Charming and quaint, the Swiss city of Basel may be modest in nature, but every June, it becomes the centre of attention for the art world, roaring to life with a sprawling exhibition of works by more than 4,000 artists from five continents, represented by some 290 galleries. A flagship cultural event, Art Basel has been operating for more than five decades, setting the blueprint for sibling fairs elsewhere that now define the art-world calendar. When not fully immersed in the art experience, participating gallerists take advantage of a city defined as much by its medieval heritage and classical modernism as by its contemporary expressions. With Art Basel 2026 taking place 18-21 June, here, five of them share their favourite cafés, bars and restaurants.

Where to eat and drink in Basel, the insiders’ guide

Casey Kaplan

Morning treat at Hotel Märthof Basel

‘I do not drink coffee, just tea, so I like to begin my days in Basel with a hot green tea on the roof of the Hotel Märthof, which looks out on the Marktplatz, where some mornings you have a bird’s-eye view of the fresh fruit vendors. That is the best place to buy strawberries.’

Hotel Märthof Basel is located at Marktgasse 19, 4001 Basel, Switzerland

Wine o’clock at Consum Weinbar

‘A glass or two of rosé from Provence in the afternoon outdoors at Consum Weinbar (across the street from Hotel Krafft) is the best spot for a break with friends and colleagues. It feels local and an escape from the art fair.’

Consum Weinbar is located at Rheingasse 19, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Dinner at Restaurant Krafft Basel

‘I recommend the river fish en papillote while dining outdoors along the Rhine at Restaurant Krafft. You can hear the rushing river from your table, which is a nice way to unwind after a long day at the art fair.’

Restaurant Krafft Basel is located at Hotel Krafft Basel, Rheingasse 12, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Galerie nächst St. Stephan

Morning treat at Confiserie Schiesser

‘One of my favourite coffee places is Confiserie Schiesser on the Marktplatz, a very traditional spot. As children, we all loved their famous Schoggi S pastries, and I still love them today – crispy on the outside and soft and slightly creamy on the inside. It was the usual treat that my mother would bring home for my three sisters and me on a Saturday.’

Confiserie Schiesser is located at Marktpl. 19, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

Wine o’clock at Imi Bar

‘For drinks, I recommend the Imi Bar in the Volkshaus Basel. A great place named after German artist Imi Knoebel, who designed the glass windows.’

Imi Bar is located at Rebgasse 12-14, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Dinner at Rhyschänzli

‘Restaurant Rhyschänzli simply has wonderful cuisine: international with a touch of Swiss and a hint of Italian. During the summer, it’s lovely to sit outside on the sidewalk. Even though it’s usually very busy, the restaurant team has excellent service, and the asparagus is always a great recommendation.’

Rhyschänzli is located at Lichtstrasse 9, 4056 Basel, Switzerland

Lehmann Maupin

Morning treat at Restaurant Beyeler im Park

‘Mornings at Fondation Beyeler are magical. I always get a coffee and a croissant in the garden cafe to spend more time outdoors. When I need to have a quick breakfast meeting near the fair: Fruhling or Bru Speciality Coffee. My go-to breakfast is a flat white with oat milk, avocado and eggs.’

Restaurant Beyeler im Park is located at Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen, Switzerland

Wine o'clock at Bar Les Trois Rois

‘An aperitivo at Bar Le Trois Rois is a ritual for the art world – a sunset drink overlooking the river, before the evening crowd walks in.’

Bar Les Trois Rois is located at Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois, Blumenrain 8, 4001 Basel, Switzerland

Dinner at Zum goldenen Fass

‘Zum goldenen Fass offers a seasonal menu, a good wine list, and a great atmosphere. All within walking distance of the fair. I eat everything, but it’s their vegetables that shine. On the nights I can’t get a last-minute reservation somewhere, Thai food at Thai Family Restaurant is always there for me.’

Zum goldenen Fass is located at Hammerstrasse 108, 4057 Basel, Switzerland

STPI

Morning treat at Confiserie Beschle - Clara

‘On the busier mornings – which are most of them during Basel week – I’ll swing by Confiserie Beschle on Clarastrasse. It’s a short walk from Messe, and there’s something grounding about starting the day with a simple latte and a croissant before the craziness starts. Simple, but it gives you the right fix from the beginning.’

Confiserie Beschle - Clara is located at Clarastrasse 4, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Wine o’clock at Flore

‘When I need to decompress after a long day at the fair, Flore is where I end up – or simply opening a bottle of beer by the Rhine. No fuss, no scene, just warmth. There’s an ease to it that I really value during a week that can otherwise feel relentless.’

Flore is located at Klybeckstrasse 5, 4057 Basel, Switzerland

Dinner at Alchemist

‘The honest answer is our apartment. Our team normally rents an Airbnb during Basel week, and we cook Asian food for fellow gallerists and friends – we cooked Lu Rou Fan (braised pork rice) last year, for example. Those evenings are often the highlight of my week. That said, if dining out, I’d head to Alchemist for their poulet lollis or spare ribs.’

Alchemist is located at Schifflände 1, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

Xavier Hufkens

Morning treat at Konditorei-Confiserie Gilgen

‘I always enjoy starting the day with a stop at Konditorei-Confiserie Gilgen. There’s something very comforting about sitting down with a coffee and a fresh pastry before the day begins. I usually order coffee with a buttery croissant, and I never leave without taking some traditional Basel Läckerli home with me. They make the perfect gift (or late-night snack).’

Konditorei-Confiserie Gilgen is located at Spalenberg 6, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

Wine o’clock at Bar Les Trois Rois

‘The bar of the Trois Rois is probably my favourite place for a drink in Basel. The terrace overlooking the Rhine is hard to beat, especially at sunset after a long day. I usually go for a glass of wine there, although their cocktails are equally good. It has that rare mix of elegance and ease that makes you want to stay longer than planned.’

Bar Les Trois Rois is located at Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois, Blumenrain 8, 4001 Basel, Switzerland

Dinner at Restaurant Chez Donati

‘We traditionally have our team dinner at Chez Donati, which has become a ritual I really look forward to every year. It’s one of those timeless places with impeccable old-school service and a warm, familiar atmosphere. I usually order a classic pasta or a Milanese – simple, comforting, and always perfect.’

Restaurant Chez Donati is located at Hotel Stadthof, Gerbergasse 84, 4001 Basel, Switzerland

Art Basel Hong Kong arrives 27-29 March as the city's annual cultural coronation – a multi-media tentpole where the globe's gallery elite, collectors with bottomless wallets, and assorted art-world camp followers descend on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for confabs beneath multi-million-dollar paintings and argue about the future of contemporary art over champagne.

Since its 2013 debut, Art Basel Hong Kong has evolved into something far more ambitious than a mere marketplace for the ultra-rich. The fair now functions as a genuine articulation of Hong Kong's metamorphosis into what Angelle Siyang-Le, the fair's director (who gave us a local's guide to Hong Kong ahead of the event), calls ‘a leading centre for contemporary culture’. The numbers back her claim: 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories fill the fair, with the majority championing Asia-Pacific artists and galleries. Siyang-Le grounds Hong Kong's strength in its ‘free-port status, world-class logistics, and exceptional connectivity’, yet equally stresses the city's ‘openness and cultural ecosystem from institutions like M+ and Tai Kwun to an incredibly vibrant network of galleries and nonprofit spaces’.

In particular, what distinguishes 2026 is structural ambition. Thirty-two galleries are participating for the first time, while the fair debuts two significant new platforms. The first, Echoes, comprises just ten booths, each presenting works from the past five years, a focused curatorial statement about where contemporary practice is heading. The second, and equally significant, Zero 10 marks Art Basel's debut foray into dedicated digital art programming. The moniker references Malevich's 1915 show in Petrograd, the ‘0,10’ exhibition that redefined the avant-garde's relationship to abstraction. Supported by OpenSea, the initiative signals the fair's conviction that digital creativity belongs within – not adjacent to – the contemporary art economy.

Elsewhere, the curatorial shifts run deep to reflect a fair reshaping itself toward regional perspectives and experimental methodologies. Encounters, the sector for large-scale installations and performances, has been reorganised around a collective of four Asia-based curators: Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum), Isabella Tam (M+), Alia Swastika (Jakarta), and Hirokazu Tokuyama (Mori Art Museum). The Film Program, historically curator-led, will be directed by Ellen Pau – the first time an artist assumes this role.

Meanwhile, public programming extends beyond the convention centre. Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander's commission for the soaring façade of M+, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, launches a few days earlier, on 23 March. Projected across the museum's exterior will be hand-painted animations that trace colonial networks and contemporary commerce flowing through the South China Sea.

With so many booths occupying the centre and overflow programming throughout the city, narrowing down what matters requires some strategic thinking. Here are half a dozen artists worth your time.

Six artists to see at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

Woo Hanna

Korean sculptor Woo Hanna hijacks domestic textiles to reimagine the body's architecture. Her Bag With You series literally takes organic forms – lungs, stomachs, intestines – and stitches them into objects that can be worn or carried. There's dark humour here: something visceral made gentle through textile, something private made portable. By transforming biology into accessory, Woo asks uncomfortable questions about what we carry inside and what we're willing to expose.

Chan Ting

At 31, Hong Kong artist Chan Ting excavates history with an archaeologist's precision and a queer sensibility. His Abandoned Abundance (2025) layers collectibles – a Guanyin statue, Indian military chest, Shanghai doors, Japanese carved flowers – under plaster and pigment. The result looks weathered, fossilised, grown over. By treating contemporary found objects as archaeological specimens, Chan stages a conversation between geographies and time periods. His work asks: what happens when we layer histories on top of each other? What emerges from that sediment?

Neerja Kothari

In Walking erasure (2025, ongoing), 51 pages taken from two essays about wandering – Thoreau's Walking and Virginia Woolf's Street Haunting – hang at eye level, creating a walking path through Neerja Kothari's installation. The work emerged after illness stripped away her ability to walk and her therapist taught her the basics again, one step at a time. Now these books – gutted to just two pairs of homophonic words, heel/toe, and heal/tow – guide visitors through the same elementary lesson. It’s a startling new visual grammar on how to move your body through space.

Miler Lagos

In his Trees series (2025), Colombian sculptor Miler Lagos salvages discarded books – texts on botany, trade, colonial histories – and carves them into tree-like forms. The gesture is deliberately paradoxical: returning paper back to wood, knowledge back to matter. Stacked vertically, these sculptures become monuments to extraction: the forests logged for pulp, the information harvested and commodified, the ecosystems we've sacrificed to feed our hunger for documentation. Each work asks what we've surrendered in the name of progress.

Emi Kusano

Japanese artist Emi Kusano uses AI to expose what data capitalism demands of us. Ornament Survival - Recursive Heart (2026) takes the Magical Girl – a contradictory figure that promises liberation while demanding consumption – and updates her/it for the algorithmic age. Using generative AI to multiply her own image endlessly, Kusano visualises the labour hidden in our digital lives: the constant self-optimisation required to remain visible, the boundaries we dissolve to feed the networks. She doesn't critique the system so much as anatomise it from within.

Wang Qiang

Wang Qiang sculpts Soviet prefab housing – Type K-7 apartments designed in 1954 to solve housing shortages – in miniature cement and steel, each stained to look aged. The Chinese artist’s concern is what happens when utopian ideals become concrete fact. Each building is a memory of a promise: standardised design that was meant to erase class difference, frozen now in his hands. In an era of unaffordable housing and failed utopias, the work feels urgently contemporary.

Art Basel Hong Kong will be showing 27-29 March 2025 (Preview Days on 25-26 March) at Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai.

Also read: A local’s guide to Hong Kong by Angelle Siyang-Le

Ask Art Basel Hong Kong director Angelle Siyang-Le for local recommendations, and first, she will assess your schedule. ‘When people are short on time, I usually point them to places that are consistently reliable, easy to get to, and very much part of my own routine,’ she tells Wallpaper*.

A leading figure in the contemporary art world, Siyang-Le has directed Art Basel Hong Kong since 2022. She joined the organisation in 2012, previously leading gallery relations and business development across Asia, and helping to position Hong Kong as a key global hub connecting artists, collectors and institutions.

The 2026 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong continues to celebrate the city’s status as Asia’s international cultural hub. This year sees a new curatorial team take the lead across the Encounters, Film and Conversations sectors, alongside the introduction of the inaugural Echoes sector.

‘We want to inspire, foster learning and bring communities together. Art Basel Hong Kong is more than an art fair – it is a living ecosystem where creativity and culture sustain a vibrant, resilient art market,’ adds Siyang-Le.

Here she shares her go-to dining, cultural and nature spots to make the most out of Hong Kong during Art Basel and beyond.

What to see and do in Hong Kong, Angelle Siyang-Le’s tips

Where to eat and drink

Always Joy

‘Always Joy is my choice for a relaxed, casual night out. The service never misses, and their Japanese-inspired dishes – subtly infused with local touches – are consistently excellent. I always recommend trying the seasonal sashimi and the dry-aged threadfin.’

Always Joy is located at Shop No. 1, G/F, Nam Wo Hong Building, 148 Wing Lok St, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

Bound

‘Bound is a beloved neighbourhood bar with a genuine local spirit, and it’s also a hangout spot for many artists. It’s unfussy, welcoming, and always full of character – exactly the kind of place that shows Hong Kong’s creative side at street level.’

Bound is located at G/F, 32 Boundary St, Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong

Duddell’s

‘Duddell’s remains one of my top recommendations for anyone visiting Hong Kong. The refined Cantonese cuisine, elegant interiors, and subtle art-and-culture atmosphere make it especially fitting during fair week. Their dim sum is crafted with exceptional ingredients and attention to detail, and I always make sure to order their Chinese soups – they’re deeply comforting and beautifully made.’

Duddell’s is located at 3/F & 4/F, 1 Duddell Street, 1 Duddell St, Central, Hong Kong

NOC Coffee Co.

‘NOC Coffee Co. is my true go-to café – not just because one of their branches happens to be in my office building, but because their coffee is unfailingly excellent. The minimalist interiors offer a clean, calming pause in the middle of Hong Kong’s constant buzz, making it one of the places where I can genuinely reset. My order is always a flat white – simple, smooth, and consistently great.’

NOC Coffee Co. is located at Shop G42, G/F, Whampoa Garden Site 9 Block 1, Tak Fung St, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

Rootdown

‘Rootdown sits right below my boxing gym, which makes it the perfect pre-workout stop. The coffee is fantastic, the team is warm and friendly, and there’s a cosy neighbourhood feel that keeps me coming back. I’m often their first customer of the day, stopping in for a hot Americano before training.’

Rootdown is located at Shop 16-19 G/F, Two Artlane, 1 Chung Ching St, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong

Yardbird

‘Yardbird captures the energy, creativity, and flavour of Hong Kong like few other places can. It’s always buzzing, always delicious, and always a fun night out. Their chicken dishes are all about chicken. You need to try everything.’

Yardbird is located at Winsome House, 154-158 Wing Lok Street G/F, Shops A and B, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

What to do

Central and South Side Gallery Districts

‘When someone is short on time, I always point them to the gallery clusters in Central and Wong Chuk Hang. They offer a concentrated yet meaningful snapshot of Hong Kong’s art landscape and make for the perfect warm-up before diving into the fair.’

Sham Shui Po

‘For a different perspective on Hong Kong, Sham Shui Po is a must. The neighbourhood is full of independent art spaces – like Thy Lab – that show a more experimental side of the city. I love ending a visit there with a drink at Bound, which is where many local artists naturally gather.’

Where to detour

Hiking trails

‘Hong Kong’s outdoors are one of its greatest and most underrated surprises. If you have a free morning, there are three trails I always recommend: Jardine’s Lookout, which is close, accessible, and instantly rewarding with panoramic views of the skyline; Dragon’s Back, the iconic ridge walk with sweeping coastal vistas; and Old Peak Road, a classic ascent to The Peak – steep, invigorating, and perfect when you want a workout paired with spectacular views.’

Rivian takes a break from trail running on the West Coast to hit the neon-streaked streets of Miami. For the first time, the electric SUV brand is making a splash at Miami Art Week, debuting a new exterior colour, Borealis, along with a limited-run Miami Edition of the R1S. There’s also an interactive installation and even a Rivian scent.

All this activity stems from the carmaker’s desire to become more of a cultural player. The Rivian Concept Experiences, as seen in New York and California, are now joined by a pop-up Rivian pavilion in Collins Park, which is holding panel discussions throughout the week.

In addition, Rivian’s increasingly sophisticated manufacturing set-up makes short-run editions more practical, allowing the company’s design team more latitude to explore new materials and colour combinations. The arrival of the California Dune Edition R1 earlier this year was a pointer to things to come.

The Rivian R1S Miami Edition is certainly unexpected, picking up the city’s reputation for pastels and parties with a zinging colour scheme conjured up as part of Rivian’s handcrafted Studio Originals series. Just ten of the R1S Quad Miami Edition will be made, so if you fancy a palette of teal and pink, right down to the 22-inch wheels, along with an interior influenced by ‘Ocean Coast and Driftwood’, you’ll need to move fast.

Equally vibrant but less Florida-facing is Rivian’s new exterior colour, Borealis. Described as a colour-shifting velvety purple, it was inspired by imagery taken by a group of outward bounds Rivian owners during a solar event in 2024. The lustrous finish pairs nicely with the new All-Terrain Burnished Bronze 20-inch wheel.

Finally, Rivian is using its Miami events to release its own scent. No word on commercial availability yet, but the smell is meant to convey ‘ruggedness and sophistication … inspired by diverse landscapes from alpine to canyon to forest’. You can’t get much more outdoorsy than that.

Rivian.com, @RivianOfficial

When Nina Johnson founded her eponymous gallery in 2007, she set out to serve Miami’s contemporary art community while engaging an international audience. Now, as Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 (running 5-7 December, with preview days on 3 and 4 December) gets started, the gallery is making its debut at the fair, presenting a selection of artists who have shaped its trajectory over the years. Works by Anna Betbeze, Rochelle Feinstein, Dara Friedman, Patrick Dean Hubbell, Emmett Moore, George Nelson Preston, Nathlie Provosty and Katie Stout will be shown at Booth D20.

Alongside its presence at the fair, the gallery is rolling out a vibrant programme on-site at its own base (in the Little Haiti neighbourhood): ‘Acid Bath House’, curated by Jarrett Earnest; ‘Star People’, a solo show by Dara Friedman; and ‘Neon Sun’, a suite of outdoor works by Emmett Moore. Johnson’s gallery may be a first-timer at Art Basel, but Miami is her native ground. ‘Having grown up here, it’s been extraordinary to see how much has changed over the years; the architecture, the museums and of course the art scene have all blossomed into world-class destinations,’ she tells Wallpaper*.

She also points to the city’s intimate entanglement with nature – its beauty and its volatility. ‘We feel it every day, whether through a stunning neon sunset or a torrential tropical downpour, we are always reminded of how small we are in the larger scope of nature.’ Here, she shares her essential Miami haunts for Art Basel week and beyond.

What to see and do in Miami, Nina Johnson’s tips

What to do

MOCA North Miami

‘Head to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, for “Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden”, a sweeping 15-year survey of the Karachi-born, Brooklyn-based artist. Blending Indo-Persian miniature traditions with lush large-scale works, the exhibition transforms the idea of a paradise garden into an immersive exploration of nature, myth, and femininity.’

MOCA North Miami is located at 770 NE 125th St, North Miami, FL 33161, United States.

Nina Johnson

‘There is a brunch happening at my gallery on 6 December 2025, featuring German artist Dara Friedman with her daughters, Violet and Cherry Handforth, alongside Julia Trotta, founder of nonprofit organisation Artists and Mothers, which provides childcare grants to artist mothers.’

Nina Johnson is located at 6315 NW 2nd Ave, Miami, FL 33150, United States.

Pérez Art Museum Miami

‘The Pérez Art Museum Miami recently reimagined its permanent collection galleries to highlight new perspectives on Latin American, Caribbean, and African diasporic art. The refreshed presentation features work by Eamon Ore-Giron (acquired from us), among others, reflecting the museum’s ongoing dialogue between Miami’s cultural landscape and the global contemporary art scene.’

Pérez Art Museum Miami is located at 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132, United States.

Zey Zey

‘Zey Zey is a locals’ favourite, an outdoor bar and music venue with a range of spaces and a mix of music depending on the night.′

Zey Zey is located at 353 NE 61st St, Miami, FL 33137, United States.

Where to eat and drink

Caracas Bakery

‘This is my go-to for breakfast on the Miami side of town; their cachitos (a traditional Venezuelan pastry with a savoury filling) are the perfect hangover cure!’

Caracas Bakery is located at 7283 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33138, United States.

The Cleat

‘My favourite spot for a sunset cocktail that feels undeniably Miami. I always get a piña colada; it’s a great way to end the week after a busy Art Basel.′

The Cleat is located at No Name Harbour, 1200 Crandon Blvd, Key Biscayne, FL 33149, United States.

Sunny’s Steakhouse

‘Sunny’s is a Little River fixture with a menu built on simple, well-executed staples like handmade pastas and wood-fired steaks. The space has an easy warmth that keeps the energy relaxed, even on a busy night.’

Sunny’s Steakhouse is located at 7357 NW Miami Ct, Miami, FL 33150, United States.

Twist

‘A classic and, in my opinion, a last bastion of freedom in an increasingly oppressive state. The club often has no cover, and each room has a theme for different types of dancing; it’s been this way for decades. If you need to shake your bones well into the early morning, this is your place!’

Twist is located at 057 Washington Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139, United States.

Where to shop

Éliou

‘Éliou is a homegrown gem! This local brand started small and has become a favourite of celebs the world over. We are lucky to have them just a few blocks from the gallery. If you need a gift (for yourself) or others, this is where to go!’

Éliou is located at 160 NW 73rd St, Miami, FL 33150, United States.

UmaLu Vintage

‘If you’re looking for those 1990s or early aughts gems, this is the spot for you.’

UmaLu Vintage is located at 7648 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33138, United States.

Vara

‘For all your vintage needs, Vara is a highly curated, multi-brand boutique on the Miami River. My husband and I make it a must-stop before any big event; I recently picked up a gorgeous Mugler skirt suit and some Courrèges sunnies.’

Vara is located at 210 NW 8th Ave, Miami, FL 33128, United States.

Miami is the very definition of a hotspot – a torrid playground of sun-dappled beaches, vibrant culture and high-octane nightlife. The streets, lined with art deco façades and swaying palms, set the scene, while the dynamic neighbourhoods – from South Beach to Wynwood – pulse with creative energy.

The jam-packed social events calendar fuels Miami’s non-stop buzz. Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual contemporary art fair, is essentially the Super Bowl for lovers of art and a good party. Held the same week in early December, Design Miami brings even more aesthetic attention and excitement to the South Florida city.

After a day of design shopping or sunbathing and a night of gallery hopping, see-and-be-seen dinners, cocktails or clubbing, travellers need a place to crash (or keep the good times going). The best hotels in Miami are more than just a retreat; each one is distinctive, overflowing with artful touches and bursting with personality. From the opulent to minimalist to the avant-garde, the city’s line-up of design-centric stays offers an immersive lens through which to explore the scene, kick back by the pool and, yes, eventually retire to a really chic room.

The best hotels in Miami

1 Hotel South Beach

Exuding quiet luxury with its natural palette and organic blend of raw stone and reclaimed wood, 1 Hotel South Beach manages a hat-trick of sexy, serene and eco-conscious. A swish South Beach refuge that fuses style with substance and sustainability, its ethos and aesthetics are perfectly aligned. Tactile accents punctuate the 425 breezy coastal rooms and the Bamford Wellness Spa. The airy interiors are complemented by a chic rooftop pool and a 300ft cascading green exterior wall composed of 12,000 local plant species. The culinary offerings cement the hotel's eco commitment, with seasonally driven dishes served at the restaurants and bars.

1 Hotel South Beach is located at 2341 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

The Betsy Hotel

Creativity courses through The Betsy Hotel. Visionary architect L Murray Dixon’s singular example of Florida Georgian architecture sits proudly along Ocean Drive, commanding attention. As part of a 2016 expansion, Henry Hohauser’s adjacent art deco gem was brought into the fold. The two wings – now connected by the egg-shaped 'Betsy Orb' – each bear the name of their respective architect. Literature, art and music are woven into the residential design tapestry, curated by Diamante Pedersoli and Carmelina Santoro. Guests can expect walnut bookshelves filled with diverse tomes in the library, live jazz at the convivial Piano Bar, walls that double as galleries and Fortuny chandeliers adorning the lobby.

