing whatever comes to mind and figuring it out. I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I felt I could really do that, and I'm finding that this process of baring my soul is the way that I want to move forward with any painting that I do from now on. 

You bared your soul with ‘We From the Heavens,’ too. That kind of raw honesty must take its toll. How — and more importantly, why — are you doing it this way?

Well, as an artist, that's just what you have to do, you know what I mean? I wouldn't be an artist if I couldn't do that.

The print version of your piece “A Flower Undimmed” was featured in a recent episode of FX Networks’ ‘The Bear.’ How did that come about?

My friend Bianca Pastel recommended me. Someone from ‘The Bear’ came and saw my work, and they reached out to me after. The people that work for the show couldn't tell me if it was gonna be aired, or when it was gonna be aired. Friends saw it before I did, and sent me [messages] like “I didn't know you were on ‘The Bear!’” 

It was really dope, but at first, I didn't celebrate it like I wanted to celebrate it — like I should have celebrated it. I have some peers and some mentors who’ve had their work featured in movies or on TV shows multiple times, so naturally, I'm comparing myself to them, and you know what they say: comparison is the thief of joy. Once I started to think “So-and-so has done that three times already, I need to catch up,” I didn't have as much appreciation for it. I don't know what made me snap out of it, but eventually, I did. 

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from experiencing your work?

This is my first show in Miami, so I'm really excited. I don't really have any intentions on what the audience takes away from it. There is a concept, but it's mostly about feeling. That’s what I care about. 

I think all of my art is open to interpretation, but with this new stuff, there's a lot more abstract mark-making, and someone who looks at it might see something totally different than what I was feeling when I was creating it. A lot of people, including me, love to know the artist's thoughts behind their paintings, and I'm happy to provide some commentary. But I just hope that the audience feels something — something familiar. Something they can relate to, in their own way.

Vertical Gallery will feature six new paintings from Troy Lee (@_troy.lee_) at Aqua Art Miami, running December 3-7. Email sales@verticalgallery.com for the collector preview.

Shop artwork from Jamie Jones here.

Jamie Jones tears off the mask of adulthood to depict the child within. His paintings portray preteens costumed as Marvel and DC Comics heroes — imagined identities that conceal the true self.  

“I started painting kids as superheroes at the end of 2022,” says UK-born, Cyprus-based Jamie, one of 13 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami (December 3-7). “It came from what I feel a lot of us are missing from our lives: the things that made us happy and joyous as children. I want to take you back to that era in your life where your greatest superpower was that you could be anything you wanted to be.”

It took Jamie longer than most to become the artist he wanted to be. His origin story begins in the north of England: “Comics were always part of my life,” he recalls. “I was drawing constantly.” When Jamie was seven years old, his family relocated to Saudi Arabia, and four years later, he returned home to attend boarding school in Yorkshire. “Art was something I really, really threw my head and heart into, and I ended up getting an art scholarship,” he says. “I went to [Blacon Art College], where I started doing multimedia and design, because I wanted to use things like Photoshop. But the course wasn't really what I wanted. I didn’t get much out of the experience.”

Jamie spent the next seven years at British retail goliath Marks & Spencer, working his way up from stocking shelves to mid-management roles. From there he served two decades in the hospitality sector, owning and operating a series of bars as well as consulting for Michelin-starred establishments across the globe. The so-called “Cocktail Hobbit” even claimed Diageo World Class GB Bartender of the Year honors in 2017. 

“I was well known in the global drinks industry. I was traveling around the world constantly, doing appearances to make cocktails, or writing menus and training bartenders. I also released the world's first augmented reality cocktail menu, called Mirage,” Jamie says. “Creating the recipes and the aesthetic and the presentation of these drinks allowed my passion for creativity to come out again.”

After the COVID-19 pandemic knocked the hospitality business off its axis, Jamie pondered his next career move. His now-wife Laura had the answer. 

“My first marriage wasn't a pleasant one, because I wasn't who I was before we got married. I'd been shaped into somebody very different,” he says. “Coming out of that experience, I met Laura. She was very encouraging of the way I dressed, the things I was into, my music choices — just me being me. She was also the first to encourage me to pick up my pencil and start drawing again. I did a drawing of Christopher Walken, and I thought ‘Oh, look, I can still do this. Something's still in there.’ And then I put it on Instagram, and people said ‘Wow, that's amazing!’ So I got some paints, some acrylics, and decided to keep moving forward.”

When Laura was furloughed from her job, the couple relocated to Cyprus, the third largest and third most populous island in the Mediterranean. There Jamie made his first-ever group show appearance, contributing three pieces to 2020’s En Plo Artists of Cyprus exhibition in the city of Paphos. A pair of group shows back home in Manchester, England preceded his first solo showcase, ‘Mnimoniko,’ presented in Paphos in 2022.

Jamie’s 2023 solo exhibition ‘Misled Youth’ was the first to feature his now-signature portraits of children made up as pop culture icons. “I’ve suffered from depression a number of times in my life, and I think a lot of those pressures are brought on because we're not necessarily the people we want to be. We’re told to grow up and behave: ‘Do this, do that.’ I wanted people to reflect on who they were as children, and superheroes were the easiest way for me to do that,” he says. “My work has always been about nostalgia, and everybody around the world recognizes these characters and sees a bit of themselves in them.”

