When a plate breaks, most people reach for the dustpan. Artist Rob Strati reached for a pen. The ink drawings that followed became his Fragmented series, and works from it are headed to Art Miami 2026, which opens with a VIP preview on December 1 at One Herald Plaza in downtown Miami. Fremin Gallery will present the pieces, according to materials sent to FAME. At a fair built around buyers and dealers, the subject is an unusual one: what happens after something breaks.
Strati was born in Boston in 1970, grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and studied art history at Ohio State University, according to Adelson Galleries, which lists New York as his home and studio base. The series began with a plate that belonged to his wife’s late mother. It broke at the end of 2020 and sat on the kitchen island for months before the pieces moved to his studio, as Laughing Squid reported. When Colossal covered the work in 2023, it described how he arranged the shards on a flat surface and continued the original designs in ink matched to the single-color palettes of antique plates. The artist described the project to the outlet as an exploration of “the possibilities of things broken and the stories that can evolve from them.” His work has also been shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Columbus and New York, according to a 2025 Arctic Paper interview.
Rob Strati draws past the edge of the plate
The method is simple to describe. The porcelain is not repaired or hidden. Cracks, edges and missing pieces stay in view, and the printed patterns on the china become the opening lines of a larger drawing, according to the artist’s team. Ships, figures, animals and landscapes grow outward from those patterns, along with surreal details. The release says the scenes seem to spill off the plate and onto the page. Madelyn Jordon Fine Art, which carries his work, describes how a small vignette on a plate can widen into a lake dotted with boats that runs to the horizon.
The release places the series somewhere between sculpture, drawing and storytelling, and calls the compositions detailed and monochromatic. That is the publicist’s framing, but the premise is easy to test in person. A fragment most people would have swept up now anchors an entire scene.
Fremin Gallery brings Strati’s Fragmented works to Art Miami
Art Miami runs from a VIP preview on Tuesday, December 1, through Sunday, December 6, at the waterfront One Herald Plaza site, according to the fair’s website. The fair invites collectors, curators and press to a First View, and CONTEXT Art Miami runs alongside it. The fair sits inside Miami Art Week, which organizers list as November 30 to December 6, with more than 20 fairs and hundreds of exhibitions across Greater Miami.
Fremin Gallery will show works from the series, the materials say, offering visitors a closer look at the drawings. They do not name specific pieces or a booth number, so what arrives in Miami is still to be confirmed.
The calendar does not end with the fair. Strati told My Modern Met that a two-person show, Fragmented Horizons, was set to open September 18 at Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, California, and that he is developing a book on the series with an essay by Glenn Adamson. He hoped to launch the book during Art Week in New York in November. The release closes on a question about what makes something worth saving, and how its value shifts once it is seen differently. Art Miami answers that question in sales. A plate nearly thrown out offers another way to answer it.