The Betsy Hotel is located at 1440 Ocean Dr, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Esmé Miami Beach

Esmé Miami Beach comprises a series of interconnected buildings on Española Way that were originally built by developer NBT Roney in the 1920s. Then known as the Spanish Village, it got its start as a bohemian artist's colony. The Spanish-Mediterranean revival complex received a modern makeover a few years back, emerging as a boutique hotel. The interiors by Jessica Schuster Design, in collaboration with Infinite Hospitality, layer jewel tones, rich mahogany furniture and gold in a nod to the property’s Jazz Age roots. There’s plenty to appreciate from a contemporary perspective – including a rooftop with chequered tiles, a heated saltwater pool and striped cabanas.

Esmé Miami Beach is located at 1438 Washington Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Faena Miami Beach

Whereas many of its contemporaries lean toward restrained minimalism, Faena Miami Beach shines that much brighter with its theatrical, unapologetically maximalist sensibility (a trademark of the portfolio, which now includes a flashy new sister property in New York City). With creative visionary and hotelier Alan Faena at the helm – and input from Baz Luhrmann and his award-winning costume designer wife Catherine Martin – it makes a cinematic statement with red velvet, enormous gold columns and vivid, large-scale murals. Damien Hirst’s 3m-tall gilded mammoth skeleton takes centre stage, but performance extends beyond the setting, with cabaret, live shows, and music in the theatre and bar.

Faena Miami Beach is located at 3201 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140

Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club

In an area filled with frivolity and flashing lights, Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club, nestled between Miami Beach and Bal Harbour, maintains an air of reliable luxury. Originally envisioned by architect Russell Pancoast and opened in 1930, the social club hosted a roster of luminaries – from Frank Sinatra to Elizabeth Taylor. Though the storied destination underwent a modernist expansion by Richard Meier, this beachfront respite retains all of its historic charm. After waking up in one of its 77 tranquil rooms, suites and bungalows with interiors by Joseph Dirand, you can choose to lounge around palm-fringed patios, retreat to the historic clubhouse, float in one of three swimming pools, dine in Thomas Keller's Michelin-starred restaurant, or simply enjoy a vast swath of cabana-dotted coastline.

Four Seasons Hotel at The Surf Club is located at 9011 Collins Ave, Surfside, FL 33154

The Goodtime Hotel

Celebrating Miami’s art deco legacy, 1950s glamour and party-centric present, The Goodtime Hotel – from musician and fashion designer Pharrell Williams and Miami hospitality mogul David Grutman – is all about having a good time (and capturing Instagram content). Stretching an entire block of Washington Avenue in South Beach, the 266-key hotel, with interiors by Ken Fulk, pops with pastels, tropical motifs and playful touches. The 30,000 sq ft pool club is decked out with pink scalloped cabanas and hosts weekend parties fuelled by stiff drinks and DJ sets. The whimsy and retro cool extend to the compact yet cheerful rooms, featuring striped linens, rotary phones and whimsical custom curtains.

The Goodtime Hotel is located at 601 Washington Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Hotel Greystone

Like many of the art deco edifices in South Beach, Hotel Greystone was originally built in 1939 by Henry Hohauser. Architecture firm Shulman + Associates spearheaded the extensive restoration. Design firm Bowen Holly modelled the interiors to match the lively, colourful character of Miami, but pulled from a palette of soft hues to create an adults-only oasis that provides a break from the buzz of Collins Avenue. The lobby pairs cream tones and lush greenery. The 91 minimally minded rooms feel refreshingly calm, courtesy of a monochrome palette, wooden headboards and woven carpets. And did we mention the cocktail bar?

Hotel Greystone is located at 1920 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Mayfair House Hotel & Garden

Situated in Coconut Grove, Mayfair House Hotel & Garden provides a lush departure from flashy South Beach resorts. Originally designed by influential Miami architect Kenneth Treister in 1985, the property was refreshed by New York-based studio Goodrich, preserving its spirit with copper details, mosaics, stained glass and hand-carved wood. Each room is individually decorated, following a scheme of emerald tones and warm wood finishes that stretch into the restaurant, Mayfair Grill. Secluded, leafy and deeply creative, it’s a verdant oasis for dreamers who appreciate an urban refuge where nature stirs the soul and art is key.

Mayfair House Hotel & Garden is located at 3000 Florida Ave, Miami, FL 33133

The Miami Beach Edition

With its distinguishing modern façade and pristine, white interiors, The Miami Beach Edition channels Mid-Beach minimalism. Overhauled by Ian Schrager, the 1925-built urban resort seduces with its high ceilings, subtle tropical undertones and heritage details – Carrara marble floors and gold mosaic columns in the lobby, a plaster gesso chandelier and walnut millwork in the grand oval dining room. Plants bring life into the communal spaces, echoing the lush landscaped gardens. The 294 sleek rooms are warmed with oak panelling. There are two swimming pools, a large spa and a beach club, plus a basement entertainment zone with a bowling alley and – yes – an ice rink.

The Miami Beach Edition is located at 2901 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140

The Moore Miami

The Moore Miami is an aesthetically pleasing, art-centric, multi-use hangout in the Design District. Developed during Florida’s 1920s land boom by David P Davis, the former furniture showroom and warehouse now houses a ground-floor restaurant tucked beneath a pliant-web installation by Zaha Hadid that spans the four-storey interior arcade, a members’ club, a co-working space and a boutique hotel concept. Designed by Studio Collective in collaboration with Icrave, the 13 residential-style suites showcase furnishings from emerging brands such as Dallas-based Mous and Brazil’s Sossego. Surprises include a decorated UV-lit elevator, a speakeasy and a karaoke room featuring a custom mural by Japanese painter Ryota Unno.

The Moore Miami is located at 4040 NE 2nd Ave, Miami, FL 33137

Mr C Miami – Coconut Grove

Mr C Miami – Coconut Grove is backed by an all-star talent roster. It’s owned by Ignazio and Maggio Cipriani (yes, the Venetian family behind the global restaurant and hotel empire). Renowned architecture firm Arquitectonica designed the building from the ground up. As for the interiors, they're a blend of European sophistication and South Florida flair. Martin Brudnizki reinterprets the typical nautical theme into yacht-ready style that flows through a sea of blue and white, midcentury lacquered wood, maritime fixtures and sailboat photographs. Bringing a taste of Italy to South Florida, the rooftop restaurant, Bellini, is an upscale spot for carpaccio, baked tagliolini and refreshing mandarin cocktails.

Mr C Miami – Coconut Grove is located at 2988 McFarlane Rd, Coconut Grove, FL 33133

The Setai Miami Beach

Snowbirds who appreciate polished design, high-thread-count sheets and a prime Collins Avenue location regularly return to The Setai, Miami Beach. Previously known as the Dempsey-Vanderbilt Hotel, the property – designed by renowned architect Henry Hohauser – was opened by heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in 1937. Its sleek, East-meets-West second act, headed up by Jean-Michel Gathy, leans into the building’s art deco legacy while layering in rich Asian influences – from Shanghai brick flooring and Burmese teak to Chinese-mythology animal statues in the courtyard and Lee Jung-Woong’s bold Brush artwork series. The new Japanese restaurant continues the theme with a mosaic crane, a hand-painted gold-foiled glass mural and temple-inspired ceilings.

The Setai, Miami Beach is located at 2001 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

The Shelborne by Proper

The Shelborne, originally conceived by Igor Polevitzky and Thomas Triplett Russell, with a later expansion by Morris Lapidus, has sat at the corner of 18th Street and Collins Avenue since 1940. California-based Proper Hospitality and ADC Atelier gave the Ocean Drive stalwart $100-million refresh, infusing the art deco landmark with contemporary, sun-dappled warmth and sophistication. The highly anticipated revival captures the chic, palm-trees-swaying-in-the-breeze cadence of Miami (a welcome departure from neon lights). Emblematic midcentury elements, such as the historic façade, remain intact. The lounger-studded pool, earth-toned rooms, flora-filled bar and convivial social scene amp up the cool factor.

The Shelborne by Proper is located at 1801 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Soho Beach House Miami

A surprising mash-up of classic Miami zest and cross-pond sophistication, Soho Beach House Miami occupies a 1940s art deco tower on Collins Avenue. Wood-panelled and vintage tiled corridors lead to a slender lap pool flanked by high-gloss day beds. The ocean-view rooftop terrace supplies another spot for swimming and sipping. Antique furniture and retro accents add character to the 49 guest rooms, while walls are adorned with artworks by local and international talents alike. It’s a buzzy affair – from the trellis-lined perimeters courtyard at signature Italian restaurant Cecconi’s to the beach bar.

Soho Beach House Miami is located at 4385 Collins Ave, Miami Beach, FL 33140

With 2025’s Frieze London and Art Basel Paris in the rearview mirror, it’s roll on Art Basel Miami Beach, opening with two VIP preview days from Wednesday 3 December and welcoming the public from Friday 5 December to Sunday. This year’s edition promises to be as eventful as ever, with more than 280 leading international galleries representing 43 countries and territories. The fair will also debut a new digital art platform in partnership with OpenSea, a sign of the momentum that new media has in the broader art world. Embracing the city’s vibrant community ties, Art Basel Miami Beach will see standout presentations of artists exploring Latin America and the Caribbean. As always, the glitzy event rounds out 2025 on a celebratory note as dealers, collectors and everyone in-between flock to Miami for the art, the beaches and, of course, the parties.

From a major display of works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on view at chic hotel The Betsy to monumental, pink inflatable creatures by Philippe Katerine suspended over Lincoln Road, there’s no shortage of pop-ups around town. This year, the most anticipated special event is from American artist Alex Prager, who will transform a historic Miami Beach movie theatre into an immersive installation exploring the glamour and artifice of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Called the Mirage Factory, the mise-en-scène, complete with an artificial orange grove, is a collaboration between The Cultivist and Capital One that will be activated throughout the week with dinners from renowned chef Dave Beran, as well as special performances and public experiences. Fresh from Prager’s having photographed Billie Eilish for the cover of WSJ. Magazine, the event marks a significant moment in the artist’s illustrious career.

To help you get the most out of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, here are the must-see booths. (And while you’re in town, check out Design Miami 2025 too.)

Lehmann Maupin

Speaking of Alex Prager, the artist’s work will also grace the halls of the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Lehmann Maupin’s booth. The gallery is showing new photographs that exude glamour and drama as impressive as that of the pop-up installation; among them is Hidden Hills (Echoes) (2025), in which a housekeeper weeps as a buff man in a bathing suit stands outside the window behind her, posing as if in a body-building contest. He, in turn, looks through another window at a woman in a red satin dress sitting in front of a house of cards precariously stacked on a table. Masks hanging along the wall allude to deceit, and an open flip phone sitting on the sill hints at a fraught message, perhaps an image of betrayal on the brink of being revealed.

Jessica Silverman

With Woody De Othello’s impressive solo show of anthropomorphic sculptures and tile wall pieces on view across town at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, it’s particularly apt for Jessica Silverman to bring the Miami-born artist’s work to the fair. Included in the gallery’s presentation is a large-scale patinated bronze sculpture called inner knowing (2025). While little is needed to entice visitors to see Othello’s museum show, the sculpture offers a glimpse of what to expect in his equally contemplative and expressive investigations of the transformative power of spirituality and both ritual and everyday objects. Though he often explores themes of heritage and place, Othello leaves his work open to the viewer’s interpretation, inviting deep personal connections with whatever emotions the audience brings.

Uffner & Liu

With a roster full of women artists, it’s no surprise that Uffner & Liu should impress with an equally female-forward booth. Visitors familiar with the gallery will see recognisable names like Anne Buckwalter, whose Pennsylvania Dutch-inspired domestic scenes are filled with salacious details, like fornicating figures, and Bernadette Despujols, who paints intimate, textured portraits often centred on the body and exploring resilience and the Latin American diaspora.

The gallery will also show recent and historic works by Reginald Madison, a self-taught painter and sculptor who just joined Uffner & Liu’s roster. Now in his mid-eighties, Madison began working at the height of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from jazz and his fellow artists to explore the Black experience.

Gemini G.E.L.

A titan of the world of printmaking, Los Angeles-based Gemini G.E.L. is returning to the fair with a rich selection of editions that it has made with leading artists over the decades. Included in the booth will be several prints and sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg to coincide with the global commemoration of what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. Rauschenberg collaborated with Gemini for four decades, pushing the boundaries of printmaking with works like the Hoarfrost series (1974), on view, comprising ethereal textiles with images transferred from newspapers and other media.

Among the newest editions that Gemini is bringing will be a monumental lithograph by Toba Khedoori featuring meticulously rendered, ghostly tree branches. The elegant image spans three sheets of paper, a testament to the skill of the printmakers at Gemini’s studio, which will celebrate its own milestone next year, its 60th anniversary.

Tina Kim Gallery

Always staging elegant presentations is Tina Kim Gallery, which is bringing a selection of artists from its primarily international roster with a keen eye for Asian-American and Asian artists. A highlight of the booth will be an abstract textile piece by 95-year-old Lee ShinJa. Called Hill (1996), the stunning wool and copper piece spans over 7ft in length and features a vibrant, geometric landscape. While she’s been working since the 1950s, Lee has been on a renewed rise in recent years, with a current solo show at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California and a glowing profile in The New York Times.

Erin Cluley Gallery

To tease Nic Nicosia’s solo show that opens next year at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Erin Cluley Gallery is presenting a selection of photographs from the artist’s celebrated Real Pictures series (1987-89) in the fair’s Survey Sector. Dedicated to under-recognised artists of historical importance, the section offers visitors a chance to broaden their art historical lens and see rarely exhibited artworks. Nicosia’s Real Pictures series is exemplary of such work. Inexplicable scenes, such as children setting fire to a tree, and a clown preparing to brawl with a passing driver, fill these quirky and unsettling photographs, showing moments of everyday suburban life in Dallas. While the works are crucial to the history of photography, they haven’t been exhibited together since a 1999 retrospective at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston.

Voloshyn Gallery

Also exhibiting in the Survey Sector is the Miami and Kyiv-based Voloshyn Gallery, which is bringing a series of paintings and works on paper by Janet Sobel. The self-taught, Ukrainian-American artist, who died in 1968, depicted anxiety-filled images of battlefields, prisons, and refugees, revealing the trauma and tragedies of the Second World War and its aftermath. These scenes combine Sobel’s memories of her life in Ukraine with the complexities of post-war America, where she was living. Often intimate in scale, the artworks on view reveal Sobel grappling with the duality of the immigrant experience and the transformation of the US in the mid-20th century.

Marianne Boesky Gallery

Bringing a selection of strong works from artists on its roster is Marianne Boesky Gallery, a long-time exhibitor of the fair. Included in the gallery’s booth will be a new, expressionistic painting by French artist Dora Jeridi. Titled Imperfect (2025), the work contains a vibrant yellow abstract drape inspired by the runway shows of designer John Galliano. Taken by the textures and theatricality of these events, Jeridi reimagines the dramatic shapes of Galliano’s designs to comment on the luxury of high fashion and aristocracy. She juxtaposes this with mangled feet and hints of a distorted face in charcoal, alluding to something darker beneath the glamorous surface.

Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery

In the Meridians Sector, artists can flex their creative muscles with large-scale and immersive artworks that wouldn’t otherwise fit the format of an art fair. Co-presenting in the buzzworthy section are Ryan Lee Gallery and Catharine Clark Gallery, which are showcasing an installation resembling an oversized vanitas by Stephanie Syjuco. Born in Manila, Philippines, Syjuco is known for her research-based practice exploring authenticity as it relates to race, labour, and history.

Her project in the Medians Sector, Neutral Calibration Studies (Ornament + Crime) (2016), features an array of readymade objects alongside digital prints and laser-cut images, blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is artifice. Symbols related to psychoanalysis, the Philippines, and the Black Panthers are among the themes Syjuco introduces in the work. Together, they question the construct of historical narratives, including in relation to American colonisation in the Philippines.

Art Basel Miami takes place December 5 - 7, artbasel.com

With a brazen jewel heist at the Louvre and an array of impressive pyrotechnics closing the Pompidou, 2025’s Paris Art Week (embracing both Art Basel Paris and Design Miami Paris as well as events around the city) has had an electric start. The city is abuzz. The drama is haut.

Time to head over to the Bastille, perhaps, where Galerie Patrick Seguin's ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ (24 October – 22 November 2025) offers a serene counterpoint. A calming breath of clean lines and fresh air amidst the chaos, here, four rare furniture designs are being reissued under the curatorial direction of Anthony Vaccarello.

Four lesser-known Charlotte Perriand designs

The exhibition opens to coincide with Art Week, but it operates at an entirely different frequency. Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director since 2016, has selected four of Perriand’s lesser-seen works – the ‘Rio de Janeiro’ bookcase (1962), the ‘Indochine Guest Armchair’ (1943), the ‘Table Mille-Feuilles’ (1963) and the monumental sofa designed for Japan’s ambassador in Paris (1967) – to be produced in limited editions. Each has been recreated from archive drawings, original models or one-off pieces, using the same species of wood, metal and cane that defined Perriand’s original vision.

The results are remarkable for their restraint. The ‘Table Mille-Feuilles’, formed from ten stacked layers of contrasting rosewood and cherry, is both sculpture and surface, lightness and density. The ‘Indochine Armchair’, conceived during Perriand’s time in Vietnam, marries industrial tubular steel with the warmth of local artisanship, an early expression of global modernism that is continually current and effortless.

And the ‘Japanese Ambassador’s Sofa’, a sweeping five-seat banquette that appears to float on its curved rosewood base, is technically furniture, but with bone structure to die for and catwalk-model poise. The Japanese Embassy in Paris helped to identify important details of the banquette to help bring it back to life in this edition.

For Vaccarello, this is about precision as much as it is about reinterpretation. His direction at Saint Laurent has often blurred the lines between fashion, art and architecture, and this project is a natural continuation of that approach. As is so often true these days, the most interesting work is that which sits between disciplines. By re-manufacturing Perriand’s furniture with the same care given to haute couture, the collaboration elevates these functional objects into studies of proportion, craft and materiality.

The dialogue also makes historical sense. Yves Saint Laurent himself collected Perriand’s work and admired her purity of line. Theirs was an aesthetic kinship, a shared understanding and an attitude. Pierre Bergé too, backed major international retrospectives of Perriand’s work.

In today’s Paris, with major institutions at a juncture and so much of the art and design world so performative, ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ is comforting in its subtle celebration of endurance. Galerie Patrick Seguin, long known for its scholarly presentations of Jean Prouvé, Pierre Jeanneret and Perriand herself, provides an ideal setting in its Jean Nouvel-designed space.

In a week when the city’s creative energy tilts toward the new, ‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ offers a lesson in lasting modernity and a reminder that true innovation doesn’t always have to mean invention, newness or encore du drame…

‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ is on view until 22 November 2025
5 Rue des Taillandiers, 75011 Paris

This week, Paris is dominated by an array of art moments as Art Basel Paris and Design Miami Paris return for their third instalment after the 2023 debut in the city. Across the French capital's historical venues, from hotels particuliers to landmark apartments, collectible design finds a place to show its most experimental side, with multidisciplinary cross-pollination opportunities that range from textile-like treatment of solid surfaces to music merging with design.

Here, we round up the best design exhibitions to see in Paris as Art Basel and Design Miami both land in the city.

Paris design exhibitions to discover this week

A triple bill by India Mahdavi

This week, India Mahdavi stages three collaborative exhibitions: with AGO Projects, a display of Kauani's Parenchyma cactus-shaped sculptural lights in her Project Room, 'an intimate study of xerophytic plants endemic to the American continen', and an exhibition of chairs by Serban Ionescu in her Tiny Room gallery space. Ionescu's anthropomorphic chairs reflect his Balkan origins: drawing from ancient vernacular, 'I treat wood like drawing or clay, improvised and direct, embracing all accidents,' says the designer.

With culinary collective We Are Ona, she also presents Rose C'est La Vie, a flower-clad restaurant pop-up with Mexican chef Jesús Durón, whose name is a nod to Marcel Duchamp's female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and whose interiors reference the Mahdavi-designed iconic APT club in New York.

Project Room #20, 29 rue de Bellechasse, 75007
Tiny Room #7, 3 rue las Cases, 75007

Perrier Jouët at Maxim's

For the second year, Perrier Jouët brings its Parenthèse Belle Époque to Paris with a takeover of legendary Art Nouveau haunt Maxim's. On the first floor bar, guests can expect stained glass windows and arches adorned with Émile Gallé anemones and vintage posters. For the occasion, the French champagne Maison has partnered with Maxim's chef Yann Meinsel who created exclusive gastronomic pairing in collaboration with Maison Belle Époque executive chef Sébastien Morellon.

Maxim's, 3 Rue Royale, 75008 Paris

Charles Zana's In Situ furniture collection

Charles Zana presents his new In Situ furniture collection in a 500-square-metre Directoire apartment that formerly housed the Swedish Circle (and where Alfred Nobel established the awards that bear his name). Located on the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Tuileries gardens, the apartment has impressively high ceilings and large reception rooms. 'You feel like you've stepped into another era,' Zana says.

Instead of creating rooms for dining, entertaining, sleeping, etc., Zana has mixed up his works in what he calls a 'fantasy' interior, creating 'an emotion rather than simply an aesthetic.' The exhibition includes a coffee bar run by pastry star Yann Couvreur where you can sip an espresso at a 'Cocteau' mushroom-shaped side table while listening to the chill techno sounds of Sébastien Tellier and Ray Mang. Text by Amy Serafin

'In Situ' runs 21-26 October 2025, 242 Rue de Rivoli, Paris

Contributions

Curated by design industry veterans Anna Caradeuc and Élise Daunay, the Contributions design festival returns to Paris for its second edition. With a set up that encourages dialogues between design and other creative disciplines, the festival's 2025 edition weaves together design and music, with five installations pairing artists, designers and musicians.

The projects on display include Nifemi Marcus-Bello's first Paris presentation, a new iteration of his M2 Shelf with an integrated speaker created in collaboration with La Boîte Concept - a design reminiscent of the living room in his family home growing up, scaled up into a listening room with a soundtrack by Brazilian musician Rodrigo Amarante.

Elsewhere, Italian musician Andrea Laszlo De Simone presents the premiere of his audiovisual piece Una Lunghissima Ombra, accompanied by natural wine bar and micro-cinema Out of the blue byFrench design advisor and dealer Harold Mollet recreating the convivial spirit of an Italian bar with pieces by design collective Metals.

On view until 24 October across different locations:

Union de la Jeunesse Internationale, 2-4 blvd Rocheouart, 75018
Atelier Alterio, 57bis blvd Rocheouart, 75009
Out of the blue, 9 rue Saint Maur, 75011
La Pièce, 24 rue Camille Desmoulins, 75011
Lucid Interval, 94 rue Quincampoix, 75003

Salon des Nouveaux Ensembliers

The Galerie des Gobelins hosts the inaugural Salon des Nouveaux Ensembliers, under the patronage of France’s manufactures nationales – Sèvres and Mobilier national. In the lineage of art deco’s pioneers, the salon gathers a new generation of interior architects invited to rethink the dialogue between form, function and meaning in contemporary living.

Under the theme ‘L’Ambassade de demain’ (the embassy of tomorrow), ten architect-decorators (nine French and one Brazilian) reinterpret the symbolic spaces of diplomacy: offices, vestibules, salons and reception rooms.

Their brief is as pertinent as it is ambitious: how can design today embody representation, openness and exchange, while embracing ecological and social responsibility? Each designer has imagined an experimental embassy space, selecting one specific area within the building as the framework for their vision. These embassies function as both interiors and laboratories of ideas, exploring diplomacy as a contemporary art of encounter. Text: Fabienne Dupuis

Le Salon des Nouveaux Ensembliers is on view at Galerie des Gobelins until 2 November 2025. 42 Av. des Gobelins, 75013 Paris

Salon 94 Design presents Massimiliano Locatelli & Fabio Zambernardi's Nullus Locus

Installed within Locatelli’s private Paris apartment, this collection of objects created by the studio and Fabio Zambernardi with Graziano Ricami features embroidery on timber. Becoming unexpected tapestries, wooden vessels and furniture pieces becomes a canvas for floral embroidery, brought to life by the skilled techniques and machinery developed by Graziano Giordani.

By appointment only

‘Un Souffle De Vent’ by Yves Salomon Editions X Dimorestudio

Dimorestudio and Yves Salomon Editions present a new immersive installation inspired by Georges Perec’s debut novel Les Choses, a text rich with descriptions of opulent interiors. Similarly, the objects and furniture on display are meant to be contemplated, rather than used, with Dimorestudio's narrative approach to design developed through tactile surfaces, a rich material palette and a mood that exudes a decorative richness while embodying a minimalism of form.

