Untitled Art | Miami Beach | Isabella Amram

We are delighted to announce our participation in Untitled Art, Miami Beach, with a solo presentation of new works by Isabella Amram. We will be showing in Nest, an invitational section dedicated to supporting emerging artists, young galleries, and non-profit organisations.

Isabella Amram’s paintings approach the canvas as a site where colour and gesture test the limits of symbolic language and rational comprehension. Rather than representing or standing in for reality, her canvases enact a process of meaning-making in real time. Paint is applied and scraped back, sometimes over months, to create time-worn, vibrant layers that function as material records of action and force. Her surfaces register both immediacy and duration, staging dynamic encounters between artist/viewer and artwork.

This new series, debuting in Miami, takes the Tarot as its point of departure. Rooted in an ancient visual system of archetypes, the Tarot dramatises human experience through emblematic figures, symbols, and actions. Amram turns to this tradition not to reproduce its imagery, but to absorb its intensity and reconfigure it through abstraction. In her work, the Tarot’s symbolic charge converges with the layered, gestural language of nature — its erosions, proliferations, and rhythms — each offering systems that are at once structured and unstable, codified yet resistant to final interpretation. Amram translates these forces into paint, using bold colours and marks that move across the canvas like performers — exaggerating, colliding, and reassembling into shifting fields of clashing and releasing.

Two works on view respond specifically to the Six of Wands and the Seven of Cups: cards that stage contrasting facets of human experience. The Six of Wands, often associated with triumph and recognition, finds resonance in sweeping directional gestures and hues that suggest momentum and forward motion. The Seven of Cups, linked to illusion, choice, and desire, dissolves into unstable layers of colour and form, evoking multiplicity, confusion and ambiguity. In both cases, Amram translates the symbolic drama of the Tarot into painterly terms, preserving its intensity while resisting fixed representation.

This resistance is central to her practice. Through painting, Amram extends the Tarot’s performative dimension while also drawing on its inherent irrationality. The cards resist linear logic, relying instead on associative leaps, intuition, and ambiguity. Just as importantly, they have long been used for divination, a playful, controversial and vulnerable practice that carries cultural weight, offering orientation, reflection, and counsel. In this sense, they embody what Georges Bataille termed “non-knowledge” : forms of experience that escape rational comprehension but remain profoundly meaningful. Amram seizes on this dual quality, paralleling it with the instability of abstraction. Just as the Tarot unsettles reason by holding multiple meanings at once, her paintings obstruct singular interpretation, foregrounding flux, uncertainty, and the provisional.

Her working process reinforces this. Each painting develops through cycles of experimentation: laying down a base structure, overlaying energetic sweeps, then scraping or erasing to reveal submerged traces. This accumulation and removal inscribes time into the canvas, producing surfaces that feel both immediate and ancient. The resulting works operate as sites of instability — never fully resolved, yet cohering into compositions that withhold closure.

Amram’s practice is grounded in the conviction that painting can address both body and mind in ways that bypass rational thought. In place of fixed symbols, her canvases create indeterminate yet visceral encounters, where colour and gesture act as living presences. Viewers are invited into a space where meaning is suspended, where painting itself stages the unfolding (and at times uncontrollable) drama of existence.

Nest 2025 is guest curated by Jonny Tanna, founder and director of Harlesden High Street and co-founder of Minor Attractions in London. Tanna’s curatorial approach, grounded in experimentation, seeks to bridge social and cultural divides within contemporary art. “I’m proud to spotlight POC-run spaces that are often excluded from mainstream fairs and to provide them with a platform to reach a broader audience,” notes Tanna. This year, Nest returns in a reimagined format as a continuous section within the fair and has expanded to welcome 36 galleries, embracing the spirit of community at the core of experimental art fair concepts.

Location:
Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, FL


VIP and Press Preview:
Tuesday, 2 Dec, 10am-7pm

Opening Hours:
Wed 3 Dec - Saturday 6 December: 11am-7pm
Sun, 7 Dec, 11am-5pm