‘Echoes of the Unseen’ at a New Miami Art Gallery with a Global Perspective

Tyrrell Winston, “Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out, Jimmy,” 2025, Used Basketballs, liquid plastic, steel, epoxy, 44 x 54 x 9 inches, is one of the featured works in Opa Projects second exhibition, “Echoes of the Unseen” on view through Sunday, June 29. (Photo courtesy of Opa Projects)

Founded by Billy Tartour, whose expertise in art spans history, collecting, and advising, Opa Projects is a newly inaugurated contemporary art space in Miami’s Ironside district.

The gallery is a platform for global dialogue, curating exhibitions that are not only of the moment but also explore the deeper strata of memory, perception, and identity. Through a curatorial program featuring emerging, mid-career, and blue-chip artists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, Opa Projects positions itself as a conduit between diverse voices and a discerning audience.

Sofia Nifora, left, “Southern Zephyr,” Oil on linen, 51.18 x 31.49 inches; right: “No Longer,” Oil on linen, 82.67 x 39.37 inches. (Photo courtesy of Opa Projects)

The name “Opa” captures the liveliness, celebratory nature, and cultural spirit the gallery seeks to bring to Miami’s artscape. It is a common interjection in the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and in Hebrew. It is frequently used during celebrations such as weddings. In Greek culture, the expression sometimes accompanies the act of plate smashing.

Its second exhibition, “Echoes of the Unseen,” brings together eight artists whose practices engage with the intangible: memory, materiality, and the hidden forces that shape the human condition. The show unfolds as a meditation on liminality— the threshold between what is seen and what is sensed.

With a pronounced emphasis on representational painting and tactile surfaces, the current exhibition assembles enigmatic portraits, recontextualized objects, and works that hover between figuration and abstraction. It is a world of layering, both materially and contextually.

Maurice Mboa, “LE DUC DU VILLAGE,” Acrylic on metal, 70.86 x 39.37 inches. (Photo courtesy of Opa Projects)

Originally from Cameroon and now living in Geneva, Maurice Mboa presents a frontal faceless figure incised into a smooth steel panel. His surface is marked by a process of scratching that captures and refracts the light. Drawing from animist cosmologies and the ancestral teachings of his grandmother, a traditional healer, Mboa’s portraits seek not to render likeness but to channel spirit. They are less depictions than invocations, soul portraits. The scratched sheen defies static representation. As light shifts and the viewer moves, the work metamorphoses—mutable, ephemeral, alive. The intense emotion of the work harkens to 1980s Neo-Expressionism.

David Salle’s career bloomed during the 1980s, and is known for his visual riddles: collaged images from disparate sources woven into cinematic montage. Here, the East Hampton, N.Y.-based artist offers a more meditative departure from his characteristic density. Faces, domestic scenes, and ambiguous fragments become painterly koans—enigmatic and elusive—inviting prolonged reflection over immediate comprehension.

Noel W. Anderson, “Alligator, BOY !!!,” 2021, Jacquard tapestry, 106 x 77 inches. (Photo courtesy of Opa Projects)

An oversized figure flies out of view, mid-jump, on a basketball court in Noel W. Anderson’s large tapestry, frayed and re-stitched. By incorporating snags into the surface, the Louisville-born, Harlem based artist draws attention to the fallacy of illusionistic space, as well as the use of “nontraditional” materials. His woven images of iconic Black athletes function simultaneously as homage and critique, unraveling the mythologies that have historically framed Black excellence.

Tyrrell Winston, now based in Detroit, assembles minimalist sculptures from deflated basketballs salvaged from New York’s streets. These worn relics—arranged in precise grids—bear the patina of past lives, transforming disposable objects into markers of time, memory, and cultural residue. Logos fade into abstraction, their original meanings transmuted. A second arrangement of the same objects, displayed above, underscores the tension between formality and feeling, chaos and control.

French artist Ben Arpéa reimagines still life and landscape through bold geometry and saturated hues, engaging with both analog traditions and digital aesthetics. His paintings hover between canvas and screen, questioning how technology reframes our experience of the natural world.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy fuses abstraction and figuration to construct dreamlike narratives that draw from her heritage. The Los Angeles artist’s lyrical landscapes evoke themes of home, metamorphosis, and the ever-shifting terrain of belonging.

Ho Jae Kim, “Icarus : Praise the Fallen,” 2025, Oil, acrylic, graphite, charcoal, inkjet transfer, enamel on canvas, 96 x 72 inches. (Photo courtesy of Opa Projects)

Ho Jae Kim fuses spatial concepts and evocative surface modeling to craft visual allegories that shift between dreams and reality. His surreal works, depicting elements like a sun resembling snakeskin, wax-covered surfaces, and solitary figures in transitional spaces, evoke the cave shadows of Platonic ideas. In “Evocative Pool Painting,” the monochrome color scheme and prominent palm symbolize suspended time. The vertical orientation of his pieces encourages a top-to-bottom exploration, allowing the viewer’s eyes to caress the textures and absorb the Brooklyn artist’s vision.

Sofia Nifora, born in Patras, Greece and educated at the Royal College of Art, paints from recollection and rural memory. Her atmospheric works, steeped in nostalgia, evoke both the universal and the intimate. With fluid brushwork and shifting light, her canvases become meditations on transience and longing.

Throughout “Echoes of the Unseen,” the exhibition foregrounds the material as a vehicle for the immaterial. Whether through Anderson’s unraveled threads, Kim’s wax surfaces, or Winston’s battered basketballs, the works probe the interplay between surface and depth, illusion and presence. Scars, snags, and scratches function not as flaws, but as inscriptions—each mark an echo of something once felt.

Focusing on representational painting and textured surfaces, the exhibition gathers mysterious portraits, recontextualized objects, and pieces that navigate the space between figuration and abstraction. It reveals a world rich in layers, both in material and context.

WHAT: “Echoes of the Unseen”
WHERE: Opa Projects, 7622 NE 4th Court, Miami
WHEN: Daily 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Through June 29
COST: Free
INFORMATION: (516) 807-5419 or www.opaprojects.com

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