On view until 26 October 2025, 5, rue Castiglione, 75001

'In The Mood for Touch' by Nilufar at Métaphores

Nilufar Edition and high-end textile company Métaphores present an immersive installation that reflects the tactile and emotional potential of interiors. Works by Nilufar Edition are paired with examples of Métaphores' textile excellence, crafting 'a sensual, atmospheric world where every surface speaks a language of materiality and craft.'

On view from 23 October 2025 to January 2026, 5 Rue de Furstemberg, 75006

'Im Zwischen' by CØR Studio x Harold Mollet x Monument

This group exhibition by Parisian gallery CØR Studio, consultant Harold Mollet, and London gallery Monument is inspired by the concept of the 'in-between', imagined as a bridge between historical and contemporary design as well as an exploration of 'the relationships between structures, forms, and materials.'

The display includes a 10-metre light wall by François Chapuis, 1980s designs that include Ron Arad’s Horns chair as well as Ingo Maurer lighting designs.

On view until 25 October, CØR Studio, 28 rue du Petit Musc, 75004 Paris

'Judd', an exhibition by LVH Art

This display of Donald Judd's work is set within a grand Parisian residence, offering a contrasting point of view between the American artist's minimalist and the ornate beauty of French interiors.

By appointment only, Place Beauvau, Paris 8

Invisible Collection and Féau Boiseries Present Period Rooms of the Future

In this exhibition by Invisible Collection and Féau Boiseries, previously unseen Art Deco elements become the backdrop to a display of contemporary pieces. 'Rare paneling, shelving, and boiseries, originally created for the tastemakers of their time, are displayed in their original splendor; a fascinating reminder of the cultural continuity between the 1920s and today’s collectible design,' reads the exhibition text.

On view until 20 January 2026, by appointment only
Féau Boiseries, 7 rue Laugier, Paris 75017

'Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand' at Galerie Patrick Seguin

In this calming Bastille exhibition, Saint Laurent’s creative director since Anthony Vaccarello has selected four of Perriand’s lesser-seen works to be produced in limited editions. Each has been recreated from archive drawings, original models or one-off pieces, using the same species of wood, metal and cane that defined Perriand’s original vision. Read more

‘Saint Laurent – Charlotte Perriand’ is on view until 22 November 2025
5 Rue des Taillandiers, 75011 Paris

As Art Basel Paris 2025 arrives, the city pulses with ideas and artistic encounters – from Kai Althoff’s enigmatic new paintings at Tramps’ inaugural Paris space to Dash Snow’s intimate Polaroids at Morán Morán, and Turner Prize-winner Helen Marten transforming the Palais d’Iéna with 30 Blizzards., a hybrid installation-performance mapping human experience through sculpture, video, and live performance.

Elsewhere, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou reimagines a harp shop as a melancholic study of urban solitude, while at the Lycée Turgot, Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake explore the poetic intersections of light, fabric, and technology through guided tours and workshops. There are also radical publishing and book launches, with Pina magazine celebrating its second issue – featuring an exhibition by Forensic Architecture – at an event hosted by After 8 Books at Paris Internationale.

At night, don't miss the Berlin-based curatorial platform Trauma, throwing an evening of music, art and performance on 23 October at U122AE, the subterranean club located at 13 Rue de Belhomme. And beyond the main fair, make sure to visit Place des Vosges, 7 Rue Froissart, and Paris Internationale – art fairs that bring together some of the most exciting artistic voices in contemporary art working worldwide today.

Ten things to see at Art Basel Paris 2025

Tramps: Kai Althoff

Inaugurating the Tramps gallery space, Kai Althoff returns to Paris with a compelling new presentation following his recent exhibitions in the city at Galerie Hussenot and Modern Art. The second chapter of an exhibition first presented at Studio Casoli in Filicudi, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, textiles, sculptural objects, and carefully arranged photographic excerpts on partition walls, which present the artist’s working process and magnify the delicate, thorny beauty embedded in the paintings themselves.

Althoff is one of the most revered painters of his generation and has long explored the intertwined realms of persona, memory, and materiality. His dense, elliptical compositions hover between devotion and delirium: expect interiors filled with fragile figures, faded fabrics, and cryptic symbols, each fragment hinting at a whole that may never be fully seen, a central provocation to Althoff’s practice. This iteration of the exhibition reflects the urban nature of Paris, contrasting with the airy openness of its summer counterpart in Italy.

Passage du Caire, 33 Rue d’Alexandrie, 2e arrondissement. Open until 7 December, Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00–19:00

Dash Snow: ‘Carrion’ at Morán Morán, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig

Morán Morán inaugurates its new Paris project space with ‘Carrion’, a survey exhibition of American artist Dash Snow’s (1981–2009) Polaroid photography, curated by Jeppe Ugelvig. A chronicle of early-2000s New York, post 9/11, and pre-social media, ‘Carrion’ captures a world of skaters, party-goers, squatters, and hipsters navigating sky-rocketing consumerism, jingoism, and celebrity mania.

Born into the prominent de Menil family, Snow moved between subculture and art-world royalty, and tragically died of a drug overdose in 2009 at the age of 27. Drawing connections between Snow and Baudelaire’s fascination with beauty in decomposition, in ‘Carrion’, Ugelvig positions the artist as both a prophet and a romantic whose work translates the finality of the analogue era. Far from mere downtown legend, Snow’s photographs document the fragile poetics of modernism and their grainy analogue quality captures a world on the brink of digital domination.

5 Rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris, from 21 October – 29 November 2025

Eugene Kangawa x A-POC Able Issey Miyake

The collaboration between Japanese artist Eugene Kangawa and A-POC Able Issey Miyake represents a dialogue between visual art and design-led textile research. Emerging from a three-year exchange between Kangawa and A-POC Able’s creative director Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the project originates in Kangawa’s ongoing painting series Light and shadow inside me (2021-), first seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Presented in a scenography conceived by Paris-based architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the installation foregrounds a newly developed ‘bit-level fabric’ that shifts from black to white through woven density, rather than with dye. Displaying test pieces, prototypes, and working tools alongside Kangawa’s related works, the exhibition also includes guided tours by Kangawa and Miyamae, along with an on-site workshop. The exhibition is an evolving archive of artistic and technological collaboration that will continue in Tokyo and Osaka later this year. Admission is free, although booking is required.

Lycée Turgot, 40 Rue Volta, 75003 Paris. From 24–25 October (11:00–19:00); 26 October (11:00–18:00)

Cheruby x Viscose Journal: ‘Fashion Sensorium’

This week, Paris is focused on visual art, but Viscose Journal turns up the volume on something rarely given space at an art fair: sound. The independent journal for fashion criticism launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, and has built a cult following for its rigorously edited, concept-driven topics that critically dissect fashion and the fashion industry.

Now, for its Paris launch of Issue 08: Sound (alongside a reprint of Issue 07: Scent), Viscose and the Shanghai-based collective Cheruby transform the Paris Internationale fair into a live experiment in sensory thinking. On 24 October, they will feature Thai sound artist Tanat Teeradakorn, who presents newly commissioned works exploring how style might be heard rather than seen, translating texture and rhythm into acoustic form. Alongside Teeradakorn, Swedish scent collective Store Skuggan presents Monkeyflower, a perfume inspired by a once-fragrant flower that mysteriously lost its scent, a poetic meditation on loss, mutation, and extinction.

Paris Internationale on 24 October

Helen Marten: ‘30 Blizzards.’, presented by Miu Miu

For its second year as Public Program Partner of Art Basel Paris, Miu Miu presents 30 Blizzards., a new commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten. The installation-performance hybrid unfolds across five sculptural platforms and corresponding video works, tracing a loose meteorology of human experience through childhood, community, sexuality, interiority, and loss.

Marten is known for her linguistically charged assemblages and use of symbols, and at Palais d’Iéna extends her exploration of how language inhabits material form, constructing what she calls a ‘map of emotion’ in 30 Blizzards. Developed with theatre director Fabio Cherstich, whose practice spans experimental opera and scenography, and sound artist Beatrice Dillon, the performance introduces 30 characters conceived less as actors than as semiotic systems, gestures or weather fronts in human guise.

Palais d’Iéna, Paris, 22–26 October (Preview: 21 October)

Airbnb x Art Basel Paris: ‘A Curated Experience with Loïc Prigent’

Following their 2024 collaboration, Airbnb and Art Basel continue their partnership with a new series of immersive cultural experiences across the fair’s global editions. In Paris, the initiative takes shape as an intimate, guided encounter led by Loïc Prigent, known for his sharp-eyed documentaries (Signé Chanel, The Day Before); a journalist and satirist, he has become famed in the fashion world as one of the most witty commentators.

As part of Art Basel Paris’ ‘Oh La La!’ programme, curated by Prigent, a selection of galleries will rehang their booths midweek, reframing their displays in response to the fair’s evolving energy over the week. Prigent’s tour offers rare insight into this process, combining his humour and cultural fluency with behind-the-scenes conversations with artists and gallerists, and access to the fair’s Collectors Lounge.

The collaboration underscores how Airbnb and Art Basel are reimagining hospitality as a form of cultural mediation and where access, curiosity, and conversation replace exclusivity. With limited spots still available for Friday’s session, this experience promises a uniquely Parisian blend of insight and wit: an art-world tour guided by one of its sharpest chroniclers. Book your place on the tour here.

Massimodecarlo Pièce Unique: Elmgreen & Dragset

Visible through the street-facing vitrine day and night, a new installation work depicts a gallery assistant slumped at her desk behind an open laptop. She’s exhausted. Part performative mise-en-abîme, part allegorical mirror, Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset’s installation confronts passersby with the ambiguities of labour, visibility, and institutional ritual. Is she asleep, disengaged, or quietly protesting? The absurdity is both humorous and unnerving, a hallmark of Elmgreen & Dragset’s practice, and echoes Prada Marfa (2005) and their 2024 Musée d’Orsay exhibition ‘L’Addition’, where inverted male figures disrupted traditional hierarchies.

October 2025 compresses these concerns into a single human proxy, a microcosm of gallery life that collapses critique and fiction, and asks what remains unseen in the everyday theatre of display. The gallery’s Instagram captures passerby reactions that are as telling as the work itself.

57 Rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris in October 2025

Marietta Mavrokordatou: ‘Downtown Blues’

Situated in the Viaduc des Arts, a repurposed railway viaduct in the 12th arrondissement, an area known for its artisanal ateliers, Greek artist Marietta Mavrokordatou presents ‘Downtown Blues’ in The Harp Store, in which she constructs a spectral interior where painting, video, and sculptural debris converge to evoke Paris as both subject and symptom: a city perpetually haunted by its own image. Mavrokordatou is known for her innovative approach to photography, often employing macro lenses and experimental optical techniques to reflect her own visual impairment into her work. The resulting soft-focus, near-abstract images resemble eyes, landscapes, or interior spaces, collapsing the distinction between self-portraiture and perception itself. These works operate as acts of translation, turning the instability of sight into a metaphor for the instability of memory, identity, and collective vision.

In ‘Downtown Blues’, she extends this inquiry to the architecture and aura of Paris, creating an installation that feels both cinematic and introspective. Having previously exhibited with Brunette Coleman in London and elsewhere internationally, Mavrokordatou continues her rigorous investigation into how the spaces we inhabit shape and mirror our inner lives.

The Harp Store, 107 Avenue Daumesnil, 75012 Paris. Opens on 22 October

Barbara Kruger x Performa x Item Idem: ‘The Drop’ (2025)

Few artists have defined the visual politics of our time like Barbara Kruger, whose bold typographic works, red, white, black, and defiantly feminist, have shaped how we see power and persuasion in art. To mark Performa’s 20th anniversary, Kruger’s Untitled (The Drop) returns with Item Idem as a limited series of multilingual apparel featuring her signature slogans, now translated into French and Arabic.

Originally conceived for Performa 17, the project moves from billboard to body, transforming critique into circulation. Oversized jumpers and tees emblazoned with statements like ‘Your gaze hits the shirt’ turn the act of wearing into a form of dissent. Founded by RoseLee Goldberg, Performa has long expanded performance into the social sphere – and here, art becomes commerce’s mirror: proof that a T-shirt can still be a political gesture.

Opening on 20 October, 12pm (online and in-store at Item Idem, Paris)

No Tax: Reba Maybury & Lucy McKenzie: ‘Pervert or Detective?’

Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, this incisive exhibition brings together Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie in a provocative exploration of power, authorship, and erotic labour. Within No Tax’s arcade-like vitrines, murals, drawings, and collaborative works stage acts of control and complicity: Maybury, whose practice merges political domination with visual art, directs her submissives to create under her command, probing masculinity, labour, and authority. And McKenzie, known for her intricately detailed trompe-l’œil paintings and architectural interventions, investigates authenticity, illusion, and institutional power.

At the exhibition, buy a copy of Pervert or Detective?, a publication by Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie, which presents an extended conversation between the artists, moderated by Marie Canet, and published by No Place Press (MIT Press). With essays and an afterword by Susan Finlay, the book extends the exhibition’s themes. Together, the show and publication reveal the intertwined dynamics of eroticism, labour, and artistic creation, making this a must-see exhibition for those interested in power, performance, and authorship.

More info here.

38 Rue St Sabin, 75011 Paris. 21 October – 9 November. Opening and Book Launch: 21 October, 5–9 pm

The art world is descending on Basel once again, and there's lots to see.

Alongside the presentations at the Messeplatz, Art Basel’s new Shop is a destination in itself, featuring a coveted limited edition of 100 porcelain Labubu by artist Kasing Lung, alongside exclusive drops including FC Basel’s artist-designed jersey, a Katharina Grosse capsule collection, Thomas Bayrle’s custom raincoat, a limited edition poster by Sasha Stiles, and rare prints by Daniel Arsham and Amoako Boafo.

Across the city, Jordan Wolfson challenges perception at Fondation Beyeler, while at Kunsthalle Basel, Lebanese-artist Dala Nasser traces the layered history of the Byzantine church of St. Christopher near Kabr Hiram in Qana. At Museum Tinguely, prepare to enter the surreal at Scream Machines, with a ghost train by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez, created in an anarchic tribute to Jean Tinguely’s Crocrodome, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth. In a modest house at Bannwartweg 39, an ambitious group exhibition titled Maison Clearing, organised by C L E A R I N G (NYC & LA), brings together standout contemporary artists, including Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Nicole Coson, and Supawich Weesapen. For a more contemplative encounter, don’t miss Lenz Geerk’s solo show lautlos at Domushaus, presented by MASSIMODECARLO – a quiet meditation on colour, interiority, and emotional stillness from the Basel-born painter.

12 things to see at Art Basel

Joyce Joumaa – Galerie Eli Kerr, Art Basel Statements

Timed to blink, dim, or fade in and out, the lights in Lebanese-artist Joyce Joumaa mirror’s the rhythm of the power grids — or lack thereof — across cities in Lebanon, where entire cities rely on shared generator schedules, makeshift solar setups, and the collective knowledge of when and where electricity might flow next. She transforms repurposed circuit breaker boxes arranged across the walls, and flickers with light, sometimes dim. Inside each box, hazy inkjet prints on vellum paper flicker in front of LED lights and electronic timers, their soft glow showing intimate glimpses of life — apartment interiors, rooftops, street corners — in Tripoli and Beirut.

The urgency of Joumaa’s work lies in its ability to materialise the invisible: to show us how power shortages don’t just mean living without light, it also reshapes space and autonomy. The installation presented by Eli Kerr at Art Basel Statements builds on themes from Joumaa’s critically acclaimed presentation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and her inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale central exhibition.

Thomas Bayrle – neugerriemschneider, Art Basel Parcours

Known as one of Germany’s most influential pop artists, Thomas Bayrle’s 1960’s installation Coats will take place in the Manor department store in this year's Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director at Swiss Institute New York. Using tools like the Jacquard loom and Xerox copier, Bayrle’s six-decade practice has bridged graphic design, mass production, and political critique.

First conceived in 1967–68, Coats brings together transparent raincoats printed with his iconic repeating patterns, displayed against walls wrapped in his signature superform wallpaper.

The Parcours presentation is part of a triple showing of Bayrle’s work across Basel, including a major new tapestry and painting at neugerriemschneider’s Art Basel booth and Chairman (1972) at Basel Social Club. Bayrle’s Parcours project is a rare opportunity to experience one of his earliest experiments with form, fashion, and the politics of production, ahead of his upcoming retrospective at the Kunstahalle Frankfurt in 2026

Alia Farid – Sfeir-Semler, Art Basel Unlimited

Elsewhere, is an urgent, visually stunning act of cultural memory and resistance. Sixteen large-scale embroidered rugs, made in close collaboration with weavers in Samawa, Iraq, maps Palestinian-owned pharmacies, mosques, Arabic menus and signage in Puerto Rico. Drawn from photographs, interviews, and archival research, Farid makes visible the complex networks of migration between the Middle East and Latin America.

The rugs blend flat weaving techniques with region-specific chain stitching. Textiles become an object that document craftsmanship, and resist erasure; telling stories that institutions often fail to hold. The series of rugs are part of a long-term project tracing Arab and South Asian migration across the Caribbean and Latin America.

Known for her cross-disciplinary practice spanning film, sculpture, and textiles, Farid’s work insists on visibility and on remembering what some histories choose to forget, revealing how stories erased by the Global North endure in everyday rituals, architecture, and material culture.

Bijoux Solaires – Suns.works, Basel Social Club

Held, as it usually is, in an unlikely venue, this year's Basel Social Club takes place in a Swiss bank vault on one of the oldest streets in historic Grossbasel. In one of the vaults, Suns.works orchestrates a glittering, transhistorical assembly of artists who have worked with jewellery as a sculptural form. Bijoux Solaires brings together rare pieces by Cinzia Ruggeri, BillyBoy*Zoé Mohm, Meret Oppenheim, and Fausto Melotti, treating jewellery not as adornment but as narrative device, aesthetic experiment, and political metaphor. BillyBoy*’s Surreal Bijoux, once worn by Warhol and embedded with televisual and occult motifs, gleams alongside Ruggeri’s wearable and ornate earrings and necklaces, and Oppenheim’s mytho-feminist objects. By framing these works within the context of postmodernism, esotericism, and countercultural fashion, Suns.works proposes jewellery as a form of micro-sculpture: portable, subversive, and intimate.

Alekos Fassianos – Herald St, Art Basel

Alekos Fassianos’s figures are often likened to demigods, nearly always caught in the banal rituals of urban modernity, his characters wear suits, ride bicycles, and smoke cigarettes with the languor of epic heroes. His paintings bridge ancient iconography and contemporary life, as their flat bodies, delineated by bold lines and patterns, are stylised in a manner that it is clear to see his work from theatre sets and ceramics to furniture and poetry. Painted in vivid blues and bright reds, Fassianos is a seminal figure of postwar Greek modernism. Don't miss his paintings, which will be presented by Herald St in Art Basel, following the 2022 opening of the Alekos Fassianos Museum in Athens - housed in a building the artist designed - and the establishment of his estate, where a significant international reassessment is underway.

Katharina Grosse: CHOIR – Messeplatz Project

It will be impossible to miss the sweeping fields of pink that overtake Basel’s Messeplatz this Art Basel. A bold new commission by Katharina Grosse transforms the spacious area at the heart of what’s known as Kleinbasel in little Basel into an chromatic colour field landscape. Titled CHOIR and curated by Natalia Grabowska, curator at Serpentine in London, the project continues Grosse’s rethinking of scale, gesture, and public space, extending her ambition to, in her own words, 'paint the world.' Her tool of choice is an industrial spray gun that floods colour pigment to architecture, ground, and atmosphere alike. 'Colour becomes anarchic,' she explains. 'It allows me to fight categorisations... to turn reality into something entirely liquid.'

In CHOIR, colour becomes not merely a surface treatment but a performative act: as Grosse’s work positions colour as a carrier of sensory and spiritual intensity. Unlike her artist predecessors such as Rothko, or af Klimt who explored expansive colour fields in their work, Grosse’s colour doesn’t transcend the world, rather it overruns it. Her pink pigment seeps into the architecture of the city, refusing containment and redefining the Messeplatz as a living, liquid space to encounter. In a time when public space is increasingly commodified and surveilled, Grosse’s chromatic intervention stages an abstract but pointed reimagination of the commons, becoming a porous threshold where pigment reclaims territory.

Alexandra Metcalf – Ginny on Frederick, Art Basel Statements

Elif Saydam – Franz Kaka, Art Basel Statements

Opulently decorated doors — two authentic Art Deco toilet stall doors and one illusionistic trompe-l’oeil painting — are central to Elif Saydam’s dissonant installation with Franz Kaka at Art Basel Statements. Drawing from the visual language of Persian miniature painting and referencing texts like Jami’s Haft Awrang, the doors are framed as an allegory of capitalism’s bait-and-switch logic. Aiming to collapse the ornamental with the conceptual, Saydam is interested in Lauren Berlant’s theory of 'cruel optimism' to unmask the toxic allure of the so-called 'good life.' The doors, poised between Camp and devotional craftsmanship, are portals to nowhere, evoking both absurdist game shows and the architecture of gendered categorisation. Exit signs flicker with iconographies, erotic fragments, and veiled citations. Saydam studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule and Montreal’s Concordia, an artistic education that has informed a practice that is as theoretically robust as it is formally seductive.

Arturo Kameya – GRIMM, Art Basel Statements

Peruvian artist, Arturo Kameya work revolves around the narratives and myths that comprise different versions of socio-political history of Peru, and at Statements, Kameya examines the use of physical education in 20th century Peru as a tool of assimilation and control, designed by elites to instill bourgeois values under the guise of national progress. The walls are painted in institutional greens and dusty ochres, evoking the worn surfaces of mid-century educational buildings. Objects, from bleachers, gym equipment, faded murals, form a kind of theatrical mise-en-scène that draws heavily on the visual codes of state-run schools across Peru: with weathered linoleum floors, peeling paint, didactic posters, and surveillance-like repetition of nationalist motifs.

In Kameya’s richly layered paintings, figures appear spectral, blurred at the edges or flattened into diagrammatic forms, and always on the verge of disappearing. Iconography drawn from personal and public archives sits alongside images of indigenous rituals and colonial allegories.

Evangeline Turner – a.SQUIRE, Liste

One of the most compelling emerging artists in London’s art scene, Evangeline Turner has quickly made a name for herself. Her paintings, presented by a.SQUIRE at Liste, splice the English pictorial tradition with surreal domestic tableaux that bristle with quiet unease. Her canvases fracture space and time; in one painting, dismembered heads hang like pendulums from a door lock. Turner’s paintings call upon a lineage stretching from early 20th-century abstraction to post-Brexit psycho-geography. Referencing Mondrian-like compositional rigidity, her work plays with perspective and moral allegory. Turner’s paintings feel haunted by their own ancestry – entangled in post-imperial disillusionment, droll humour, and theological motifs. A musician as well as a painter, she plays in a rock band, a detail that echoes the performative flair in her work. Her fusion of dandyism, absurdity, and sincerity marks her as a singular voice in the resurgence of figurative oil painting.

Rhea Dillon – Soft Opening, Art Basel Statements

Corroded and fragile, Rhea Dillon’s sculptural installation at Art Basel Statements, presented by Soft Opening, confronts the lingering aftershocks of colonialism through disfigured glassware boxed in sapele mahogany vitrines. The vitrines don’t just frame the objects, they evoke the aesthetics of museum cabinets while destabilising their authority. The result is a powerful meditation on preservation, erasure, and resistance.

Dillon is an artist, poet, and writer and builds upon a language of absence in her practice. Her sculptural forms appear weathered yet beautifully preserved, revered as a semi-reliquary in their cabinets. They are part of a history that refuses to be silenced and settled.

Rooted in Black feminist thought and Caribbean material culture, Dillon’s practice abstracts diasporic histories into minimalist, affective forms. In her acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition at Tate Britain, An Alterable Terrain, she examined how the Black female body has been encoded, commodified, and staged throughout history. In Basel, that inquiry intensified, crystallising around materials loaded with colonial memory, from glass, soil, and molasses, each a residue of trade, extraction, and displacement. Dillon’s work invites a slow, embodied encounter with the objects before you. It’s a study in how violence inscribes itself into the material world, and how that material world might still speak back.

Sacha Kanah – Clima, Liste

In Until Soon, Italian artist Sacha Kanah has created seemingly transparent forms that you might miss on first glance. Looking more closely, these are a living mold from which all life originates. The quietly immersive installation of nearly transparent sculptures that seem to float, flicker, and dissolve into space. Some are suspended mid-air, tracing invisible currents with their weightless forms; others rest on scattered children's toys.

The sculptures are made from kelp membranes shaped by the chemical and physical properties of water. This ongoing project explores how organic matter might evolve and occupy space beyond traditional ideas of permanence.

