The Best Show During Art Basel

A vivid, narrative-rich world unfolds at KDR Gallery as Susan Kim Alvarez draws on Florida folklore, personal memory and a maximalist visual language to explore how myth takes shape from the inside out. Blending humor with unease, she treats her own interior landscape as a catalyst for reimagining the cultural stories that define the region.

At the center of The Best Show During Art Basel is Mouth of Miami (2025), a two-paneled painting that envisions a fiery, creature-filled expanse with figures drifting along its edges. Within the turmoil, an orange-lit version of the city sits quietly intact, suggesting resilience amid the spectacle. Surrounding works continue Alvarez’s ongoing practice of reconfiguring her family history, fusing inherited narratives with invented ones to build a personal mythology that mirrors the unruly spirit of South Florida.

Presented with the artist’s bold, cartoon-influenced style—dense, playful and attentive to the surreal—the exhibition offers a view of Miami that feels both intimate and exaggerated, shaped by memory as much as cultural lore. On view November 30 through January 10 at KDR Gallery in Allapattah, it highlights a rising painter whose work channels the region’s imagination through a lens that is at once idiosyncratic and deeply rooted in place.