‘Misled Youth’ signaled Jamie’s first foray into oil painting. “I'd only picked up and started using oil paints three or four months before. I'd exclusively used acrylic and spray paint up until that point, but I like to challenge myself, and I was getting to a point where I felt I needed to become more of a grown-up artist, with my own colorway and color scheme,” he says. “Technically, I'm colorblind, so vivid colors dance in my eyes in a different way. When I put colors together, brighter colors generally appeal to me a lot more. The other thing is that I was quite sick as a child, and ended up with damage to my left eye. I now have about 10 percent vision in that eye, and the right eye's on its way to having big problems. But I'm doing what I can with the tools that I've got. It's all instinctual — I know what colors I like, and I know what feels right to me.”

Jamie created 50 pieces for ‘Misled Youth,’ selling all but a handful. Several pieces from the show were acquired by Anthimos Economides, CEO of development firm KUUTIO Group, who then commissioned Jamie to create artwork for the M Boutique Hotel, an adults-only retreat minutes away from the Mediterranean coastline. Jamie created 235 pieces in total, one for each hotel room, in a span of just six weeks. 

“I was just coming off the back of the [‘Misled Youth’] show, having worked for nine months solid and planning to finally get some downtime, into working 15 hours a day,” Jamie chuckles. “My biggest stress was getting the canvases printed and framed. I customized every single piece as well. Each one had a different spray-painted background. It was an intense project, but I nailed it.”

Jamie also nailed his contributions to Aqua Art Miami — his very first exhibition on U.S. shores. 

“[The children are] not wearing real costumes this time. They're wearing clothes they could find around the house and repurpose as superhero costumes, and relying on their imagination to bring the character to life,” Jamie explains. “This body of work is my inner child coming out. This is just how I did it — I'd run around with chopsticks between my fingers, pretending I was Wolverine. When you’re a kid, it doesn't matter what something really is: it’s about what you see. Children look at the world in a different way, and I think if you can master that as an adult, you’ll be a very happy and very positive person.” 

Shop artwork from Jamie Jones here.

Melbourne, Australia-based painter Andria Beighton is one of 12 artists exhibiting with Vertical Gallery at this year’s Aqua Art Miami, which descends on South Beach from December 3-7. 

Andria reinterprets midcentury design aesthetics for a new millennium, fusing archetypal atomic-age shapes and motifs with bold, flattened perspectives and ultra-contemporary color palettes. The self-taught artist draws on her lifelong fascination with the textiles, décor and architecture that defined domestic living between the 1930s and 1970s: signatures of her work include neo-nostalgic still lifes, floral wallpapers and form-follows-function dream houses. 

Andria made her Vertical Gallery debut as part of our 2024 Holiday Group Show, her very first group exhibition on U.S. soil. In the latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series, Andria previews the work she’s exhibiting at Aqua and looks back at the development of her signature style. 

Vertical Gallery: Tell us about what you’re showing at Aqua Art Miami 2025. 

Andria Beighton: I wanted to put together a collection that will be fun for the Miami vibe, so I’m showing a range of cocktails in sort of a midcentury style — my graphic style. 

Why cocktails?

I’ve done cocktails for fairs before, and they’re fun to make, because they've got lots of tiny little sections of color. People love them. I've had quite a few people display them over their bar cart, which is really cute.

A cocktail is like an artwork in itself, with all its different elements. There’s something special about a cocktail served up in a beautiful glass with beautiful garnishes. It's interesting to me to pull out all the different shapes, like the twist of the orange peel or the curve of the glass. I work with background colors that highlight those elements, and that work well in people's homes. It’s important to think about the collector’s perspective.

I’ve made 12 canvases for Miami — lots of different shapes, lots of different glasses. They're framed in a light-colored hardwood, so they're ready to go. There are martinis and Aperol spritz, and because people go wild for the negronis, I've done those in three different colors and two different glasses. With a negroni, the orange peel is kind of the hero of the artwork, so I put it against quite a deep navy or peacock background to make the drink pop. 

Where did your fascination with midcentury design originate?

A lot of my interest comes from textiles. My mom worked in the rag trade, and we were always sewing. I started to collect fabric from my grandparents, and I became kind of obsessed with the patterns — the colors and the shapes. I was always drawn to record covers and posters from that time, too. There were so many objects in my grandparents’ homes I wanted to know more about. 

Your style is so exacting — so precise. How has it evolved over time?

I've always known how I wanted to paint, and how I wanted my work to look. It took me probably 20 years off and on, trying different things. I was painting with gouache for a while, which I found was the closest way to get the kind of flat, matte finish I wanted. I'd never been able to get the right finish with the acrylics.

Five or six years ago, I was like “Okay, I'm gonna try [acrylics] again, in a larger scale.” Something just clicked, and it started working. It felt like I was finally able to create what I've seen in my mind for my entire life, you know? I could get it onto the canvas. Since then, I've been doing as much work as I can, just getting it all out.

People often message me: How do you do this? How do you do that? What do you use for this? I can tell you, but it doesn't mean you're gonna be able to do it. It's a lot of time, a lot of patience and a lot of experimenting along the way to get it right.

What do you hope the Miami audience takes away from experiencing your work up close?

I just hope it makes them happy. I mean, they’re cocktails — they don't have a huge meaning behind them. But people often come to me and tell me stories. They say “Oh, the negroni! That’s our favorite cocktail,” or “That was the lockdown cocktail we made together every week to get through the pandemic.” People bring their own associations to the work, and that’s always nice.

Follow Andria on Instagram: @andriabeighton