Presented at the height of their growth process, these delicate forms blur the line between material and immaterial, echoing themes of transformation, memory, and the ephemeral nature of bodies in space. Originally shown at Clima in Milan (2024) for Kanah’s solo exhibition Sleep Starts, the work continues to evolve as a meditation on the origins and future of life itself.

Art Basel runs from 19 - 22 June 2025.

Since the announcement of the first global Art Basel Awards earlier in 2025, there has been much anticipation about who will get the nod. Today (15 May), the winners – 36 ‘Medalists’ – have been announced, each one moulding the future of art from their own field. Among them are cross-disciplinary creators, curators, institutions, patrons, media figures, and behind-the-scenes specialists.

Art Basel Awards 2025

The new awards are dedicated to recognising excellence across the contemporary art world. They break away from more traditional achievement-based prizes, instead focusing on artistic practices that demonstrate broad cultural influences and the ability to help shape the future of art.

The winners were selected by an international jury of museum directors and curators – Hoor Al Qasimi, Vincenzo de Bellis, Elena Filipovic, Jessica Morgan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Adriano Pedrosa, Suhanya Raffel, Franklin Sirmans, and Philip Tinari – who judged applicants on their vision, skill and impact.

The 2025 medalists are placed in the following categories: Artists (Icon, Established, Emerging), Cross-Disciplinary Creators, Patrons, Institutions, Curators, Allies, and Media and Storytellers.

The winners are listed in full below, and include British artist and curator Lubaina Himid, who is known for her role in the British Black Arts Movement, while cross-disciplinary creators such as fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner and design studio Formafantasma are recognised for their work bridging fashion, design, and art.

Winners in non-artist categories include Dakar-based RAW Material Company, curator Candice Hopkins, patron Maja Hoffmann, and Art Handlxrs*, a group dedicated to the support and growth of Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, women, queer, trans and gender nonconforming people in the professional arts industry.

The winners will be recognised during Art Basel’s flagship fair in Basel, Switzerland in June; artist category winners will receive nearly $300,000 in artist honorariums and philanthropic gifts, global networking opportunities, tailored partnerships, and high-profile commissions.

Later in the year, the 36 winning medallists will come together to select up to 12 ‘Gold Medalists’, an additional award and a new model of peer-based recognition. This will be announced in December 2025 at Art Basel Miami Beach.

The new annual Art Basel Awards are designed as a tool to spotlight those working with radical vision and commitment to their craft and championing communities.

artbaselawards.com

Art Basel Awards 2025: here are the winners

Artists- Icon

David Hammons

Lubaina Himid

Joan Jonas

Adrian Piper

Betye Saar

Cecilia Vicuña

Artists- Established

Nairy Baghramian

Tony Cokes

Cao Fei

Ibrahim Mahama

Delcy Morelos

Ho Tzu Nyen

Artists-Emerging

Mohammad Alfaraj

Meriem Bennani

Pan Daijing

Saodat Ismailova

Lydia Ourahmane

Sofia Salazar Rosales

Cross-disciplinary creators

Formafantasma

Saidiya Hartman

Grace Wales Bonner

Curators

Candice Hopkins

Shanay Jhaveri

Eungie Joo

Allies

Art Handlrs*

Gasworks / Triangle Network

Sandra Terdjman

Media and Storytellers

Negar Azimi

Barbara Casavecchia

The Journal of Curatorial Studies

Patrons

Shane Akeroyd

Maja Hoffmann

Joel Wachs

Institutions Art + Pracitce

Jameel Arts Centre

RAW Material Company

Art fairs are vital for artists to sell their work as well as forge connections in the art world. But said art world is also notoriously opaque, with legacy fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze showcasing some of the most influential names on the planet.

So what of emerging and independent artists? There are corners of the industry carved out for them, allowing them a platform away from the towering competition. ‘Spaces for emerging artists are essential, offering visibility and connections to those that are often overlooked in favour of established, market-safe names,’ says John Russo, CEO of London-based Maddox Gallery. ‘Emerging artists bring the risk, energy and innovation that keeps the art world dynamic. Supporting them isn’t just essential, it’s a strategic investment in the future of art.’

Alternative art fairs can showcase experimental work and allow artists to connect with collectors, critics and curators hoping to unearth the ‘next big thing’. Russo advises these collectors to peruse smaller shows, ‘[engaging] directly with the artists to build meaningful connections’, which is exactly what these fairs allow attendees to do.

From the artists’ perspective, smaller or specialist art fairs mean the single most important thing: visibility. ‘Make yourself impossible to ignore,’ suggests Russo. ‘Regularly update your portfolio and engage with your audience. Persistence will keep you visible in a crowded art world.’ These fairs may also offer specific support to new artists in the form of programmes or promotion; a dedicated space for lower-priced art; and the ability to sell directly, meaning that gallery representation is not a prerequisite.

Read on to discover some of the best art fairs for emerging artists, which are paving the way for the next generation.

Affordable Art Fair

There are multiple editions of the Affordable Art Fair held throughout the year at locations in 13 cities across the UK, Europe, the US, Australia and Asia, with nearly 220,000 attendees each year. The fair is driven by the idea that art should be accessible, with work available from £100. Although it showcases both established and emerging talents, the lower price point makes it a particularly attractive proposition for the latter, allowing smaller artists to build an audience without having to compete with those in higher-priced markets. The fair also allows artists to make direct sales, opening the door to those without gallery representation.

affordableartfair.com

Art Space Art Fair

Art Space Art Fair claims to be ‘reshaping the art world’ with an approach that puts artists first. Exhibiting in Monaco, London, Dubai and a handful of Spanish cities, the fair says that it ‘goes beyond the standard fare’ in ensuring that artists are property recognised and compensated, unlike traditional art fairs where ‘trade margins and industry conventions often take priority’.

The art here is alternative, challenging trends and convention, making it hospitable to artists that don’t fit the mainstream. As a result, Art Space Art Fair prides itself on ‘bringing fresh perspectives to the global art scene’, which attracts galleries, collectors and enthusiasts looking to discover new voices.

artspacefairs.com

The Other Art Fair

The Other Art Fair prides itself on being ‘bizarre, unexpected, and never normal’, exhibiting boundary-pushing, affordable art and creating an atmosphere where everyone ‘belongs’. This attracts under-the-radar artists, as does the fact that the fair facilitates direct sales to collectors, offering artists more control over their sales. The Other Art Fair also provides comprehensive support to artists, including fully-built booths and promotion through its platforms, and has a dedicated New Futures programme that lends extra support to first-time exhibitors.

The Other Art Fair has exhibited over 10,000 artists and 100,000 artworks across its seven cities of operation (Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas, London, LA, Melbourne and Sydney). Each of the fairs is different, but all are united by a desire to make an art fair an experience, with DJs, bars, performances and the odd tattoo or taxidermy class thrown in.

theotherartfair.com

SPRING/BREAK Art Show

SPRING/BREAK Art Show showcases untraditional art in unexpected environments, namely historically-significant spaces in New York and Los Angeles, like former schools, post offices and factories. These temporary galleries juxtapose with the contemporary art on display.

These exhibitions are either free or low-cost, ensuring that emerging artists are not priced out. SPRING/BREAK Art Show also has a curator-driven structure, which ensures a diverse range of artistic perspectives: artworks that address social and political issues, rather than simply catering to the demands of the market, are actively encouraged. The fair also helps the visibility of emerging artists by displaying all of the available artworks online.

springbreakartshow.com

New Artist Fair

The New Artist Fair was established in London in 2011 and has since been exhibiting the work of recently-established and emerging artists from the UK and beyond. The fair, which takes place in east London’s Truman Brewery, is artist-run, allowing them control over how their art is promoted and sold. The fair provides plenty of support for artists, including information packs and promotional materials.

Again, the price point is entry-level, with work priced from £50 to £2,000, and artists sell their work directly to buyers. The low barrier to entry allows exhibitors to get their name out there, with many securing gallery representation after participating. The aim, says the fair, is to make buying and selling artwork easier and more cost-effective for both sides.

newartistfair.com

At Art Basel Hong Kong, there’s enough artistic firepower to make even jaded collectors sit up and pay attention. The numbers don't lie: 240 exhibitors from 42 countries and territories will be on show. More than half hail from Asia-Pacific, proving this isn't just a Western art showcase, but a genuine platform for regional talent.

If nothing else, the fair is bona fide feather in the cap of Hong Kong’s artistic ambitions. As Suhanya Raffel, museum director at M+ points out, ‘With major art fairs like Art Basel playing a central and crucial role in the local art scene, alongside auction houses, galleries and public institutions, the city's cultural landscape has expanded and transformed dramatically over the past ten years.’

This year's edition bursts with immersive large-scale installations and curated presentations. Fourteen were created specifically for the fair, including British artist and Turner Prize-nominee Monster Chetwynd's Lanternfly Ballet which will spill beyond the main venue into Pacific Place, ensuring even luxury mall shoppers can't escape an accidental brush with contemporary art.

But don't mistake Art Basel for just another playground for the ultra-rich. The fair has strategically scattered its DNA across the island with a week-long cultural takeover that includes free public programmes accessible to all. Para Site, a leading Hong Kong independent art institution, is curating seven film screenings featuring 30 artists under the deliciously cryptic title In Space, It's Always Night. For the visually insatiable, collaborations with cultural video channel Nowness Asia and Videotage—one of the region's premier non-profit organisations dedicated to video art—will provide additional cinematic perspectives.

If it’s not already clear, Art Basel and its current four-city constellation in Basel, Miami Beach, Paris, and Hong Kong has transformed its humble 1970s Swiss beginnings into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. In Hong Kong especially, the fair seems to have mastered the art of creative cross-pollination with elegant precision to create an egalitarian art ecosystem where champagne flows freely and Instagram opportunities multiply infinitely.

With hundreds of booths vying for attention and enough visual stimulation to induce art fatigue in even the most seasoned gallery-hopper, we've curated a shortlist of must-see highlights to kick-start your Basel adventure.

All you need to do is juice up your credit card limit.

Ho Tzu Nyen

In a dazzling collision of AI wizardry and cinematic nostalgia, Singaporean artist, Ho Tzu Nyen transforms M+'s facade into a fever dream of Hong Kong's golden screen era. Commissioned by Art Basel and M+, Night Charades remixes the island’s stars and directors into a spectacular mash-up that channels everything from Wong Kar-wai's hyper-romanticism to Wong Jing's fearless farce. It's baroque, dreamlike, and utterly now – a digital séance summoning Hong Kong's celluloid ghosts.

Betty Muffler

Aboriginal healer turned art-world sensation, Betty Muffler channels atomic apocalypse into sublime monochromatic masterpieces. The 81-year-old healer, who came to art late but has been furiously catching up, survived the late 1950s British nuclear tests that decimated her family. Her art transforms trauma into transcendence through Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), which conjures sophisticated landscapes that whisper of ancestral connections while screaming environmental reckoning – her delicate palette belying the radioactive history pulsing beneath every brushstroke.

Lu Yang

Lu Yang's piece crashes Art Basel with a fake store that's actually a sneaky installation art. The provocateur crams LED walls, flexible screens, digital displays, and collectible blind boxes into a shopping experience where DOKU –Lu's digital mini-me since 2020 – plays artist-turned-entrepreneur. This tech-heavy set-up weaponises retail therapy to mess with art's sacred cows: authorship, value, and who gets to call themselves an artist. It's critique disguised as commerce, complete with comfy sofa for bewildered fairgoers questioning everything they've just purchased.

Christopher K Ho

Christopher K Ho's ensemble piece hijacks American architect John Hejduk's 1950s design exercise involving a nine-square grid and transforms it into sly brass and aluminium trophies. The Hong Kong artist's sculptures – first shown at his 2024 show, I am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor – pack architectural inside jokes beneath sleek surfaces. Pei Cobb Freed (2023) winks at the Fountain Place building, IM Pei's Dallas landmark, whilst other pieces morph into giraffe necks and tail fins. Displayed on pedestals at deliberately uneven heights, these polished puzzles double as Ho's take on colonial power plays – intellectual heat disguised as metallic eye candy.

Gemma Smith

Gemma Smith's suspended oil canvases turn artistic second-guessing into her signature move. The Australian painter's Shadow Paintings – built through months of ruthless layering and erasing – capture the primal tug-of-war between what she wants and what the paint demands. Each massive panel archives twenty years of Smith's obsession with process, forcing viewers to physically orbit their domineering presence. Every surface holds evidence of creative U-turns and artistic dead ends, like a juicy visual diary that only rewards those willing to spend quality time with its hulking, three-dimensional attitude.

Art Basel Hong Kong will be showing 28-30 March 2025 at Hong Kong’s Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, artbasel.com

Also read: A local's guide to Hong Kong

Diagnosis? Extreme contemporary art saturation. Cure? Fine artisanal tequila. It’s a prescription the organisers of Art Basel Miami Beach understand well, the fair being a hotspot for the condition, and which Official Agave Spirits Partner Casa Dragones has stepped up to fulfil for the past four years. At the 2024 edition it returned with its largest intervention to date, with a Tasting Room in the Collectors Lounge, a spectacular 500-bottle chandelier, and an exclusive Art Basel Collector’s Cup.

An oasis for those seeking a moment’s respite from the high-octane booth-hopping, reveals and deals happening on the expansive conference centre floors, the Quiote Bar was designed by renowned Mexican designer Gloria Cortina and inspired by Casa Dragones’ award-winning Tasting Room in the historic heart of San Miguel de Allende. Integrating organic elements drawn from Casa Dragones’ agave fields into an eco-conscious, museum-like space, the bar referenced the flowering stalk of the agave plant. Adorned with sculptural elements inspired by the quiote, display cases around the space showcased Casa Dragones’ Joven Artist Collection of special limited-edition bottles, collaborations including works by artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Danh Vo, Pedro Reyes, and Petrit Halilaj.

Casa Dragones' Quiote Bar

Renowned for her designs that blend modernity, myth, and a deep respect for place, Gloria Cortina was the ideal choice for this commission. Her work often draws on inspirations ranging from Mayan artefacts to Cubism and México’s unique Arts and Crafts heritage. 'Gloria has an extraordinary ability to bring together art, architectural form, and culture to create extremely place-sensitive atmospheres and aesthetics,' explains González Nieves, Casa Dragones’ CEO and the first female Maestra Tequilera. 'Through her design of the Quiote Bar, she brings to life elements that evoke the essence of our agave fields and terroir.'

For Cortina’s part, she found beauty in the sculptural forms of the plant’s flowering stalks, using them as a poetic backdrop to showcase the Artist Edition Collection, giving it a platform that felt both organic and intentional. Having collaborated with Casa Dragones on their Obsidian Tasting Room at Art Basel 2023, Cortina sees this year’s project as a natural evolution of their shared vision. 'When passionate individuals align their vision, incredible things unfold,' she says. 'Collaborating with Casa Dragones has been a seamless experience – our shared commitment to craftsmanship and our obsessive attention to detail are always evident.'

Beneath a breathtaking 300-bottle chandelier designed by Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, the Quiote Bar also plays host to Casa Dragones’ celebrated Art-Tender series. For the first time, this interactive programme art world invites art world luminaries —including Tavares Strachan, Mario Garcia Torres, Leilah Babirye, and Wilfredo Prieto—to create cocktails inspired by their artistic practices.

Adding another layer of creativity, Casa Dragones debuted an exclusive Collector’s Cup designed by Petrit Halilaj, whose work is also featured in the Artist Edition series. The cup, available throughout the fair, was paired with the Art Basel Margarita, a signature cocktail blending Casa Dragones Blanco, yuzu, fresh lemon, and salt. Proceeds from the cup benefit the Hajde Foundation, which supports art and culture initiatives.

A welcome respite from fair fatigue it may be, but for Nieves, the Quiote Bar commission is bigger than that – it’s about building a bridge between México’s artisanal heritage and the global stage of contemporary art. 'The biggest evolution in our collaboration has been the opportunity to bring Gloria’s site-specific work from México to the US,' she reflects. 'We’re thrilled to showcase her artistry in Miami for the second consecutive year, and we can’t wait to see how the audience responds to this continuation of our partnership.'

casadragones.com

As the year races to a close, the art world is looking ahead to the last major moment of the season with a week of fairs, glamorous parties, and pop-up exhibitions anchored by Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB). While the storied fair opens to the public Friday 6 December and runs through Sunday, VIPs are afforded with two days of previews to sample the most coveted artworks on offer beginning Wednesday the 4th. This year’s selection promises to be as robust as ever with presentations from 286 premier international galleries.

Joining ABMB are several other fairs across the city, from industry leader Untitled Art on the sands of Miami Beach to the New Art Dealers Alliance across Biscayne Bay. With curator and collectors flocking to Miami, many are taking advantage of the enthusiasm of the week and staging pop-ups across town. Just a short walk from ABMB is Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj’s exhibition in collaboration with The Cultivist and Capital One. Taking inspiration from the bustling souk of Marrakech, the vibrant space will be activated in a series of dinners curated by MICHELIN-starred restaurateur Rose Previte, as well as tea services and performances.

Inside the Convention Center, ABMB’s distinct sectors offer a diverse mix of curated and thematic presentations, with the Galleries sector featuring seasoned dealers and leaders of the industry. This year, David Nolan Gallery stands out as an exhibitor to look for. Nolan has participated in Art Basel fairs for over 25 years and looks forward to the Miami Beach edition for its enthusiastic buyers who are “curious and eager to learn,” he says. Hoping to catch their eye, Nolan is bringing historic works by figures like Giorgio Morandi and Brice Marden, as well as newer pieces, including renowned artist Chakaia Booker’s sculpture made of rubber tires and wood that demonstrate the creative potential of industrial materials.

In the Meridians sector–curated by Yasmil Raymond, former Director of Portikus and Rector of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste-Städelschule–the fair offers a platform for artworks that are large-scale and immersive. Featuring some of the most exciting works on view, both in their size and in their ambitious materials, this year’s Meridians presentations include conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas’s monumental multipanel hologram of magnified plant imagery layered with representations of the female form presented by Marianne Boesky Gallery. Joining this are large-scale, abstract tapestries from the 1980s drawing inspiration from the ephemerality of light and the natural world by Korean fibre artist Lee ShinJa with Tina Kim Gallery.

Celebrating rising stars of contemporary art is the Nova sector, which features work made by up to three artists within the last three years. A highlight is Charles Moffett making its ABMB debut with a duo-presentation centreing placemaking and self-determination with felt portraits by Melissa Joseph and recycled-tire sculptures Kim Dacres. "Both artists’ careers are entering a vital inflection point and now feels like a strong moment to showcase their art on the kind of stage that Art Basel offers,” Moffett says.

Elsewhere, the Survey sector offers a historic counterpoint to Nova’s fresh faces with works made prior to 2000, including Portland-based ILY2’s selection of mixed-media pieces by Bonnie Lucas that question notions of femininity and incorporate craft and consumer objects, such as dolls and toys. “We are thrilled to exhibit at the fair for the first time,” says gallery senior director Jeanine Jablonski. “Bonnie’s unwavering, steadfast, decidedly feminist practice is precisely the type of work we champion.” Though working for over four decades, Lucas has only recently received widespread regard, an exciting moment to collect an industry pioneer on the rise.

Rounding out the fair are the Kabinett sector’s thematically curated presentations, including hand-embroidered textiles by Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar that explore language, heritage, and concepts of homeland, presented by Anat Ebgi, as well as the Positions sector featuring solo presentations of emerging artists or galleries. A highlight in Positions is an assortment of shrine-like installations of photographs and relics by interdisciplinary artist Agosto Machado presented by Gordon Robichaux. Exploring the artist’s life and the rich legacy of creatives in downtown Manhattan, these works offer a snapshot of pivotal moments in recent history, including the AIDS crisis and the queer activism of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

Art Basel Miami Beach runs 6-8 December 2024

artbasel.com

In ‘Tales & Tellers’, interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga reinterprets Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales film series for Art Basel Paris 2024’s public programme, putting the films into today’s context alongside Elvira Dyangani Osestaged.

Currently staged at Palais D’Iéna with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, the first commission in the Women’s Tales series was The Powder Room by Zoe Cassavetes, shot in 2011, while the most recent, Laura Citarella’s El Affaire Miu Miu, was released last month. Miu Miu has commissioned 28 films in total, by artists and directors including Agnès Varda, Miranda July, Naomi Kawase and Chloë Sevigny. The films all feature clothing by the brand, but they also show a wide swathe of female viewpoints from around the world, drawing on a variety of women’s experiences. They communicate messages from the direct to the esoteric, featuring the fashion but putting the filmmaking first.

‘First of all, it was very interesting to see the diversity of people who have produced these movies and so many different topics from all over the world,’ says Macuga. ‘It marks ten years of history. You can already see this progression of how society has changed, how we have changed in the way we relate to women's topics, and how the identities of women have evolved within this time as well. Then I questioned how to deal with such material and how to enhance all these different narratives that exist within it.’

The films take on the ideas of the loneliness of the modern age through the story of a young skateboarder, perceptions of the Middle East in Haifaa Al-Mansour’s The Wedding Singer and notions of femininity in I Am the Beauty of Your Beauty, I Am the Fear of Your Fear by Tan Chui Mui. In ‘Tales & Tellers’, the entire back catalogue is activated through live performance.

‘I very much wanted to look at the characters individually, and [also] as a group, and create this concept of a community. So, I extracted different characters from all these amazing films, and I created a situation where they all come together so they exist on their own, but there are moments when they come together and it becomes a dialogue and then, of course, the audience becomes part of it as witnesses and custodians of these tales. So, each character is, in a way, extending the idea of the tale back into real life.’

The performers, dressed in Miu Miu, move fluidly through the space sometimes individually and sometimes collectively, bringing elements of the films to life. Staged in keeping with the films’ storylines, each installation engages with the audience in a different way. You must pick up Varda’s film out of a box of fabric and play it on an iPad, you should sit at a dressing table and look into Cassavetes’, and July’s is on an iPhone that could have been left on a seat. Some require you to lean and others to submit as the characters move around you blending identities and narratives.

Tapping into the building’s history as a public forum, Ose has organised a talks programme with some of the directors and participants with a brief not to talk about their work, but to discuss their lives delving deeper into the realities women share. Also on view in the auditorium are all the films, screened in their entirety throughout the day.

Participating too is artist Sophia Al-Maria, who created a film for Miu Miu’s S/S 2024 catwalk show in Paris. In revisiting her work in this activation she discovered new things within it, expanding on the facilitating nature of working with the brand: ‘It was a really special experience because making films in the art world on this scale is impossible so I was able to work on film which I was really grateful for, cast who I wanted and play with subject matter which was important to me.’

‘Tales & Tellers’ will be on view from 16-18 October 2024, free of charge to the public and accompanied by a newspaper, The Truthless Times. Says Macuga: ‘Hopefully it will inspire other platforms to also create places for women to have a continuation in speaking and dealing with their issues. I guess in art things evolve and change and there's always the next thing we to move onto but without jeopardising what has come before.'

‘Miu Miu Tales & Tellers’ will be on view 16-18 October 2024 at Palais D’Iéna, miumiu.com

South Korean painter, sculptor and philosopher Lee Ufan is the latest artist to accept Guerlain’s annual invitation to reimagine a signature fragrance bottle from the French perfumer’s archive. Launching today (15 October 2024) to coincide with Art Basel’s imminent return to Paris on the 18th, is Ufan’s take on the ‘Flacon Quadrilobé’, which was first designed in 1908 by Baccarat.

This new project marks an extension of Guerlain and Ufan’s partnership, which started last year (2023) with the ‘Art & Environment Prize’, an initiative awarding one young artist per year with a residency and show at Lee Ufan Arles, a newly opened exhibition space in the city designed by Tadao Ando.

First look: Lee Ufan creates a minimalist perfume bottle for Guerlain

The 88-year-old Ufan has spent most of his life living and working in Japan, moving to Tokyo in 1956. In the mid-1960s he co-founded the pioneering avant-garde group Mono-ha (School of Things), which rejected notions of Western representation in modern art. The artist defines his paintings in particular as ‘born from the spectacular encounter between what I’ve painted and what I haven’t.’

Although considered to be ‘abstract’, they are characterised by the intentionality of his mark-making – a purposefulness beautifully demonstrated in the single brushstroke featured on the Guerlain bottle. ‘Painting is neither entirely a figure nor entirely a composition,’ says Ufan. ‘It expresses a connection with space and establishes a relationship with the viewer. In this way, I hope to establish a poetic dialogue with him, that the work stimulates the imagination, that it allows him to fly off the canvas and open up to the outside world, to infinity.’

