By Emma Hapner, December 19, 2025

Like so many who fled the cold for Miami Art Week this December, I found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work on view. Moving through two of the largest fairs, Art Basel and Untitled, I was consistently drawn to artworks that radiated a strong sense of femininity. These were not quiet or delicate gestures. They were large, intense, and undeniably powerful.

This commanding presence reflects a broader shift within the art world. There is a growing visibility of female and non binary artists alongside the continued rise of women led galleries. Together, they signal a redefinition of what feminine power looks like on the global stage. Bold, uncompromising, and impossible to overlook.

Dana Nechmad, *Harmony?,* with Kaliner at Untitled Art Fair, 2025

At Untitled, the first booth we stopped at was Kaliner, (formerly FORMah), an NYC-based gallery established by Maryana Kaliner, that showcases female and female-identifying artists from across the globe. The most striking piece in their booth was a large scale, earthy red painting on unstretched canvas, hanging like a tapestry across one wall. The painting, titled Harmony? is by Dana Nechmad as a part of her solo presentation, ‘The Braided Mythology’ and features two figures, a man and a woman, who appear to be the same height, yet the woman is folded in half. This powerful imagery is presented in a style reminiscent of ancient cave paintings, as if to suggest that gender inequality is an issue that has persisted since the dawn of time.

Emma Beatrez, X, with Hair and Nails at Untitled Art Fair, 2025

Next, as we walked by Hair & Nails, a Minneapolis and NYC based gallery owned by Ryan Fontaine and Kristen Van Loon, I was stopped in my tracks by the formidable work of Emma Beatrez. Beatrez’s cheerleader paintings immediately commanded attention with figures poised between ritual and performance, their gazes hypnotic and self-possessed. These figures radiate a charged, almost combustible energy, caught between ritual, spectacle, and confrontation, where femininity feels both volatile and fiercely controlled. Drawing from the occult, her Midwestern roots, and the quiet symbolism embedded in everyday life, Beatrez transforms the familiar into something spellbinding. Her fluid, expressive brushwork keeps the compositions alive and breathing, never overworked, allowing tension to simmer rather than explode. The result is a body of work that burns slowly but intensely, marking a striking and unforgettable moment in Beatrez’s Miami Art Week debut.

Christiane Pescheck, LIMINAL GHOSTS (Installation view) with SANATORIUM at Untitled Art Fair, 2025

One of the most immersive booths at Untitled during Miami Art Week, was SANATORIUM’s presentation of Christiane Pescheck. SANATORIUM is an Istanbul based gallery with a focus on critical thinking and experimentation, which was evident in their innovative display. Peschek articulated a form of powerful femininity rooted not in spectacle, but in quiet endurance and transformation. Her solo presentation, LIMINAL GHOSTS, portrays figures that exist between states, digital and physical, presence and disappearance, suggesting a feminine power that is subtle, resilient, and deeply self aware. Built from scanned skin, filtered self images, and layered painterly interventions, the portraits resist fixed identity, instead asserting agency through fluidity and impermanence. The soft, translucent surfaces feel intimate yet guarded, embodying a strength that lies in withholding as much as revealing. This sensibility was amplified by the installation’s atmospheric elements, with suspended 3D printed chandeliers casting a muted grey light and the stainless steel wall text reading YOU TOO SHALL PASS, acting as a sculptural assertion of survival and continuity. In Peschek’s hands, femininity becomes a commanding presence defined by adaptability, technological fluency, and the power to persist through transformation.

Agnieszka Nienartowicz,*The Garden of Earthly Delights*, with Nicodim at Art Basel, Miami Beach, 2025

On our final day in Miami, we headed over to the imposingly expansive Art Basel. I immediately started searching for my favorite gallery, Nicodim. With locations in New York, California, and Romania, Nicodim’s innovative shows never fail to impress, and I was not disappointed at Art Basel. With an impressive group exhibition of eleven artists, the piece that stood out most to me was The Garden of Earthly Delights by Agnieszka Nienartowicz. Nienartowicz’s hyper realistic oil portraits of tattooed women draw directly from the visual language of Renaissance, Old Master, and religious painting, yet firmly belong to the present. By recontextualizing these historical compositions through contemporary bodies marked by ink, Nienartowicz reclaims spaces once reserved for idealized or sanctified figures and places lived experience at their center. This particular piece, inspired by Hieronymos Bosch’s painting of the same name, features the exposed and tattooed lower half of a woman in a way that feels uniquely powerful and somehow avoids voyeurism, instead exuding a sense of intentional agency. Within the group show, her painting felt both reverent and subversive, offering a vision of feminine power rooted in authority, embodiment, and the quiet rewriting of art historical tradition.

Across Miami Art Week, feminine power emerged not as a single aesthetic or ideology, but as a spectrum of intensity, restraint, vulnerability, and control. From works charged with heat and confrontation to those that unfolded through quiet endurance and psychological depth, these artists expanded the language of power beyond dominance or spectacle. Femininity was expressed through ritual, embodiment, transformation, and the rewriting of historical and technological narratives, asserting presence on deeply personal terms. What united these practices was a refusal to simplify or soften strength. Instead, Miami Art Week revealed femininity as a force that is multifaceted and self possessed, capable of burning, haunting, resisting, and enduring all at once.

Featured:

Dana Nechmad

IG: @dananechmad

Website: https://www.dananechmad.com/

Kaliner Gallery

IG: @kalinergallery

Website: https://kalinergallery.com/

Emma Beatrez

IG: @emma.beatrez

Website: https://emmabeatrez.com/

Hair + Nails

IG: @hairandnailsmpls