Ufan worked with Maison Bernardaud to craft the bottle from pure white chiselled porcelain, harmoniously accented by a daubing of green paint and a silk string around the neck and stopper.

In Japanese culture, green is representative of eternal life and rebirth, and turns one's mind to the natural world. This is also a key starting point for ‘Souvenir d’Orchidée’ – the new scent that Ufan’s bottle contains. An aquatic and musky floral with a heady blend of angelica, sambac jasmine, iris powder, moss and amber tincture, the perfume is the result of his collaboration with the creative director of Guerlain fragrances, Delphine Jelk.

‘I hope you can feel this notion of purity and freshness from nature in the fragrance,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘There is a mineral, ozonic quality [to the perfume] which is almost humid. It gives an impression of abundant nature, of water that gives life.’

Jelk, who joined Maison Guerlain in 2014, is one of the pre-eminent noses in the industry. She takes a visual approach to perfumery, using mood boards before she starts compiling scent materials. She describes the making of ‘Souvenir d’Orchidée’ as a ‘four-handed process’ that started with a discussion about Ufan’s olfactory memories. ‘I created a film in my mind from the stories he told me,’ she says. ‘I envisioned him as a child in the mountains, dazzled by the beauty of an orchid.’

Guerlain was founded in 1828 by Pierre-François Pascal Guerlain. Today, it counts itself amongst the oldest perfume and cosmetics houses in the world, also boasting the oldest perfume in constant production, ‘Jicky’. Made by Aimé Guerlain in 1889, ‘Jicky’ is described as ‘the first modern perfume’ for its revolutionary use of notes from both synthetic and natural origins.

‘I always like to maintain a strong connection with the brand’s heritage, while also incorporating my own desires for using certain raw materials or other elements,’ says Jelk. The merging of the old and the new is further highlighted in Guerlain’s now two-year-long partnership with Art Basel, which will stock 2,000 co-branded editions of ‘Œillet Pourpre’ exclusively in the new Art Basel shop by Colette founder Sarah Andelman.

guerlain.com

Thought you could take a beat after Frieze London? Think again, it’s time for Paris! Art Basel Paris has a new name and a new venue as the fair opens its third edition at the newly renovated Grand Palais, showcasing 195 galleries from 42 countries and 53 new exhibitors. ABP is pulling out all the stops in Paris’ Olympic year with an extensive public programme staged across the city, which in turn is putting on a range of fascinating exhibitions in its swathe of world-renowned institutions.

Art Basel Paris 2024: what to see and do

'Our first edition at the Grand Palais truly represents a watershed moment,' says Clément Deléphine, director of Art Basel Paris. 'The move to this iconic venue will allow us to welcome 41 additional galleries; to introduce a new show sector, titled Premise and dedicated to singular curatorial presentations; and to truly celebrate Art Basel Paris' deep connection with the city's exceptional cultural heritage.'

Stands at the fair will include Paulina Olowska curating Pace’s booth ‘Mystic Sugar’ along the theme of mysticism and femininity, Hannah Hoffman presenting a booth including painting and photography by Darrel Ellis from the 1980s exploring his radical portraiture. Prats Nogueras Blanchard will show Untitled (Grass on Woman) (1972 / 2022) five colour photographs by Ana Mendieta, The Gallery of Everything will show paintings by outsider Abstract Expressionist Janet Sobel, Marrakesh’s Loft Gallery will exhibit Mohamed Melehi and THE PILL an installation by Nil Yalter. In the Emergence section Christian presents Zimbabwean artist Shaun Motsi, and Exo Exo is showing Lou Fauroux.

The Art Basel Shop returns, again curated by Colette co-founder and creative director Sarah Andelman, featuring a dream selection of art merch including Parley for the Oceans’ artist designed scarves by Claudia Comte and Marcel Dzarma, an exclusive Art Basel fragrance by Guerlain produced in collaboration with artist Julie Beaufils and clothing and accessories by Martine Syms produced with Lafayette Anticipations.

'The connection to Paris’ history of culture has always been paramount to the show's identity, as our freely accessible Public Program - which unfolds across quintessentially Parisian locations such as the Palais-Royal or the Place Vendôme – demonstrates again this year,' added Deléphine.

The public programme for 2024 produced in partnership with Miu Miu and the City of Paris takes place at nine venues across the city. Ghader Amer will present work from her series Paravent Girls, Jessie Darling will be at the Petit Palais, Niki de Saint-Phalle is showing at the Parvis de l’Institut De France, Takis will be on display at the Cour De L’hôtel De La Marine, the Sculpture Garden will be installed at the Domaine National de Palais-Royal, Ali Cherri Is on view at the Musée National Eugène Delacroix and Miu Miu’s ‘Tellers & Tales takes place at Palais d’Iéna. You can also see Carsten Holler’s Double Trip Mushroom at Place Vendôme.

Independent show and satellite fairs pepper the city. The Salon by NADA and The Community opens its inaugural edition and AKAA, the first contemporary art and design fair in France with a focus on the African continent opens with a focus on the connection with the Caribbean. Opera Gallery will show Figuration in the 80s, Marianne Boesky is staging Boesky in Paris, a pop-up at 24 Rue de Penthièvre with work by Pier Paolo Calzolari, the Haas Brothers, Thalita Hamaoui, Allison Janae Hamilton, Nathalie Khayat, Suzanne McClelland and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. La Maison OFFSCREEN at Eldorado Hotel will stage a series of screenings including work by the great Chantal Ackerman. Ropac will be showing Sturtevant’s ZIP ZAP and Heemin Chung’s UMBRA and Rashid Johnson’s work will be on view at Hauser & Wirth. AlLula is exhibiting work from its artist residency in Orbis Tertius, Cerith Wyn Evans: Borrowed Light Through Metz at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Asia Now will return as an annual staple take on the Asian market from across the world’s largest continent.

The institutions of Paris have a huge range of media, periods and points of view to explore. American sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud has work on view across eight Parisian institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’Orsay, Palais de la Porte Dorée and Musée du Louvre.

Martine Syms and Mohamad Abdouni have solo exhibitions at Lafayette Anticipations, and you can explore the myth of the undead at Musée Quai Branly in ‘Zombies. Death Is Not the End?’. In a unique pairing Elmgreen & Dragset curate their own intervention at the Musée d’Orsay which promises to be something special, the Cartier Foundation will show work by the great Olga de Amaral, Arte Povera is explored at the Bourse de Commerce and Musée Picasso hosts Jackson Pollock.

Art Basel Paris 2024 runs from 18 - 20 October 2024

artbasel.com

‘I'm fascinated by how we are intertwined with our technology,’ says Es Devlin when we meet at her London studio to discuss her partnership with BMW, with whom she is debuting a new series of installations set to debut at Art Basel 2024 (13-16 June).

‘BMW genuinely want to facilitate an actual meeting of minds, and that's what attracted me to this collaboration, which we have been talking about since 2017,’ she adds. ‘We have been waiting to find a genuine overlap of my lines of inquiry with their lines of inquiry. And this is the one.’ For her new works, encompassing sound, music and light, Devlin has been inspired by her time with BMW’s engineers and their work to make hydrogen a prime energy source for their electric vehicles. ‘It started with these conversations with the engineers, and then the work you see at the booth [in Art Basel] is very personal, looking back to my first memory, which was this line of light through water. That's how we begin the work in Basel. So I feel that the collaboration has allowed me to really continue my journey as an artist, as well as overlapping with these engineers.’

This intertwining of the artistic with the scientific isn’t new for Devlin, who has embraced a mish-mash of mediums and references throughout her career. Here, she looks to the scientific process itself, translating the potential of the electric BMW iX5 Hydrogen – which uses the energy from hydrogen itself to drive the motor, alongside a specially developed battery – into artworks that explore human and scientific progress. ‘Hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the universe,’ says Devlin, who studied the hydrogen fuel cell technology that enables the car to draw oxygen as it’s driven, and reconnect it with hydrogen to create energy. ‘And at the same time, the other thing you generate is water. It blew my mind that what is coming out of the exhaust pipe is water.’

Devlin builds on both this technology and the culturally eclectic foundations that underpin all her work for the series of multimedia pieces she has created for BMW. It includes two new works: Surfacing (2024) is a collaboration with choreographer Sharon Eyal that plays on light, music and water. A playful exploration of the fluid boundaries of walls of water, it becomes a magic show, drawing the eye with a trick of the light before surprising and delighting the viewer; in Surfacing II (2024) painted televisions offer a mash-up of the digital and the traditional, a haunting recontextualising of the human figure. ‘With painting TVs, you only get one go at it. I did lots of practice before, with these big brush strokes on Perspex. I had seen Frank Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads and it set me on this path. This meeting between the burnt charcoal, the chalk in our hands, the TV and the technology, the pixels and the flow of it. And the water, because this was filmed through very slow water.’ 

The car itself has also been subject to paintings, with the exterior decorated with the literature and imagery that inspired Devlin throughout her childhood, including Katsushika Hokusai’s 1831 woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa and handwritten extracts from James Joyce’s Ulysses. ‘I was already thinking about painting on the TVs and how I'd create these layers,’ says Devlin. ‘So that's what's painted on the side of the car. They took those paintings and literally translated them into print. In my practice of stage design, we work with models, with miniatures. I thought that [created] quite an interesting relationship between the human and the car. The human is able to hold the [model] car in their hand, able to twist it around and to decide where the paint goes, not being overwhelmed by not being able to see the whole system. That's why I like working with miniatures.’

Inside the car, passengers listen to a conversation between Devlin and the engineers, discussing hydrogen’s awesome potential. ‘It’s the theatre in the back of the car, this conflation between technology and humans, trying to make life for humans actually work. These engineers are the future – they are the ones sitting there coming up with the innovations.’

SURFACING: Visitors can sign up to book their seat at the hourly rituals here. Thursday 13 June - Sunday 16 June 2024, Art Basel in Basel, Hall 1.1, Messeplatz 10, 4005 Basel, Switzerland

There is something about Art Basel: the world’s most anticipated international art fair, now at age 54, maintains its status as the global market tour-de-force, as well as a testing ground for what galleries, collectors, and institutions will have on their walls for the months to come. Art Basel 2024 will debut for the VIP on Tuesday 11 June, with 285 galleries occupying the soaring convention centre, Messe, in the heart of the Swiss city.

For the fair’s recently appointed director Maike Cruse, the excitement, however, starts before the show. ‘I am thrilled to see our exhibitors from all around the world unpacking their crates,’ she tells Wallpaper*. Cruse adds that the fair’s original Basel chapter – besides its also closely watched outposts in Miami, Hong Kong, and Paris – is ‘the flagship, the touch point for the international art market with the broadest overview’.

The director has a point: the six-day affair is anchored by the presentation of exhibitors lined across aisles, but spectacle spills outside the convention centre with an ambitious programming tightly customised for the city. Right outside, Messeplatz is home this year to Agnes Denes’ land art installation Honouring Wheatfield - A Confrontation (2024), which pays homage to the American conceptual artist’s seminal 1982-dated Wheatfield installation in downtown Manhattan (she also staged a wheatfield in Milan, in 2015). Come the end of summer and the wheats will be ripe for harvest.

What to see at Art Basel 2024

Basel, with its medieval charm and effortless bustle, is the main collaborator. ‘We are in a small city with a rich density of high-profile art,’ Cruse says and compares the explosive energy during the fair week to that of the vernissage of the Venice Biennale.

Art Basel’s Parcours section – curated by the Swiss Institute’s Stefanie Hessler – invites fairgoers to roam around town to encounter art inside storefronts. Stop by a pharmacy on Clarastrasse for Mendes Wood DM’s presentation of paintings, sculptures, and cut-outs by Pol Taburet. The French artist’s haunting figures don bright attire and detached expressions, fitting for the apothecary backdrop.

End your stroll at the Middle Bridge, where the journey crescendoes at the historic Merian Hotel. Here, the building façade is dressed with Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj’s text-based installation When The Sun Goes Away We Paint The Sky, which shines nightly with the late arrival of the summer dusk. Celebrating the fair’s 30-year collaboration with UBS, the joyful constellation of stars invites visitors inside the hotel for daily panel sessions during the fair, and will continue its nocturnal beam until January 2025.

For the fans of the fair, the feast indeed starts a day early with the unveiling of the Unlimited section, curated by Giovanni Carmine of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, dedicated to monumental presentations which total in 70 this year. “We have art historical masterpieces as well as emerging talents,” explains Cruse. A standout is Pace Gallery’s display of Robert Frank’s career-defining photographic series The Americans. The international gallery shows the Swiss photographer’s documentation of 1950s America in its entirety with 84 black and white pictures, teasing what to expect from MoMA’s Frank retrospective this September.

The godfather of American Minimalism, Donald Judd is celebrated with a rarely-seen 1970-dated installation at Gagosian Gallery, pegged to the new show dedicated to Judd’s Swiss-made works at their Basel location. A suite of five-foot high galvanized iron panels stand eight inches away from the wall, and as a rare feat for a Judd, the work allows for configuration in each installation. Another American icon, Keith Haring anchors Gladstone Gallery’s booth with the 18-panel painting, Untitled (FDR NY) (1984). Haring created the originally 30-panel mural for the fence in New York’s Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive at an impressive 300-foot length. After the exuberant medley of radiant babies was removed a year following installation, its separate parts made their way into different museum shows, leading up to this largest configuration to date.

Liza Lou’s installation Security Fence (2005) does justice Unlimited experimental heft with a replica of prison fence made out of glass beads on steel and razor wire. Peril and familiarity are blended through the artist’s signature beadwork that wraps around the alarmingly isolating presence of sharp wire. Similar notions of security and discomfort are on display at Anna Uddenberg’s sleekly sexy sculpture installation Premium Economy, a riff on technology’s obsession with uber-function and the body’s odd positioning in cyber reality.

Meredith Rosen Gallery and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler co-present the Swedish artist’s airplane seat-inspired sculptures that place the body within the numbing discomfort of liminal spaces, such as airports or waiting rooms. The works will be activated throughout the run of the fair with a group of women performers engaging with uncanny gestures and contortions. A balance between order and mystery also lingers in Galerie Templon’s presentation of a red-hued rope and paper installation by Chiharu Shiota. Titled The Extended Line, the sanguine freestanding work speaks to the Japanese artist’s survival from cancer but also embodies a broader exploration of life lines and linearity with its hundreds of kilometers long ropes holding replicas of Shiota’s body parts.

Inside the fair, the galleries line up with their most standout materials amidst a sweet competition. Marianne Boesky Gallery opts for a group presentation with the gallery’s roster stars. Donald Moffett’s elegantly punctured off white linen painting Lot 030424 (cliff swallows, 1) (2024) pairs well with Suzanne McClelland’s erratic two-panel charcoal abstraction Rank (Billionaires) (207) which hides a list of world’s top billionaires alongside a photographic collage on its back. At another New Yorker David Nolan’s booth, look for similarly absorbing paintings of Iraqi American artist Vian Sora who uses sharp gestures and soothing hues to encapsulate social turmoil on canvas. Hauser & Wirth’s booth boasts a group exhibition with marquee names such as Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, and George Condo—but pay attention to Woman with Packages (1987-1993), a rarely-seen Louise Bourgeois. The mysterious marble sculpture with a wooden base holds a female figure with noticeably detailed facial features, clutching a huddle of bags.

Kabinett sector which is dedicated to curated single artist presentations amidst group showings include 23 participants, such as Perrotin. While the Parisian powerhouse spares its main booth to a group show featuring gallery names such as Hernan Bas, Anna-Eva Bergman, Sophie Calle and Elmgreen & Dragset, the special section exhibits Jean-Michel Othoniel’s glass sculptures that stem from the French artist’s decade-long partnership with mathematician Aubin Arroyo and his theories on knots and reflections. Stitching and knotting claim the center stage in Tina Kim Gallery’s booth which celebrates women artists whose practices involve fiber. A standout is a group of acrylic and plastic buttons on padded canvas works by Filipina American artist Pacita Abad who is currently the subject of a lauded exhibition at MoMA PS1. For a corporal take on the subject matter, note Mira Lee’s The Liars (2021), a suspended latex, chain, and thickened silicon oil statement with spectral hints.

White Cube alludes to the gallery’s upcoming Tracey Emin show of new work this fall with a display of the artist’s 2001-dated bright-colored textile-covered appliquéd blanket Hellter Fucking Shelter. Following his first New York show in over 50 years at the gallery’s Upper East Side space past spring, Richard Hunt is represented with the creeping welded chromed steel sculpture Opposed Linear Forms (1961) from the late artist’s Metamorphosis series. Karma’s grouping includes Kathleen Ryan’s season-appropriated fruit sculptures, albeit rotten. Encrusted with stones and minerals like amazonite, magnesite, calcite, quartz, turquoise or rhodonite, Bad Melon and Bad Orange (both 2024) embody slices plunged into a crippling but beautiful decay. Process is also a thematic thread in Refik Anadol’s project with Turkish Airlines, titled Inner Portraits. The Turkish artist’s AI-generated digital painting comes on the heels of his first institutional British show, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, at the Serpentine Galleries, and uses raw emotional data he collected from first time travelers. Spanning their journeys from leaving home, flying, and arriving to a new destination, the participants’ emotions are translated into a malleable visual lexicon of dancing colors and forms in Anadol’s recognizable fashion.

Art Basel is open to public at Messe, 13 - 16 June 2024

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 (28-30 March) sees the fair’s return to the city, bigger and better than ever with 242 international galleries – 65 more than the 2023 event – alongside 23 newcomers, who are joining the fair for the first time. As the cultural hub in Asia and Asia Pacific, Hong Kong neatly ties together the region’s evolving art landscape and, as Angelle Siyang-Le, the show’s director, says, ‘connects guests from all around the world by offering possibilities of collaboration and innovation inspired by art and artists’.

With the fair spanning a programme of films and talks to curated sections that go far beyond individual galleries, navigating the event is easier said than done, so we’ve put together this guide to the exhibitions and shows – both on-site and off-site – that we’re most excited about during Art Basel Hong Kong 2024.

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 highlights

Encounters

First introduced in 2013, Encounters is, this year, curated by Alexie Glass-Cantor, the executive director of Artspace Sydney. It will feature 16 large-scale projects from global artists from Australia’s Namimapu Maymuru-White to India’s Jitish Kallat, whose piece Wind  Study comprises a suite of intricate drawings realised with fire, wind, smoke and ink. There are 11 works made especially for the fair, including Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy by Hong Kong-based artist Mak2, which takes over two fair booths connected top-to-top and explores ideas of duplication, evolution, and simulation. 

We, however, have our eye on South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s Contingent Spheres. Presented together with Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), Kukje Gallery (Seoul, Busan) and Kurimanzutto (Mexico City, New York), the super-sized installation comprises two colourful rattan sculptures that reference 1960s Op Art and binakol, a motif used in traditional Filipino textiles that together create a dizzying effect. 

Kabinett

From Busan’s Johyun Gallery to A Thousand Plateaus Art  Space in Chengdu, this year’s Kabinett sector, staged within galleries’ main booths, will feature a record 33 galleries. There is a strong focus on solo projects from the Asia Pacific region, featuring artists such as Thailand’s Pinaree Sanpitak – represented by Singapore and  Sydney’s Yavuz Gallery – whose new works illustrate her longstanding exploration of organic structures and materials. 

Make sure to stop by London’s Herald St, whose exhibition of acrylic and ink paintings by Hong Kong-born, London-based Cary Kwok showcases his cinematic exploration of Queer interaction, domesticity, and art history. 

Film

Freely accessible to the public and located on-site at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the film programme (27-30 March) has this year been curated by multimedia artist and film producer Li Zhenhua, and features collaborations with cultural video channel Nowness Asia, as well as Videotage, one of the region’s leading non-profit organisations dedicated to video art. Highlights include A New Old Play (2021) by Chinese filmmaker Qiu Jiongjion, and Sorry for the Late Reply, a single-channel animation created by Hong Kong artist Wong Ping.

Don’t miss out on German artist Anne Imhof’s Sex (2021). Presented by Sprüth Magers, the film is composed of footage created during the first chapter of Imhof’s eponymous performance cycle at Tate Modern in 2019, and is characterised by her dark, visual language.  

Conversations

A platform for dynamic dialogues between some of the best in the art world, Conversations features a programme of 11 panels and speakers from over 15 countries and territories, put together by Stephanie Bailey, writer, editor, and Art Basel’s Asia content advisor and editor. Unfolding in Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre’s auditorium, Conversations (27-30 March) is also freely accessible to the public with highlights including: a panel moderated by Tai Kwun’s head of art, Pi Li, where collectors including Uli Sigg will share their approaches to building era-defining collections of contemporary Chinese art; a roundtable discussion on decolonising cultural institutions in the 21st century with the likes of Zeitz Mocaa chief curator and executive director Koyo Kouoh and M+ Museum director Suhanya Raffel; and a discussion between legendary Japanese artists Shinro Ohtake and Takashi Murakami, organised with Art Week Tokyo, where the duo will reflect on their relationships with Japan’s shape-shifting capital city.

What's new

Not only have 69 galleries returned for Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, but 23 newcomers are joining the fair for the first time. From the Tim Van Laere Gallery, based in Antwerp and Rome, to Los Angeles’ Nonaka-Hill and a bunch from Taipei including PTT Space, Each Modern, and Chini Gallery, there’s lots to get excited about. Shenzhen’s Mangrove Gallery, for example, is presenting a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Tan Jong. Called ‘Nook of a Hazy Dream’, the show comprises several pieces of work focusing on the Chinese diaspora in Thailand and envisioning a return to an imagined homeland through the perspective of a fictional character, using materials such as spices, fabrics, glass, and floor tiles, resulting in an immersive experience through visual, auditory and olfactory elements. 

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 runs 28-30 March

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Beginning this past week in the beachside locale synonymous with glamour and style, the blockbuster Miami Art and Design Week – which encompasses Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 and Design Miami 2023, as well as a slew of other happenings across the city – once again attracted an eclectic array of guests seeking out the next big thing (or, indeed, the next big purchase). 

As ever, alongside art and design, a host of other disciplines was represented – among them food, entertainment, hospitality, beauty, architecture and fashion, the last an industry whose presence has been growing in recent years. And it’s not simply in the designer-heavy get-ups worn by attendees, but also in an array of events, launches and collaborations held by international fashion houses and brands. 

The 2023 edition was not an exception. Here, we round up the best crossover moments at Miami Art and Design Week 2023 – including a special handbag collection designed by Frank Gehry for Louis Vuitton. 

Best fashion moments of Miami Art and Design Week 2023

Fendi unites with cult design duo Bless on ‘Backfrontal’ installation

When secretive design duo Bless – comprising Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, who create provocative objects across disciplines – were initially approached by Fendi to work on an installation for Design Miami, they were sceptical. ‘We were not familiar with Fendi, apart from our on-the-surface understanding of a post-Karl Lagerfeld era,’ Heiss tells Dal Chodha in the December issue of Wallpaper*. ‘We couldn’t see why we were being approached, but then we didn’t expect to feel the connections we did upon entering the Fendi world.’ 

The resulting collaboration – revealed in Miami this week and led by Simon Parris of Kim Jones Studio – is titled ‘Backfrontal’, comprising four double-sided screens crafted by Fendi Casa, set alongside a variety of other objects dreamt up by Bless. These include a shearling intarsia blanket, broom handles and detergent bottles adorned with pieces of fur, as well as a version of Fendi’s Peekaboo bag which playfully evokes a shipping label-stamped parcel. ‘Design – with considerations on functionality, durability and endurance – is the closest form of art to what I do,’ says Silvia Venturini Fendi, who leads the house’s menswear and accessories collection. ‘It’s increasingly important to engage in conversation with talents who can contribute to the evolution of the Fendi aesthetics beyond commercial boundaries.’ 

Read more here.

Frank Gehry creates a sculptural set of bags for Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry has had a longstanding relationship with Louis Vuitton; in 2014, he designed the sweeping Fondation Louis Vuitton gallery in Paris, with its distinctive transparent glass ‘sails’, while in 2019, he designed the house’s equally dramatic Louis Vuitton Maison store in Seoul, South Korea. Now, on the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, the architect has revealed a collection of handbags for Louis Vuitton, each capturing his distinct postmodern design philosophy, complete with unexpected angles and sculptural silhouettes. Due to launch in summer 2024 and separated into four themes – Architecture and Form, Material Exploration, Animals, and Twisted Box, the last inspired by a previous creation for the house’s ‘Celebrating Monogram’ series – the unique designs span a curved top-handle bag in monogram leather, a futuristic style in patchworked transparent plastic, and an array of bags adorned with fish and crocodiles. 

Japanese wrestling league Sukeban’s surprising Miami Debut 

An unexpected crossover of fashion, design and art met at what surprisingly became the week’s most anticipated event: an American outing for Sukeban, the Japanese women’s professional wrestling league, which held a championship fight in the city on Wednesday evening (6 December 2023). Following a sell-out fight in New York earlier this year, Sukeban – named after girl gangs of the 1960s and 1970s – presented a Miami edition including collaborations with fashion designer Olympia Le Tan on the colourful costumes (she said she drew inspiration from anime heroines), make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench (who has worked with numerous fashion brands including Vivienne Westwood, Thom Browne and Junya Watanabe), who created custom looks for each wrestler, as well as Marc Newson, who created the winner’s belt, featuring an enamel plate adorned with illustrations by Ayako Ishiguro. Attended by an array of people in town for the art and design weeks, the Sukeban League might well become the industry’s latest obsession

Read more here.

Birkenstock 1774 reveals art deco-inspired collaboration with Concepts

Massachusetts-born American brand Concepts has been collaborating with Birkenstock for ten years, a milestone celebrated this year as part of Miami Art and Design Week. This time, the pair collaborated on a rainbow-hued take on Birkenstock’s cult Arizona two-strap sandal. The colourful collection comprises four shades – pink, mauve, lime green and faded orange – which are used across a cowhide version of the signature sandal. The bold palette was said to be inspired by Miami’s art deco heritage, an architectural style on view throughout the beachside city, while the collection was celebrated with a special event at the newly opened Birkenstock store in Miami’s Design District (where the collection can be purchased, alongside on 1774.com and cncpts.com).

‘Concepts has a rich history in Miami product storytelling. We found that art, design, and fashion share parallels with the times of art deco,’ says Concepts CEO Tarek Hassan. ‘We are thrilled to partner with Birkenstock on a capsule around this week’s moment in Miami.’

At Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, the artist Alex Israel (a former Wallpaper* Design Awards judge) has partnered with BMW to create an AI-powered, participatory and interactive video installation that guides visitors on a personalised journey through their memories in an ingenious fusion of art and technology. Titled REMEMBR, Israel’s installation takes inspiration from the new 100 per cent electric BMW i5, which uses AI to power a curved display that provides driving data and infotainment on the dashboard in response to the driver’s inputs.

In Israel’s hands, the same technology has been harnessed to develop a proprietary app that filters photographs and videos from the participant’s phone and then beams them onto seven custom-designed screens surrounding the installation. Set to a sun-drenched, specially composed electronic soundtrack, this display collates memorable moments – sunsets, mountain views, birthday parties, selfies, gatherings with friends and concert visits – while leaving the screenshots and other undesirables out of the mix.

‘I was really interested in doing a project with artificial intelligence. I was trying to figure it out, talking to a lot of people and then I got a call from BMW,’ Israel recalls at the opening of the installation. ‘I went to Munich and met with the head designer, Domagoj Dukec, and he showed me the i5 and there are a lot of things about the car that I really aligned with. When you’re in the car, you can select from a series of atmospheric environmental modes. When you pick one of these modes, all the colours in the car change, and they’re meant to elevate your mood and enhance your experience. So BMW and I see eye to eye with this, that colour can enhance and change your mood and your vibe.’

He continues, ‘The second thing was there were all these different things that AI was doing in the car. One example that I found interesting was that if you’re texting and driving, the AI tells you to stop. There are ways in which it helps you and makes your experience better. The technology in the car is really advanced and it's designed to merge man and machine into a closer connected unit and that’s interesting to me. 

‘We’re all experiencing it with our phones. My phone is an external memory bank for my brain, specifically when it comes to pictures and videos. I always wonder if I will ever go and look at all of them again – probably not, but I keep taking them, recording and documenting everything that I do. And so I [wanted to find] a way [that you could] go through all these pictures and look at your life that wasn’t totally tedious and was a little bit entertaining and fun. REMEMBR asks: what if we could revisit and share all these memories in an engaging way?’

The result is a vulnerable and at-times nail biting two-minute video clip that has been aptly choreographed to capture life’s buoyant, pensive and silly moments. Located in the Collectors’ Lounge of Art Basel Miami Beach, for which BMW continues to serve as an official partner, Israel’s installation not only expresses the cultural zeitgeist, but also our developing relationship with technology itself. 

Dukec, BMW’s head of design, says, ‘Alex’s fascination with our latest innovation mirrors our shared commitment to blending the worlds of technology, design and art to pursue something truly extraordinary. The BMW i5 is a vehicle that not only moves you physically but emotionally and imaginatively, much like Alex's art.’

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For more on Art Basel Miami Beach, read our Miami Art Week 2023 guide.

Miami Art Week 2023 is upon us. Every year the world’s art and design enthusiasts flock down to the magic city, eccentric migratory birds looking for a sunny warm enclave to end their season. White halls and metaverse worlds overflow with creative expression, dark high-octane lounge rooms blast with excess. So we say, get your AI gear ready, party shoes polished and discerning eyes sharpened, Miami Art Week is not for the faint of heart, but an unmissable feeding ground rich with diverse culture and premier art. Here are our eight highlights, sure to keep you mesmerised all week long. 

Miami Art Week 2023: what to see

THE BASS – Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s ‘I Will Always Weather With You’

With her first solo show in the United States, Anne Duk See Jordan’s multisensory exhibition ‘I will always weather with you’ opens at The Bass on 4 December, as part of the museum’s 60th-anniversary season. Titled after what sounds like a turbulent love letter, Jordan’s large-scale interactive space addresses climate change induced by technology, and the increasingly challenging life on Earth. 

The immersive installation will consist of three terrestrial zones – land, water, and air – each exploring meteorological adversities endured by the spectrum of living creatures. A sensorial banquet of video projections, sounds, edible landscapes, and odd robotic characters simulates atmospheric conditions, ranging from a gentle breeze to turbulent winds. 

Aptly showing in Miami Beach, these spouts of temperamental weather are something the inhabitants of South Florida know all too well. Through humour and playful devices, Jordan reminds us of the power planet Earth has over us, but also of our hand in tipping the balance against our fragile world. A complex and entangled affair increasingly imminent and increasingly explored in this year’s Miami Art Week. 

On view through 23 June 2024, thebass.org

FAENA ART – Kelly Breez’s ‘Dirt’s Dive’ 

In its solid offering, Faena Art will also be presenting an immersive installation by local Floridian artist Kelly Breez. Set at Faena Art’s Project Room, a permanent space for innovative interventions in Miami Beach, Breez’s ‘Dirt’s Dive’ is a nostalgic journey through dive bars. Playing with scale and popular bar motifs, the artist pays homage to the infamous South Florida dive bars with thoughtfully crafted life-sized figures, sculptures, and illustrations often seen in historic bar settings. 

‘Creating an installation like Dirt’s is as much about story-telling as it is about art-making,’ says Breez. It is of concern that these ill-famed stomping grounds where people socialise while they drink, share tales, and experience chance encounters are being rapidly replaced by flashy manicured rivals, like fast fashion. Through fantasy and playfulness, the exhibition narrates the importance of these bar spaces in both the artist’s personal memory and as crucial threads in our community and its social history.

faenaart.org

PAMM – Gary Simmons’ ‘Public Enemy’

We can always depend on the PAMM (Pérez Art Museum Miami) for delivering exceptional programming during Miami Art Week and one to mark on the calendar is Gary Simmons: ‘Public Enemy’, previewing 5 December. Covering for the first time over three decades of Simmons’ artistic career, the show will feature an expansive collection of sculptures, dynamic installations, plus large scale drawings created at the space. 

Predominant in Simmon’s work, are themes of institutional racism and class inequality in popular American culture, particularly cinema, architecture, and urban music. The regular use of pedagogical motifs, such as smeared or partly-erased chalk drawings on blackboards, are quintessential to his approach. An expression of racially-charged stereotypical icons that incite painful memories, as a history that can be blurred and rewritten, but can’t be erased.

Until 28 April 2024, pamm.org

SUPERBLUE – SFER IK Award 

At Superblue on 5 December, Antoine Bertin was announced winner of the SFER IK Award 2023 –  an AI artwork competition. The artist will receive a two-month residency in SFER IK’s innovative campus in the Mayan jungle. The brief was to create an AI-generated artwork addressing themes of biodiversity, interspecies collaboration, technology, and nature, and Bertin’s winning work, The Bat Cloud, will be showcased at SFER IK’s upcoming open-air museum in Tulum. 

In this self-sustained creative centre, named Azulik Uh May, Bertin will have access to local artisans, digital fabrication facility FabLab, and a hefty $100k budget to work with. Also known as ‘The City of the Arts’, the ten-acre estate, founded by architect, ecologist and entrepreneur Roth, is also home to an architecture and interior design studio, a media production company, and a cluster of workshop pods, all built from locally sourced and sustainable materials. It’s a unique context Roth believes will allow the artist to marry traditional tools with avant-garde design to understand and better serve our natural world. 

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ICA Miami – Sasha Gordon 

Tucked between rows of couture window displays in the Miami Design District (where you might admire installations such as Samuel Ross’ new benches, and Lara Bohinc’s ‘Utopia’), the ICA Miami is another must on the list. Its Miami Art Week programme includes up-and-comer artist Sasha Gordon, whose new series of hyperreal paintings, mostly self-portraits, depict dark fantastical scenes, exploring the complexities of feminine identity through unconventional transformations of the artist’s own body. As a queer Asian-American woman, Gordon dissects societal preconceptions of gender and race, with personal experiences, and portrays emotions of vulnerability, prejudice, and empowerment in a humorous and exquisitely surreal setting. 

Also debuting is Anne Collier’s Unraveling (Are You Out Of Your Mind), a large-scale photographic installation of an unspooled cassette player, which takes over the museum’s central staircase. 

‘Sasha Gordon: Surrogate Self’, until 10 March 2024. Anne Collier, Unraveling (Are You Out Of Your Mind), until 16 October 2024, icamiami.org

Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 – Positions

Coming up to its 21st year edition, Art Basel Miami Beach (8 – 10 December 2023) will host 277 outstanding international galleries, with 25 newcomers joining this prime list. The Positions section of the fair will showcase a superb roster of young Latin American talents. 

Amongst the 16 individual presentations are: 

– Allan Weber, a Brazilian artist, displays new sculptural objects and Tamo junto não é gorjeta, a photo-series referencing class inequalities, developed whilst the artist was delivering food during the pandemic.

– Mexican artist Andrew Roberts debuts four works, including a video piece on aquatic humanoid creatures. Roberts explores topics of war technology and the ocean as a geopolitical space of violence through fantastical installations.

– Esaí Alfredo, from Puerto Rico, exhibits Noches Que Nunca Acaban / Nights That Never Ended, a collection of cinematic, dream-like paintings portraying mysterious predominantly male rural scenes of nocturnal life in the tropical oasis.   

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Art Basel Miami Beach – Meridians

Also not to be missed are the 19 large-scale heavy-hitters featured in the Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach, focusing this year on themes ‘that speak to nature, to the land, and to various cultural and spiritual geographies in a world of changing boundaries and shifting identities’, says Meridians’ curator, Magalí Arriola, director of Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. 

As highlights:

– Paula Cooper will be representing Ja’Tovia Gary’s debut installation and film collage Quiet As It’s Kept. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye as a starting thread, Gary challenges objectivity in nonfiction genres and reinserts her own visual memory to repair often-skewed representations of Black life. 

– Private Collection, by Libyan-Yurok artist Saif Azzuz comments on land boundaries determined by privilege and colonisation, with a 16ft x 16ft fenced yard installation housing sculptures and paintings only visible through small gaps in the enclosure. 

– Finally, the site-specific 60-minute music composition, The Keys, performed by Stefan Tcherepnin, embodies through electric cartographic tracks the perilous geography of Key Largo, where the artist’s grandmother lived.  

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As Frieze Week draws to a close, so Paris+ opens its doors, with a swathe of events, exhibitions and happenings across the city plus, of course, the fair. We won’t call it a competition, but in the wake of London’s fantastic showing Paris is following up with the goods, and from the Seine to the 16th there is something for everyone. 

“I am looking forward to once again welcoming more than 150 of the world's leading galleries in Paris – a city whose art world is truly experiencing a moment, thanks to the tireless work of its galleries, its ambitious public and private cultural institutions, and its openness to collaborate with other creative industries,” director of Paris+ for Art Basel Clément Delépine told Wallpaper*. “I encourage visitors to make the best of their stay by exploring the city’s world-class museums, top-notch hospitality offerings, and dynamic cultural landscape - to which we are proud to contribute not only with the fair, but also with our free public program, which unfolds across six iconic venues of the French capital.”

Indeed, Paris+ has updated its second edition with more galleries and an expanded public programme conceived with the city’s public institutions. These events are free to the public- although they may require booking- and include a talks series at the Centre Pompidou which includes Isaac Julien and Bouchra Khalili and Steven Cohen, as well as  an exhibition of contemporary art ‘La Cinquième Saison’ in the Jardin de Tuileries curated by Louvre-Lens curator Annabelle Ténèze. This is in addition to two new collaborating venues: the Palais d’Iéna, which is showing Michelangelo Pistoletto ,and L'Institut de France which hosts an exhibition by Sheila Hicks. Other fairs in the city include Asia Now Paris Internationale and the very boutique Private Choice.

Over the last decade ‘fondations d'entreprises’ have helped change Paris’ contemporary art scene. At the forefront of this are Maison Guerlain, supporters of the arts in the city since they were founded, and Lafayette Anticipations. This year Maison Guerlain will stage the group exhibition Fleurs du Mal at their stunning Maison which includes work from Laurent Grasso, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anna Aagaard Jensen, Francesco Clemente and Ghizlane Sahli. 

“It's really the artists and what they are creating for us that enables us to live in the world that we're living now, through the ups and the downs,” said Ann Caroline Prazan international artistic director, brand culture & heritage at Guerlain. “Through their vision and through what they produce and how they see the world–it allows us to get through the everyday.” 

Over at the ultra-contemporary Lafayette Anticipations they are showing ‘Study for No’ by artist of the moment Issy Wood, who will also be performing her music at this multifaceted venue on 19th October. They are also hosting Jamaican artist Akeem Smith’s ‘One Last Cry’, Smith’s work sits at the axis of art, fashion and anthropology and often draws from his extensive archive of the Jamaican dancehall scene. 

Following an influx of new galleries in the city that are yet more high profile, international names are entering the fray. Hauser & Wirth have opened with a stunning show of paintings by the American artist Henry Taylor, and are joined by Sao Paulo gallery Mendes Wood who are staging a group exhibition ‘I see no difference between a handshake and a poem’ featuring Giangiacomo Rossetti, Paula Siebr, Charlotte Moth and Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa. London gallery Modern Art will also be opening a Paris space with another group show with work from Nicolas Deshayes, Mohammed Sami, Andrew Cranston and Michael E. Smith.

 Paris’ established galleries are also showing a plethora of stunning shows with painting taking the lead. You can see elusive but wonderful Mamma Anderson at David Zwirner and the US duo with their roots in the former Yugoslavia, TARWUK, are on at White Cube. Kamel Menor are showing Daniel Buren, and Eliza Douglas and Lily van der Stokker are on view at Air de Paris. Vallois have Tableaux Éclatés by Niki de Saint Phalle, and Thaddeaus Ropac are showing two stellar offerings from Lisa Brice in the city centre and Alvaro Barrington at their Pantin space. 

The art institutions of Paris are the stuff of legend, but are most known for their historical shows. This year they are putting on a series of shows by living and more recent artists, notably including Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton, for which Pace Gallery has created a booth of commissioned responses by younger, living artists such as Torkwase Dyson, Wang Guangle and Maysha Mohamedi. These dialogues between the fairs and the public exhibitions are always a highlight for those who come to look and to buy. 

Bourse de Commerce is having an exhibition of work by musician and artist Mike Kelley, and Musée d’Orsay has an exhibition by British artist Peter Doig. Palais de Tokyo is staging a show by cutting edge multidisciplinary artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar which uses installation and dance, and Centre Pompidou opens Picasso ‘Endlessly Drawing’ on Wednesday to coincide with the opening of the fair. 

 Whether you are exploring Bellville, Pantin and the public programme, to buy, or somewhere in between Paris+ has put its best foot forward for its sophomore year.

Paris+ Art Basel runs from October 20 - 22nd

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Nature, ecology, queer perspectives and quantum physics intertwine in a web of fantastical references at Art Basel 2023 (15 – 18 June), which this year unites 284 galleries, including 21 first-time participants.

Art Basel 2023: the highlights

Perspective is viewed through a historical lens at Unlimited, encompassing 76 large-scale installations curated by Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. From Monica Bonvicini’s psychosexual study of how space leads behaviour in ‘Never Again’ (2005), to Firelei Báez’s rethinking of the ruins of San-Souci Palace in northern Haiti, context and its power is celebrated in all forms.

Elsewhere, site-specific installations around the Münsterplatz and Basel’s city centre are curated by Samuel Leuenberger as part of Parcours, the largest to date. ‘Samuel Leuenberger, Parcours’ curator has chosen a brilliant mix of projects which include both installation and site-specific projects and spread across locations including libraries, private meeting rooms financial institutions, domestic gardens, underground tunnels, bars, and even traffic roundabouts,’ says director of Fairs and Exhibition Platforms, Vincenzo de Bellis. ‘Highlights in Parcours this year include Jacolby Satterwhite’s presentation with the support of Mitchell Innes & Nash explores themes of faith, mythology, rehabilitation, and spiritual acceptance through two video installations, a VR work and painting. There is also an exciting performance by the artist on Parcours Night on Saturday 17h June  in the Museum der Kulturen in Munsterplatz. We are also looking forward to Melike Kara’s immersive and site-specific installation, held in the UBS branch Aeschenvorstadt, which documents Kurdish culture through paintings and a series of photographic prints from her personal archive and open imagery.’

This year, the emphasis will also be on dialogue, with new sector Kabinett dedicated to presentations from artists including Anri Sala, Hugh Steers and Henrik Håkansson. ‘Galleries are presenting works by artists exploring an extraordinary variety of themes and interests,’ de Bellis adds. ‘For example, there are queer perspectives: Alexander Gray Associates for the Kabinett sector will present the most extensive survey of the US painter Hugh Steers in Europe known for his allegorical work of 80s and 90s New York and who died of AIDS at the age 32; themes relating to fantasy and the imaginary are present: in Statements: Chapter NY will show Stella Zhong whose work is informed by astro-and quantum physics and also issues relating to nature and ecology will be on view: in Unlimited, Thaddeus Ropac will present Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth’s 9m long triptych inspired by the animals that have perished in environmental disasters and those discovered in Tutenkhamun’s tomb in 1922.’

For partner and global creative director at Hauser & Wirth, Neil Wenman, this year’s fair is an opportunity to highlight links between long-standing themes in artists’ work. ‘Despite the change of form and colour, the message remains as relevant today as ever. The early painting ‘Bartica’ by Frank Bowling from 1968 feels as fresh today as it did the day it was made. His work is a constant source of inspiration for younger artists. This sense of continuation and learning is important for one to remember. To think about the urge to make, the desire of the artist to communicate.’

As well as a focus on emerging artists and new works from established artists, Hauser & Wirth will also consider Louise Bourgeois in a consideration of her rare and early works. ‘The work of Louise Bourgeois always leaves me a little dumbfounded, her ability to express her most personal inner feelings is unbound,’ Wenman says. ‘Yet it’s always important to see an origin of an idea and to understand that lightbulb moment when an artist puts down on the canvas a symbol or character that is to become a trope. The early painting ‘One Way Traffic’ by Bourgeois does just that. She flips between abstraction and figurations and jostles with form-making over mark-making to form the beginnings of what becomes her visual lexicon.’  

Art Basel 2023 is open to the public June 15 - 18
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Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 will be a defining moment for Hong Kong as a regional cultural hub and the centre of Asia’s luxury art market. 

As Hong Kong emerges from some of the strictest Covid-19 restrictions in the world in time for the 2023 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, the contemporary art trade appears to be thriving, revealing that the period of relative isolation has led to intense creativity and investment in the city’s cultural landscape.

‘In circumstances of obstruction we create in a much more intentional way,’ notes Alexie Glass-Kantor, executive director of Artspace, Sydney, who curated Encounters, the section of Art Basel dedicated to large-scale works. Local artist Trevor Yeung’s Mr Cuddles Under the Eave references Typhoon Mangkhut with uprooted money trees suspended from a grid. ‘The work is about resilience. It feels representative of Hong Kong.’ Encounters also extend beyond the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre with Gravity, a playful ten-metre King Tutankhamun inflatable sculpture by Los Angeles-based Awol Erizku causing a sensation at Pacific Place mall.

Art Basel Hong Kong 2023: what to expect

The fair, forced to scale down and add online viewing rooms in 2021 and 2022, has a strong showing for its 2023 edition, with 177 galleries, 33 of them local, supported by a well-curated Conversations programme, available online. Angelle Siyang-Le, Director, Art Basel Hong Kong stresses that for the first time, Art Basel is providing onsite space to local universities. ‘Our show today has become a focal point for the city’s arts community.’

Despite intense rivalry from Singapore’s new Art SG, and Seoul where Frieze has launched a fair, Hong Kong’s cultural landscape has undoubtedly been boosted by the M+ and Palace Museums in the West Kowloon Cultural District. M+’s 65 x 110m media façade displays Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist’s mesmerising site-specific work Hand Me Your Trust, which pays homage to Hong Kong’s architectural heritage.

Art exhibitions to see during Art Basel Hong Kong 2023

In parallel to the Fair, Art Central has cutting-edge exhibitions of video and performance art, and an educational programme and the growing number of local and international art galleries show that, apart from its own art connoisseurs, Hong Kong remains the city of choice for mainland China collectors. Notably, international auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips have all chosen to establish their Asian headquarters there.

‘There is no other city in Asia that can truly rival Hong Kong for art and auctions, considering the city is a more flexible market and its strategic and convenient location in the centre of Asia,’ says Asia chairman of Phillips, Jonathan Crockett, who recently opened a 50,000 sq ft exhibition space, saleroom, café, and VIP lounge.

This week’s highlights across the city include K11 Musea's ‘City As Studio’, China’s first major exhibition, graffiti and street art exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch with works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and AIKO, and Urban Rocks, an immersive installation of twelve enigmatic stone sculptures inspired by Chinese scholar’s rocks by Hong Kong-based French artist Polo Bourieau, at ArtisTree. Outdoor works include untitled: folly; baubles, an installation made by Phyllida Barlow (who sadly passed away last week) for the British Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017; and the ever-popular Hot Dog Bus by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. 

Duddells is showing ‘The Drifters’, a group exhibition featuring a wonderfully eclectic collection of pieces belonging to five Hong Kong-based collectors including Alan Lo and Evan Chow, and at H Queen’s, a 24-storey hub of art galleries, architect William Lim has a solo exhibition of vibrant paintings titled ‘Flowers Good Moon Round’.

Can Hong Kong reclaim the title of ‘Asia’s art hub’?

‘The energy and excitement on the street is palpable,’ says Lo, who recommends Jes Fan’s sculptural work at Empty Gallery and Tai Kwun Contemporary’s major exhibition of art exploring LGBTQ+ themes.

Henry Au Yeung of Grotto Fine Arts – the only gallery to represent solely Hong Kong artists, has a strong display at the fair, with Shum Kwan-yi’s ink Forbidden Exercise on silk and Lee Bovey’s colourful hand-cut paper illustrations standing out – says ‘I think that Hong Kong has become much more interesting in that we now have a lot of different opinions and our society is becoming more complex. Kwan-yi is only 26 years old yet her works are incredibly insightful. They raise questions.’ Other highlights include Gagosian, Pearl Lam and 10 Chancery Lane.

International art galleries have signalled a return to business as usual with choice pieces: David Zwirner’s Central gallery presents ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Shop’, and Axel Vervoordt Gallery Hong Kong‘s ‘Topography of Body’, is a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary conceptual artist Kimsooja’s of indigo Indian block prints, and new clay and rice paper works. White Cube presents ‘Deep Dive’, British-Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s delicate lithographs.

As Hong Kong returns to some kind of normalcy, art consultant Alison Pickett questions any assumption that the art scene closed down during the three-year hiatus. ‘There is some misconception that the Hong Kong art scene doesn’t exist except for one week out of 52 - during Art Basel Hong Kong and Art Central. But after the doors of the Convention Centre close, all of us Hong Kongers carry on as usual, working on projects and exhibitions, curating shows and collections, and creating beautiful art.’

Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 runs from 23-25 March at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. artbasel.com

Art Basel was founded in 1970 to lure a new wave of collectors and enthusiasts in the postwar consumer society, rich in time, money and new means of global communication. The art mega fair has spent the last 50 years redefining what an art event can be. Beyond a marketplace for the deep-pocketed, a magnet for celebrities, a hotbed for lavish parties and fertile ground for people-watching, Art Basel has become a cultural incubator for some of the most radical moments in the history of contemporary art.

Following an epic Art Basel Miami 2022, we take the opportunity to reflect on the unforgettable moments that have defined the fair’s history, from taped bananas to wealth-ranking ATMs. 

An ATM displayed and ranked visitors’ bank balances

How would you feel to see your bank balance displayed, and ranked, in public? Well, it might depend on how much you had in there. At Perrotin’s booth at Art Basel Miami 2022, American art collective MSCHF debuted ATM Leaderboard, an installation displaying the real-time bank balances of users (with a picture of their faces), and ranking them in order of wealth. 

Monster Chetwynd played ball on Art Basel’s Messeplatz

At Art Basel 2021, British artist Monster Chetwynd made quite the entrance. Taking to the Messeplatz near the fair entry point, performers clad in glamorous, sequin-studded costumes rolled in and danced around giant transparent zorbs directed by the artist’s choreography. This extraterrestrial performance, titled Tears, was inspired by Salvador Dalí’s bejewelled crying eye timepiece and made for a poetic, absurd and jaw-dropping prologue to Art Basel’s 2021 edition. 

Maurizio Cattelan’s duct tape-meets-banana drama 

In 2019, it had been a while since the art world had given its community an electric shock. Just as the dust was settling (in retrospect, the calm before an earth-rattling storm), Maurizio Cattelan took the lull as an opportunity to strike. Created in an edition of three, his Comedian consisted of a fresh – if lightly bruised – solitary banana taped to Perrotin gallery’s booth wall with a piece of metallic duct tape. It was a minimal composition – which later inspired a series of T-shirts – using a classic comedy device to comment on global trade. Or maybe not; as Cattelan put it, ‘The banana is supposed to be a banana’. 

In another dramatic plot twist, Georgian performance artist David Datuna ate the piece, calling his post-sale intervention Hungry Artist. This was not the first time Cattelan had harnessed this lucrative combination of tape, walls and organic matter. Twenty years previously, the artist adhered his gallerist, Massimo de Carlo, to his gallery wall in Milan in a web of electrical tape. De Carlo, like the banana, found himself at the complete mercy of the artist in a piece that gave new meaning to the notion of ‘bonding’. 

Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist got a room, well 14 Rooms 

14 Rooms, to some extent, was what it said on the tin. For the live artwork, curatorial powerhouses Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist invited 14 international artists to each ‘activate’ a room, examining the relationship between space, time, and physicality. But, as one might imagine, there was a twist: each artwork’s ‘material’ was a human being. 

The piece sat somewhere between theatre, sculpture and museum exhibition. The commission was of unprecedented scale for an art fair, running the full duration of Art Basel. This edition of the piece, which first premiered at Manchester International Festival as 11 Rooms, featured works by Marina Abramović, Damien Hirst, Santiago Sierra, Xu Zhen, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Otobong Nkanga, the latter three debuting new works. Each work took place within its own closed-off room, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Art Basel braved a new virtual reality

Before 2020, the term ‘OVR’ might have sounded more like an obscure business acronym, or possibly an obsolete file format. But when Covid-19 struck, it became a lifeline for the globally art-deprived. OVRs (Online Viewing Rooms), came to the fore following the outbreak of Covid-19. In the year of its 50th anniversary, Art Basel had no option but to cancel the 2020 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. As the first major domino to fall, this sent shockwaves through the art world and left all subsequent in-person events in a frenzy of uncertainty. To keep the momentum alive, Art Basel recalibrated with the first digital-only edition. 

Kader Attia smashed up his Arab Spring installation

It was a 2011 press image of looted glass vitrines in Cairo's Egyptian Museum that inspired Kader Attia’s Arab Spring (2014). For the sculptural installation, staged at Art Basel Unlimited in 2015, Attia re-enacted the moment protesters entered the museum, destroyed its display cases, and robbed their contents during the Arab Revolutions of 2011-12. 

Attia wears a dark hoodie shielding his face as he pelts bricks to shatter the vitrines – a gritty performance, filled with revolt and anger. In Arab Spring, Attia explored the legacy of colonialism, specifically French colonialism, and the contradictory notion of how a country intent on reclaiming its future would destroy what was at last becoming theirs. Attia staged the performance at the preview of Art Basel, the shattered glass and red brick debris forming the final work.

INFORMATION

artbasel.com

A canopy of light and sound, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Topology is composed of 3,000 lightbulbs suspended at different heights, powered by the continuous beat of human hearts. The installation, the latest in the Mexican-Canadian artist’s Pulse series, illuminates the Superblue space at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 in a unique collaboration with BMW i.

Custom-made pulse sensors capture the individual heartbeats of visitors. Each then powers a spectacular light display and a sonic landscape that constantly evolves as people enter and leave the space. It’s an intimate and deeply personal experience that aims to foster human connection, highlighting both the fragility and the joy of living.

Lozano-Hemmer, whose participatory works have previously harnessed artificial intelligence and robotics, has also collaborated with BMW’s engineers and scientists to bring the installation to life within the first-ever fully-electric BMW i7 sedan. 

On view during Miami Art Week 2022, Pulse Topology is part of a series of biometric pieces that Lozano-Hemmer has been making since 2006. The original works featured up to 500 incandescent light bulbs arranged as chandeliers or room arrays. Since then the artist has been experimenting with LED filament technology, making it possible to light thousands of bulbs with very little power.  

‘I decided to create a full landscape with crests and valleys that the visitors would be invited to traverse,’ says Lozano-Hemmer.  ‘The topology is similar to the original inspiration for the piece: a scene in the film Macario (1960), where the protagonist enters the Cacahuamilpa Caves in Mexico and sees every person on the planet represented by a frail flickering candle.’

When he was growing up in Mexico City, Lozano-Hemmer’s parents operated a nightclub, an ongoing influence on his practice. ‘I always say that my work is incomplete. As an artist (or a nightclub owner) you can create the platform, the context, and the ambience, but your effort is only really successful when the public takes it over and self-represents. I think some people in Miami will see my work as a continuation of nightlife's flashy aesthetics of spectacle; I'm really fine with that. But I do hope that more people see it as a reflective work, one that makes tangible the intimate rhythms that keep us alive, underlining the fragility of it all, and at the same time, the feeling of being included, even if it is just in a temporary womb-like choir.’

Seeing visitors react to the installation has been both revelatory and uplifting. ‘Originally I thought the project would be quite mournful, like a memento mori that reminds you that your heartbeat will only complete a relatively small amount of cycles. But we are seeing many other reactions: some find it romantic to add their heartbeat next to their loved one, others meditate to slow down their pulse and calm the whole environment, and others feel unease as their arrhythmia becomes shared in light and sound. The project is open to interpretation and I am happy not to be able to predict public reactions.’

At the heart of it all, Lozano-Hemmer wants to create a sense of community and meaningful connection. ’The great American composer Frederic Rzewski said that people “coming together” was the most important objective of art,’ he says. ‘After social distancing and Zoom fatigue, it is critical to re-embody our social space.’

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Topology runs until 4 December 2022 bmw.co.uk;superblue.com

Miami Art and Design Week – the colloquial name for the combination of Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami – begins today (29 November 2022), seeing international artists, designers, gallerists and collectors arrive en masse in the beachside city for the various art and design happenings taking place over the coming days. The fashion industry is present too; in recent years, brands have chosen the week to unveil collaborations, stage exhibitions, or undertake runway shows (memorably, last year included a Louis Vuitton menswear show, an homage to artistic director Virgil Abloh who had died just days prior). 

The 2022 edition is no exception – among others, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent and Fendi will all be present this week in Miami, showcasing various projects spanning art, design and fashion. Here, Wallpaper* selects the best crossover moments at Miami Art and Design Week 2022. 

The best fashion crossovers at Miami Art and Design Week 2022

Bottega Veneta and Gaetano Pesce: ‘Come Stai?’ at Design Miami

Matthieu Blazy’s acclaimed sophomore outing at Bottega Veneta, held in Milan this past September, featured a set designed in collaboration with 83-year-old Italian designer Gaetano Pesce. The space, called ‘the world in a small room’ by Blazy, comprised a swirled resin floor in Pesce’s signature saturated palette, alongside 400 equally colourful chairs crafted from cotton canvas dipped in resin (it marked the first original chair in some years from Pesce). Each one was entirely unique, some featuring naive motifs by the designer – from handbags and smiley faces to question marks – in an attempt to capture the diversity of human life. ‘It is about the human being; we are all different,’ he said at the time. ‘We are all different and this is our defining quality – otherwise, we are just a copy. We are all originals, and this is one of the themes of my design.’

The various chairs will go on display as part of the Design Miami 2022 fair, where a selection will also be available to purchase. An accompanying book – titled Come Stai?, the name given to the original project – will also be released, exploring ‘the ideation, approach, and process of the collaboration’ in a conversation between Pesce and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Like the chairs, each cover of the limited-edition book will be entirely unique, its publication celebrated with a book-signing by Pesce which takes place 30 November 2022 from 4pm to 6pm at the fair.

Come Stai?, the exhibition, runs at 153 NE 40th St, Miami, FL 3313 from 30 November 2022 to 4 December 2022

Saint Laurent Rive Droite: Sex by Madonna, curated by Anthony Vaccarello

One of contemporary photography’s most controversial tomes, Madonna’s Sex book, a collaboration with image-maker Steven Meisel, was banned by the Vatican and caused waves of conservative protest across America on its 1992 release. Its legacy is celebrated in a new exhibition by Saint Laurent curated by the house’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello alongside the musician herself. The show coincides with the re-release of the book as part of Saint Laurent Rive Droite (the house’s ‘creative and cultural destination’, which has stores in Paris and Los Angeles), and features large-format versions of the book’s now-iconic images. It’s an exploration of the ‘once-shocking now timeless’ volume and its ‘liberated views of sexual self-expression’, which have inspired countless artists in its wake. The ephemeral gallery is found on Miami’s beachfront, where a limited-edition number of copies, signed by Madonna and benefitting her Raising Malawi fund, will be sold via auction, alongside limited-edition T-shirts and tote bags. 

The Saint Laurent beachfront gallery will be free to visit for anyone over the age of 18 from 29 November 2022, to 4 December 2022.

Louis Vuitton at Art Basel Miami Beach

Louis Vuitton takes part in Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 with a special exhibit featuring works by some of the world’s best-known artists (many of which have previously collaborated with the house). Titled the ‘Louis Vuitton lounge’, the space displays pieces including two wax figures of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (created by the artist herself), a panda figure by Takashi Murakami balancing on a vintage Vuitton trunk, paintings by Richard Prince and Alex Katz, a photograph by Jean Larivière, and the new Artycapucines collection, whereby various artists leave their unique imprint on the house’s Capucines handbag. Elsewhere, a celebration of Vuitton’s relationship with Kusama takes place – marking ten years since she first united with the house – revealing a teaser of a new upcoming collaboration. 

Louis Vuitton will present at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139 from 29 November – 4 December 2022.

Fendi presents Lukas Gschwandtner’s Triclinium at Design Miami

Fendi has invited Austrian artist Lukas Gschwandtner to display a new work as part of Design Miami, a continuation of his fascination with imagery of women reclining on chaise longues. ‘I have always noticed depictions of reclining female figures, carved into building façades and friezes,’ he told Wallpaper* earlier this year. Titled Triclinium, it is a continuation of his Pillow Portraits series – ’wearable canvas sculptures referencing historical portraits of women’ – with the new furniture-inspired works on display in Miami drawing particular inspiration from Fendi’s history of leather work and use of calico in the atelier. ‘The moment the sculpture is worn, it immediately directs the body to impersonate the corresponding painting or artwork,’ says Gschwandtner.

The artist’s reimagining of Fendi’s ‘Peekaboo’ handbag, created by filling each compartment with plaster before cutting away the original material, accompanies the exhibit. 

Triclinium is on show from 29 November – 4 December 2022 at Design Miami.

Stone Island’s 40th birthday celebrations

Stone Island was founded by Massimo Osti in 1982; 40 years on, it is one of the world’s most recognised clothing brands, now synonymous with subcultural movements and the underground music scene. To celebrate, the Italian brand is hosting a party in Miami on 29 November 2022, promising performances and sets from Jamie XX, O.BEE, Tomas Station and Jonny Rock. An accompanying collection – titled 82/22 – celebrates four decades of technical innovation, reinventing archival pieces in the cutting-edge fabrications long linked with the brand. 

The Codes c/o Architecture by Virgil Abloh for Nike

28 November 2022 marked the one-year anniversary of Virgil Abloh’s death – a designer whose resonance continues to be keenly felt. A new exhibition, debuting in Miami, celebrates his fruitful partnership with Nike, a label he collaborated with throughout his career. Titled ‘The Codes c/o Architecture by Virgil Abloh for Nike’ and held alongside Virgil Abloh Securities, the four-day happening will revisit the agenda-setting collaboration through an exploration of Abloh’s approach to design.

‘Virgil and Nike thrived together because he understood the brand’s role as a cornerstone of culture while Nike understood the importance of truly supporting creatives and their visions,’ says Shannon Abloh, the chief executive officer and managing director of VA Securities. ’This beautiful four-day experience at Miami Art Week will honour their legacy together and champion both Virgil’s open-source methods and his genuine commitment to collaborating with and inspiring others.’

For information on opening hours and programming of ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes c/o Architecture,’ follow @arch___itecture.  

In partnership with Ruinart

Vintage champagne, sunshine and art are a heady and mouthwatering combination. Look forward to all three at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 as Ruinart and Jeppe Hein present a limited-edition Jeroboam of Ruinart Rosé in a special wooden box by the Danish artist, and offer experiential art and mindful escape at The Ruinart Beach Art Lounge. 

Ruinart Rosé Jeroboam limited edition by Jeppe Hein

The limited edition joins Hein’s installation Right Here, Right Now, the 2022 commission in Ruinart’s Carte Blanche series, for the culmination of its world tour – and is infused with the same themes of sensory discovery and surprise.

The Carte Blanche commission inspired Hein to explore the history and know-how of the house through his art. As part of his artistic reinterpretation of Maison Ruinart, he transformed the wooden box containing a Jeroboam of Ruinart rosé into a work of art, examining the different dimensions of champagne, and nodding to Right Here, Right Now at every turn.

The installation, which sees Hein re-assess the simple things – a grape, a piece of wet chalk, and the specific aroma that lingers over the Champagne region’s vineyards – is a playful, participatory immersion in Maison Ruinart’s world. It spans guided meditation, mirrored speech bubbles bearing motivational maxims, and the chance for visitors to express their emotional state through drawing with chalk inside bubble-like circles. 

The artist used chalk again – taken from the walls of Ruinart’s chalk pits in Reims – to whiten the Jeroboam’s wooden box, giving it a ceruse-like appearance. In place of the usual Ruinart label, meanwhile, the bottle bears a rosé-coloured mirror label, with no writing, echoing the bubbles from the installation. Once it has served its purpose, the box becomes the base for a rose-coloured mirror sculpture, evoking both the colour and sparkling bubbles of the champagne.

Be Right Here, Right Now at The Ruinart Beach Art Lounge

Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 is a last opportunity to experience Right Here, Right Now. The installation will form part of The Ruinart Beach Art Lounge, situated on the South Beach beachfront between 21st and 22nd Streets.  

The lounge is intended as both an experiential art piece and a mindful escape during Art Basel Miami Beach. Guests are welcomed to embrace moments of calm and to be ‘right here, right now’ through a series of meditative sound baths and interactive art experiences hosted by Hein himself. 

Inspired by the Miami beachfront setting, the ‘Breathe with Me and the Waves’ guided meditations encourage participants to paint their own breath in wave-like brushstrokes. The guided experience will provide visitors with a new way to connect with art by encouraging them to pause and live in the moment, simultaneously recharging from the endless stimulation experienced during the art fair. 

The Ruinart Beach Art Lounge will be open to the public and available to all on a first come, first served basis. The ‘Breathe with Me and the Waves’ guided meditations with Hein are available to reserve. ‘I wanted to give the audience an eye-opening experience using artistic tools,’ says Hein. ‘To make them see, smell, hear, taste and feel the essence of both Ruinart and their own lives.’ 

The Ruinart Rosé Jeroboam limited edition by Jeppe Hein comprises 25 signed and numbered copies, priced €3,500 each.

ruinart.com

It’s beginning to look a lot like Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. As the art world glitterati flocks to the city for one of the mega-moments on the art calendar, it’s all systems go for Miami Art Week 2022. 

This year, for the 20th anniversary of Art Basel Miami Beach, there’s a lot to see, hear and talk about, before we even get to the parties (and afterparties). Fortunately, we have you covered with our guide to the art exhibitions we're most excited about during Miami Art Week 2022.

And if you're in the mood for a bit of art fair-related fun, try our art fair personality test to suss out what type of Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 visitor you are.

Miami Art Week 2022: a guide to the highlights 

1. Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 20th-anniversary edition

Miami’s success as an art destination has no doubt been bolstered by Art Basel selecting the city in 2002 as its sole US location. It was conceived 20 years ago as a platform to bridge the North and South American art markets, championing local and international art, as well as elevating the position of Latin American art on the global stage. The biggest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach yet, 2022 will see 282 galleries will participate, hosted at the Miami Beach Convention Center (AKA the centre of the art universe during Miami Art Week 2022).

This year, we have our eye on the fair’s Positions section. Among the 19 solo presentations are Sung Tieu’s thought-provoking project, ‘Anomalous Incident,’ a culmination of the artist’s research into the psychological dimensions of warfare, specifically the mysteries surrounding Havana syndrome, and abstract paintings by Leslie Martinez which bridge notions of queerness and border politics.

2. Nina Chanel Abney, ‘Big Butch Energy’ at the ICA, Miami  

Nina Chanel Abney’s ‘Big Butch Energy’ (until 12 March 2023) uses bold colours, stylised forms, graphic design traditions and cubic motifs to draw views into a web of complex political narratives. Drawing on cinematic and media representations of Greek student life, the artist highlights racist systems and sexual desire in the United States and explores how gender perception and performance are inspired by the legacies of social ritual and the dissemination of visual culture. ‘Instead of just rewriting Greek life narratives with queer Black characters, I wanted to highlight the implicit flamboyance and homoeroticism of frat house and sorority house environments,’ Abney says. 

3. Leandro Erlich ‘Liminal’ at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) 

In another Miami Art Week 2022 mega-moment, Argentine artist Leandro Erlich will unveil ‘Liminal’ his first North American survey at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), spanning two decades of the artist’s career, with sixteen interactive works and site-specific installations. In what’s set to be one of the most Instagrammed moments of Miami Art Week 2022 (if the artist’s sand-covered traffic jam on Miami Beach in 2019 is anything to go by), the show (on until 4 September 2023) will feature Erlich’s acclaimed Swimming Pool (1999), rising out of PAMM’s car park. 

4. Alex Prager, ‘Part 2: Run’ at Lehmann Maupin Palm Beach

Alex Prager’s Palm beach show will probe the root of cultural ambivalence and uncertainty. Through new photographs, films, and sculptures, LA-based artist offers an uncanny look at everyday anxieties through meticulously staged but ambiguous scenes that nod to cinematic techniques such as noir and the Western. The Palm Beach exhibition builds upon a solo presentation at Lehmann Maupin London earlier this year and will culminate in the debut of Prager’s ambitious new film at the gallery’s New York location in January 2023.

5. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Topology with BMW i at Superblue Miami 

Lozano-Hemmer's ongoing series of 'Pulse Artworks' capture and make tangible the heartbeats of participants. Titled Pulse Topology, the first Miami presentation of the artist’s series draws on conversations with engineers and designers of the new BMW i7. Composed of 3,000 lightbulbs, suspended at different heights, the artwork creates a flickering, memento mori landscape that offers a deeply human approach to technological innovation. Pulse Topology will be staged at Superblue Miami until 4 December. 

6. Random International debut Living Room, an immersive installation commissioned by Aorist, in partnership with Faena Art

In another immersive vein, experimental art collective Random International will debut Living Room, housed in a purpose-built pavilion at Faena Beach. The installation will explore how blockchain technology can revolutionise how visitors experience and collect art and builds on the group’s iconic Rain Room. Living Room has been commissioned by Aorist, the cultural institution supporting artists creating at the edge of art and technology, who was also behind Refik Anadol’s much-acclaimed Machine Hallucinations: Coral at Miami last year, and the first-ever indoor drone performance by Drift during the Venice Biennale 2022. 

Art Basel Miami Beach, 1-3 December (invitation-only preview days on 29 and 30 December) at Miami Beach Convention Center. artbasel.com

In recent weeks, the French capital has been elevated culturally by the arrival of Paris+ par Art  Basel. The newest iteration of the cutting-edge art fair brought together 156 leading French and international galleries within Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary location while the Grand Palais undergoes renovations. 

Beneath clear autumnal skies, I met the duo in front of The Ritz on the historic Place Vendôme where Sans described how, ‘This spectacular installation sets a dialogue between new structures combining natural stone globes and three concrete stairs with a set of 17 spheres, a recurring motif for the artist.’ Kwade added that ‘the staircases have a clear symbolic meaning. It’s about human nature - continually trying to elevate yourself, but then inevitably going down again.’ Her interest in power reflects the nearby column depicting Napoleon. ‘He was reaching for the stars and trying to elevate himself above everybody else. But I’m trying to bring the stars down onto Place Vendôme.’

Before we met, I knew Alicja’s work from her Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as the permanent collections of Paris’ Centre Pompidou and the Boros Collection in Berlin where she lives and works. The studio complex that she shares with artists like Olafur Eliasson is on a river in the East of Berlin. ‘To be honest, my favourite place on the planet is being alone in my studio at night’ says Kwade. ‘It is where I feel very happy and balanced.’ 

Although Kwade prefers to work alone, there is a natural sense of community in her work.  As we spoke, we watched children play on her sculptures. As Sans describes, ‘her work is very engaging - those spheres are like magnets. From old to young - everyone wants to touch because it gives you strength.’ There is a natural friendship between artist and curator that felt almost balletic as we spoke. Sans describes how, ‘when I work with an artist, it is never once. We collaborate recurrently. It is never flirting, but the chance to push our limits together long-term and learn something new.’ They were united by their devotion to the project, but ultimately, as captured by Kwade, ‘You need people you admire and respect, that you trust and enjoy having around.’Kwade speaks eloquently about her devotion to public art and the joy it gives her to observe the sense of community and togetherness that her sculpture created. She confides, ‘I really believe in public art, especially nowadays, as a source of identification. The human scale of Au cours des mondes reflects the approach of Sans who described how he ‘never understood the works that I have to see from afar and not touch” and instead believes in sharing the experience of art as much as possible. Kwade continued, “For me, my work is about human nature - why we are what we are and behave as we behave and believe what we believe. How we create this society and this world as we think it is. This piece is about us spinning around on a globe, on a stone, and still ironically trying to figure out why we do that. We’re spinning around ourselves.’ 

Before we parted ways, we discussed how Paris+ par Art Basel has inspired many galleries, museums and curators to get involved. Kwade describes how, ‘culture is deeply embedded in Parisian society, which is beautiful. It is everywhere.’ She has perceived a newfound sense of collaboration. For example, the unmissable ‘Monet - Mitchell’ exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, which creates a dialogue between the two celebrated artists, and the California Light and Space and Beyond exhibition at the modernist home of Benjamin Paulin and Alice Lemoine for which curator Lawrence Van Hagen collaborated with designers Paulin, Paulin, Paulin. Also, As Kwade continues, ‘For the city, it is the best possible outcome. You could see the opening of the fair was very busy. It was insane. It is reviving for  Paris to bring people from all over the world. The city is excited. You can feel it.’  

Sans concluded by reflecting on the project as ‘creating a point of connection and community’ and that rings true to the overall effect of Paris in its renewed contemporary art moment. 

Au cours des mondes by Alicja Kwade, curated by Jérôme Sans will be on view at the Place Vendôme until 13 November, as part of the Sites program of Paris+ by Art Basel. parisplus.artbasel.com

Nine months after the bombshell dropped that Art Basel would dislodge the 47-year-old FIAC from its October spot at the Grand Palais, the new contemporary art fair, called Paris+ par Art Basel, throws open its doors this week to great expectations. (The Grand Palais Ephémère will house it until the projected completion of renovations at the Grand Palais in 2024.) 

Arriving just one week after Frieze London 2022, the Paris edition of Art Basel demonstrates that in the past few years, the French capital and its contemporary art scene have awakened from a decades-long torpor. ‘There is a Parisian moment that Art Basel wanted to be part of,’ says Clément Delépine, the new fair’s director. ‘Paris is benefiting from a new dynamism. The market is stable, and getting stronger. International galleries [such as Hauser & Wirth] are moving in. There’s a very strong base of collectors, and a context of cultural institutions, private foundations and public institutions, supporting the effort.’ 

The fair’s name reflects Art Basel’s specific identity for this city. Many on the Paris team are FIAC veterans, including six out of ten people on the gallery selection committee. Beyond that, says Delépine, the fair ‘will be supported by a global infrastructure. The tools that Paris+ has at its disposal are extremely efficient. To give you an example, the VIP team at Art Basel has 35 VIP reps spread around the world, working daily to identify new collectors and spoil existing ones.’

But, he adds, the fair is not just about well-heeled collectors: ‘There is a will to address audiences far beyond ticket holders.’ They are accomplishing that with satellite programmes such as ‘Sites,’ an exhibition of more than 20 artworks in publicly accessible parts of the city. It is open to all galleries, whether or not they are exhibiting at the fair. This year, there are large-scale works on the theme of history’s layers in the Jardin des Tuileries (such as four toppled marble lions scattered with birdseed by Danish artist Nina Beier), sculptures by Thaddeus Mosley at the Delacroix museum, an immersive project by Omer Fast at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and a new site-specific work by Berlin-based Polish artist Alicja Kwade at the Place Vendôme, her largest installation to date.

On a boat docked in the Seine, Paris+ is hosting a three-day programme of ‘Conversations,’ free to the general public upon advance reservation. A duo of independent curators, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou, put together an eclectic programme for this inaugural year, with nine panels and 32 speakers. Teyssou says, ‘When we spoke with the Art Basel team about what they had in mind, the focus on Paris was strong – to acknowledge the new identity of Paris’s artistic scene,’ especially on its margins. Mateos adds, ‘We wanted to take advantage of the different cultural industries in Paris – the place of the fashion industry, arthouse cinema – and make bridges and connections.’ For instance, a conversation around 21st-century dandyism features Jeremy O Harris, who wrote Slave Play and acted in Emily in Paris.

The fair itself will host 156 galleries, just a handful fewer than last year’s FIAC. Some are names that haven’t come to Paris in a while, such as the New York galleries Matthew Marks, Greene Naftali and Peter Freeman. Delépine is excited that galleries are ‘bringing their A-games’, including an immense new work by Philippe Parreno at the booth of Pilar Corrias; the Argentine conceptual artist León Ferrari at the booth of Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel; and avant-garde painter Francis Picabia at Applicat-Prazan.

The powerhouses Hauser & Wirth, Pace and Gagosian are all coming. Serena Cattaneo Adorno, director of Gagosian Paris, says that her gallery has modified its approach this year, as its artists are particularly eager to participate. ‘FIAC was a fair where the gallery worked a lot more with the modern aspect of our programme. We did curated booths – for example, we rebuilt the Villa Santo Sospir of Cocteau. This year, the approach is more contemporary, and we will be able to present new works by artists that have never really shown in Paris before, like Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Ewa Juszkiewicz and Ashley Bickerton,’ paired with figures from earlier generations, such as Brice Marden and Simon Hantaï. The designer Pierre Yovanovitch has fashioned Gagosian’s booth in the shape of a hexagon.

When the news of Art Basel’s arrival first hit, some French galleries worried they would be pushed aside. Kamel Mennour, who runs four locations in Paris, claims there was no cause for concern, as organisers were careful to keep the quota high – 30 per cent of participants have their first or primary exhibition space in France. ‘They considered it very important to not do something too elitist, too foreign,’ Mennour says. ‘They really took the Paris scene into consideration.’ He thinks the fair will be great for the city. ‘It will bring higher standards and more expertise. Lots of collectors are saying that Paris is becoming more desirable, and it will be even more so thanks to Art Basel. You can’t not be here.’ His booth is showing Camille Henrot, Anish Kapoor and Lee Ufan alongside artists who have major events elsewhere in Paris, notably Alicja Kwade and Ugo Rondinone (with a solo show at Petit Palais). 

Another important French dealer, Almine Rech, who just doubled the size of her Avenue Matignon address, is doing a group show with artists from different countries, including a new work by American painter Scott Kahn, Ghana’s Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, and France’s Claire Tabouret. Rech expects a large increase in the number of clients coming to town for the fair. ‘I got many emails from North American and South American clients telling me, “Hey Almine, I’m coming, what are you showing?” And they were not coming in the years before. It’s very exciting. I think Paris is going to be very crowded. I must say I understand, it’s a very nice time in Paris with beautiful museum shows, restaurants, a hotel offering that’s crazy beautiful. There are many reasons…the fair, of course, but also it’s nice to have a few days in Paris.’

Not all the exhibitors at Paris+ will be so well established; 16 emerging galleries from around the globe have been invited to do solo presentations. One of these is Chris Sharp, who opened his space in LA less than two years ago and is showing young British painter Sophie Barber. ‘FIAC was a very good fair, Art Basel is the best. It’s an incredible honour for a gallery to be selected,’ says Sharp, who lived in Paris for a decade in the early 2000s. As he recalls, back then ‘the art scene was really local. But in the past few years, it’s evolved a lot. Brexit obviously helped. This will push it over the edge. I think this puts Paris in a position to become the art fair for Europe.’ 

Paris+ par Art Basel fair will run from 20-23 October (preview day 19 October) at the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris. parisplus.artbasel.com

In partnership with Ruinart

Earth, water, air and sun – these four elements are essential to champagne-making. To reimmerse us in nature, acknowledge the alchemical, elemental make-up of champagne and bring a multisensorial experience into our daily lives, Ruinart has collaborated with artist Jeppe Hein.

The resulting participatory installation, ‘Right Here, Right Now’, summons the four elements to awaken our senses and connect us to ourselves and the world.

‘Right Here, Right Now’ at Art Basel in Basel

For the project – the 2022 commission in Ruinart’s Carte Blanche series, and generating installations to appear at art fairs and events throughout the year, of which Art Basel in Basel is the latest – the champagne house encouraged Hein to play with the element of surprise, the magic of the unexpected. In turn, he invites participants to share emotions and reflect on the intangible value of the present moment, at once fragile and memorable.

Both an immersive artwork and a digital extension, ‘Right Here, Right Now’ provides a journey into Ruinart’s storied history and unparalleled vinicultural know-how. Just like the maison’s winemakers, Hein is an artist who likes to start with very simple things. A grape, a piece of wet chalk and the specific aroma that hovers over the vineyard lingering above the vines. Hein translates his first impressions of Ruinart’s terroir into fragments of matter and emotion. He asks us to feel and be inspired by the natural connections between things, in a collective experience that is unique each time.

Jeppe Hein on his inspiration

Hein explains how researching the elemental nature of champagne-making provided a very personal and multisensorial effect. ‘I could imagine the sun touching my face, while I am standing in the middle of the vineyard,’ he says. ‘Smelling the moisture of the earth, listening to rainwater dripping onto the vine leaves and tasting the grapes.’

The final installation has translated into a sensory-focused experience for visitors that includes, for example, being invited to place their hand inside a hole set within a mirror, and to receive a series of three objects, each connected to Ruinart: a drop of scented oil (evoking a vineyard), a raisin (to be tasted as part of a mindfulness exercise), and a piece of chalk (a tactile nod the land of the Champagne region, on which Ruinart’s grapes are cultivated).

Original inspiration for the installation, which encourages what Hein calls ‘a small sensory epiphany’ in its visitors, came from the artist’s first visit Maison Ruinart, the champagne house's HQ in Reims, France. ‘The real discovery for me was going to the vineyards very early in the morning, in the mist, at the beginning of harvest,’ he says. 

‘Everyone was very excited. I could feel the tension at this special time of year. The cellar master and his team were checking if the grapes were sweet enough. [I was] going back and forth, cutting bunches, smelling the scents with my eyes closed, tasting the sweetness, acidity and bitterness of the grape. It was incredible. It made me realise how difficult it is to make a bottle of champagne and how much work it involves. I now have a huge amount of respect for the many, many people involved in this process.’ 

The region’s crayères, the former chalk quarries used by Ruinart to age its wines, provided another reference point. ‘The first thing you feel is the change of temperature and humidity on your skin. A very pleasant smell emanates from the wet chalk, nothing like the mustiness of a cellar. The most inspiring thing was feeling the chalk under my fingers, as I ran them over the walls. I thought, “This is something I want to explore, but also something I want to share with others.” I wanted people to live this experience. I wanted to put that chalk in their hand.’

Hein’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’ is on a mission to offer new perspective and vision, to encourage the audience to smell, hear, taste and feel the essence of both Ruinart and their own lives. ‘For me, it is about helping people understand who they are and where they are going,’ says Hein.  ‘But also how to be present here and now, in the moment. Because, with our hectic lifestyles, we sometimes forget to enjoy and seize the moment.’

The digital experience

For those unable to make the fair in person, Hein’s moment-seizing can be explored in the digital space. An online interactive presentation of the project offers art lovers a singular experience that is simultaneously participatory, sensory and meditative. Designed to heighten the connection between artist, digital visitor and the outside world, it invites an open-armed embrace of the moment via kinetic navigation and intuitive interaction.

INFORMATION

‘Right Here, Right Now’ is at Art Basel in Basel, 16 – 19 June 2022

ruinart.com

Chanel No5 celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2021, and the brand has celebrated throughout the year with a variety of campaigns, events, and launches. 

The most recent, and certainly one of the most exciting, happenings it has staged is a new monumental labyrinth designed by artist and designer Es Devlin. 

Devlin is best known for her ‘stage sculptures’ that use a dazzling combination of built structures, lights, and sound to create environments that are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Her design for Chanel doesn’t disappoint, giving visitors an experience that feels as epic as Theseus’ fabled journey into the labyrinth. 

Those lucky enough to make it to Miami before the exhibit closes 21 December 2021, will have to parse their way through a forest to Devlin’s massive white labyrinth. From there, they will ascend a ramp that provides an ample view of the surrounding treetops, as well as a garden populated with the plants and flowers that make up Chanel No5. At the top of the ramp, visitors will find a sundial that indicates the passage of the sun overhead, as well as the 28 minutes it takes for the molecules of Chanel No5 to evaporate, according to their different molecular densities. 

After that, it is time to move into the labyrinth itself–a white-walled series of five concentric pathways, filled with light and a thumping soundscape designed by Devlin in collaboration with Chanel’s In-House Perfumer Olivier Polge. 

When creating the sculpture, Devlin was preoccupied with the interplay between the natural environment, the architecture that populates it, and the behaviour of the humans that populate them both. 

‘The word labyrinth originally referred to human movement: it was a dance before it became architecture,’ Devlin says. ‘If our behaviour can define out architecture, then perhaps art and architecture can alter our behaviour.’ 

‘If works of art can help us see ourselves as part of the biosphere and symbolically fused with it, if we can start to see plants and animals as equal protagonists as ourselves in life, I believe we have a better chance of making the fundamental behavioural shifts that are necessary not only to avoid climate chaos, but  also to live in a more just, equitable, ad joyful way,’ she explains.

Sustainability was also a key tenant of the project, titled Five Echoes. After the installation closes, all components of the labyrinth will be repurposed and recycled. While, the forest of over 1,000 plants, shrubs, and trees that make up the exhibit will be replanted in parks throughout Miami-Dade County. 

INFORMATION

chanel.com

Over the last year, the art world has tentatively been refinding its footing, and at long last, ’tis the season to eat, drink and be in Miami. Explore our picks for Miami Art Week 2021. 

Art Basel Miami Beach makes a bold return for 2021

Art Basel Miami Beach 2021 (2 – 4 December) will return to the Miami Convention Center for the first time since 2019, and although spirits are high, new-normal protocols remain. A strict mask mandate minimises the potential for celebrity-spotting and people-watching, and this year’s must-have accessories include a body temperature within normal range, proof of a negative Covid-19 test, and evidence of vaccination status. 

The 2021 edition will showcase 253 galleries from 36 countries and territories, 43 of which join for the first time. The fair format remains largely the same (albeit one day shorter than usual), but the emphasis has shifted towards the elevation of underrepresented perspectives. ‘There’s enormous excitement within the art world on both sides of the Atlantic about Art Basel Miami Beach 2021,’ says Marc Spiegler, global director of Art Basel. ‘Not only because it's our first fair in two years in the Americas, but also because the show has never before featured such a diverse range of voices.’

Meridians – the fair’s platform for large-scale projects – returns for its second iteration. Highlights include Yinka Shonibare’s Moving Up, an installation chronicling the vertical movement of six million African Americans from rural Southern states to cities in the North, Midwest, and West from 1916 to 1970, known today as the Great Migration. Elsewhere, Nicholas Galanin engages in the complexities of Indigenous identity, culture, and representation. His Tlingit background informs his conceptual practice, which includes the installation The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls, an arc of 60 suspended hatchets that appear in flight. 

Beyond the headliner Art Basel, this year will also see the return of satellite fairs including Untitled Art (30 November – 4 December), Design Miami (1 – 5 December), and Art Miami (30 November – 5 December).

Miami Art Week 2021: events and exhibitions to see around the city

David Shrigley and Ruinart’s virtual worms and unconventional bubbles 

In 2020, David Shrigley became Ruinart’s 12th carte blanche artist. That summer, he travelled to Maison Ruinart in Reims to experience champagne production from root to cork. The results – comprising paintings, ceramic vessels and neon works – are as much a witty commentary on champagne consumption as a tribute to Ruinart’s heritage. For Miami Art Week, David Shrigley and Ruinart will stage several activations relating to the artist’s project, ‘Unconventional Bubbles’. At The Bass museum, giant augmented-reality worms inspired by Shrigley’s painting, Worms Work Harder Than Us, come to life via the Acute Art app. Elsewhere in the virtual realm, Ruinart will present ‘The Unconventional Gallery’, a showcase of Shrigley’s carte blanche project fit for a post-pandemic world. For those in the mood for an IRL encounter, the Ruinart Lounge at Art Basel will host a curated collection featuring 42 pieces from Shrigley's project. 

Alex Israel’s self-portraits enter a new augmented reality with Snapchat

For Alex Israel’s new collaboration with Snapchat you’ll need a phone, the Snapchat app, and an open mind. The LA-based artist – and 2020 Wallpaper* Design Awards judge – is known for a multidimensional practice saturated with pop culture motifs, Hollywood scenes and imagery relating to Californian millennial lifestyles. Israel’s self-portraits – almost exclusively in profile, in sunglasses, and against an LA backdrop – have become an instantly recognisable emblem of his work and a brand in their own right. For Miami Art Week 2021, in collaboration with Snapchat, Israel has created five augmented reality experiences, each linked to one of his self-portraits. On view at The Bass museum until 1 May 2022, the project integrates Snap’s AR into Israel’s physical works – taking the latter into a new, animated dimension. On the museum’s art deco façade, a sixth work makes use of Snap’s Landmarker technology and uses the museum as a canvas for the artist’s oversized avatar, which sits crossed-legged in an enchanted forest, accompanied by Disney-esque creatures.

Jorge Pardo reflects on displacement, trauma and hope at the Museum of Art and Design

At the Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at Miami Dade College (MDC), Cuban American artist Jorge Pardo presents ‘Mongrel’. The show features a new series of semi-abstract drawings, custom-fabricated chandeliers – one encircled by modernist chairs based on the Latin American butaque (the only part of the show not designed by Pardo) – and a carpet, all framed by MOAD’s Skylight Gallery. The exhibition conjures the artist’s personal history including his childhood memories as a refugee. The artist immigrated to the United States as a child, passing with this family through Miami’s Freedom Tower, then used as a reception centre for Cuban refugees. His memories of the welcoming architectural landmark, which now houses the Museum of Art and Design, intertwine with those of displacement, trauma, and loss caused in part by the Cuban regime’s confiscation of the emigrants’ family photographs and documents. Mongrels will be on view until 1 May 2022.

Kathia St. Hilaire’s large-scale public installation blends nature and the divine

Kathia St. Hilaire’s The Pilgrimage of the Soul, marks the final installation of Fringe Projects’ ‘Public Color’ exhibition, a showcase of site-specific public works by artists of Caribbean descent including April Bey, Morel Doucet, Mark Fleuridor, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Charo Oquet, Johanne Rahaman. Each artist took Miami itself as a starting point to explore themes and experiences of collective urban life as viewed through their distinctive diasporic lenses. St. Hilaire’s large-scale collage is draped across the facade of Downtown Miami’s 148 East Flagler Street. The mixed-media work – which resembles a tapestry – uses the reduction relief printing technique, which involves cutting out small sections on linoleum to create a layered composition. Thematically, The Pilgrimage of the Soul explores the artist’s Haitian heritage and the relationship between humans, nature and the divine. 

ICA Miami ends 2021 season on a high with Jadé Fadojutimi and Hugh Hayden

In a climactic end to its 2021 programme, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents exhibitions dedicated to rising star artists Jadé Fadojutimi and Hugh Hayden, on view until 17 April 2022. This marks the first solo museum presentation for Fadojutimi, whose vibrant, layered abstraction has made waves in the world of painting in recent years. ‘Yet, Another Pathetic Fallacy’ features new large-scale paintings that cite and rewrite tropes of 20th-century art history. At the centre of Hayden’s show is a white carpet occupied by the monumental title work, Boogey Man (2021). Depicting a police car draped in a white cover, the stainless steel installation has an ambiguous, cartoonish and almost-spectral presence evoking the ominous silhouette of a hooded Klansman – a potent statement on the ongoing issue of police brutality in the United States. 

Superblue Miami: enter the incubator for experimental art 

In May 2021, Miami’s much-anticipated hub for experimental art opened its doors. Superblue Miami promises a new kind of art experience, one that focuses on large-scale, experiential, interactive art beyond the realm of object-based practices. Superblue Miami’s trippy inaugural exhibition, ‘Every Wall Is A Door’, features new work by the likes of Es Devlin, James Turrell, teamLab and Drift. Devlin’s performative sculptures are brought to life in Forest of Us, which explores the biological and external structures that allow us to breathe. Meanwhile, Drift’s kinetic sculpture, Meadow, turns a traditional landscape on its head, with sensors and mechanical flowers that mimic nature’s rhythms. For Miami Art Week, Superblue has commissioned Yinka Illori to create a site-specific café called Blue Rider. 

Iván Navarro charts rebellions and revolutions in Miami Design District

Iván Navarro was born in Santiago, Chile, and spent his childhood under the Pinochet dictatorship. Though he migrated to New York in 1997, this experience continues to have a profound impact on his work. Under the dazzling mirrors and lights lurk some of the darkest, and most pressing themes of the era: control, political propaganda, torture and north-south inequalities. Navarro’s public art installation during Miami Art Week, on view until 5 December, is no exception. Sited on vacant property in Miami’s Design District and commissioned by the non-profit Vitrinalab Foundation, Fight for Your Land comprises four text-based posters – reminiscent of eye charts – that evoke messages of protest. Each is encased within a vitrine, placed alongside neon palm trees and elevated above a mirrored base. The vitrines themselves are etched with text chronicling rebellions and revolutions across the Caribbean into the Americas, beginning with ‘Barbados / Slave Revolt 1633-1685’ and concluding with ‘Mexico / Zapatista Uprising 1994’.

INFORMATION

Art Basel Miami Beach, 2–4 December 2021. artbasel.com

Sunset-inspired scenes on the Miami beachfront, kaleidoscopic Sol LeWitt artworks wrapping interiors, rippling wooden furniture produced by artisans across Botswana – a host of activations, events and exhibitions were evidence of fashion brands at Design Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. Houses including Saint Laurent, Loewe and Fendi were all on hand to inspire in the city synonymous with mammoth art sales and art deco. Here we present the Miami marvels of the fashion world.

Fashion brands at Design Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach 2021

Saint Laurent Rive Droite

Sho Shibuya's globally renowned Sunrise from a Small Window series, which began as the world entered its second month of lockdown in April 2020, features abstract gradient blocks of colour, painted obscurely over the front page of the The New York Times. The series was born out of a daily meditation on the contrast between the stable morning sky and the increasingly chaotic news cycle. Poignant pieces include a newspaper with the headline ‘Biden Beats Trump' accented with an optimistic rectangle of colour, evoking an orange sun illuminating a serene blue sky; and a front page bearing the headline ‘Trump Incites Mob’, next to a bloody red rectangle, the outline of a punch through the paper. 

A host of works from the Sunrise from a Small Window series are housed inside a futuristic red box on Miami Beach, as part of Saint Laurent's ‘55 Sunrises’ exhibition. The show – which includes two new artworks by New York-based Shibuya, founder of brand design studio Placeholder – commemorates the 55th anniversary of the opening of Saint Laurent’s first Rive Gauche ready-to-wear boutique in Paris. The new works are inspired by the brand’s original logo and evoke a window through which the tones of the sunrise filter through.

Loewe

Loewe's Miami Design District store, which opened in 2015 and has played host as a gallery space to artists including Anthea Hamilton, Paul Nash, Lucie Rie and Rose Wyli, Ian Godfrey, Andrea Büttner and Anne Low, has reopened as a renovated space, with a large-scale artwork by American conceptualist pioneer Sol LeWitt. 

The graphic acrylic bands of Wall Drawing #1138 (2004) wrap the interior walls of the boutique's interior in bold hues, marking Loewe’s commitment to creating striking retail spaces that showcase its collection of art and design. Similarly, pieces by Erika Verzutti, Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2021 finalist Takuro Kuwata, and Sir Edwin Lutyens populate the brand's newly opened Lisbon store in Portugal. The Miami boutique's glass façade offers passers-by a glimpse of the large-scale Sol LeWitt work, alongside 20 black ceramic vessels by Japanese artist Kenta Anzai.

Fendi

Designed by Peter Mabeo and produced by artisans across Botswana, the Fendi Mabeo collaboration is a ten-piece collection exploring local craft and pushing traditional techniques and materials in new directions. The collection includes the Gabi-Gabi sculpture, a large-scale centrepiece made of galvanised metal sheet, and recreated in a smaller version in the ‘Gabinyana’ brass table lamp; and the ‘Shiya’ seat, made of panga panga wood and plywood. Reaching into different experimental territories is the ‘Foro’ chair, which moves away from the idea of a clay object being a monolith and instead uses the material to create an archetypal seat (an additional version is made of panga panga wood).

Looking at the pieces in this collaboration is like exploring a map of craft in Botswana, as Mabeo called upon an extended network of artisans to bring each design to life. ‘We’ve travelled all over the country, we’ve engaged basket weavers, metal workers, people practising ancient techniques, as well as our local wood and metal artisans,’ he explains. Human connections were key to bringing the pieces together, he adds: ‘I didn’t want to just employ the materials for the sake of it, but to create an opportunity to engage with the craftspeople who are still custodians of these techniques, going back so long.’ Writer: Rosa Bertoli §

There’s nothing new in a well-known brand using its resources to promote the arts, but few have undertaken that mission with as much dedication as La Prairie. The Swiss luxury skincare brand began its sponsorship of contemporary art at Art Basel and the West Bund Art & Design fairs in 2017. Since then it has funded projects at the Fondation Beyeler museum for modern and contemporary art in Switzerland, supported students at ECAL, and is now set to cement its place as a leading patron of contemporary art with its first appearance at Frieze London this October from 13-17 October.

La Prairie at Frieze London

La Prairie’s debut offering at Frieze London is Sense of Blue, a multisensory immersive installation that plunges the viewer into the depths of the night. The piece is by French digital artist Maotik, best known for using computer-generated algorithms to create reality-shifting environments.

Here, he deploys that same technique, although this time using motion sensors, low-frequency sounds, and shifting blue and black lights to simultaneously distort the viewer’s sense of space and heighten awareness of their immediate surroundings.

‘The idea was to travel through the night through this immersive environment,’ says Maotik, speaking from Sense of Blue’s debut at Art Basel this September. ‘To use these devices to create [the sensation] of travelling not from one distance to another distance, but travelling through time and to use light to change your perception of space.

‘At night, your vision is less clear. You see things with more difficulty, but it also opens up new perspectives; when you see less you maybe open your imagination a bit more.’

The Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil

Maotik’s installation was commissioned by La Prairie to celebrate the launch of its latest product, Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil. Skin Caviar is one of the brand’s most iconic collections, famed for harnessing the reparative powers of caviar and augmenting them with the use of La Prairie’s patented Exclusive Cellular Complex (a formulation so highly protected that its components are produced and blended in three separate labs to ensure the recipe remains a secret). The Nighttime Oil is unique within the Skin Caviar collection as it blends the line’s signature caviar formulation with a new ‘caviar retinol’. 

Speaking about the collection, La Prairie’s global director of strategic innovation, Dr Jacqueline Hill, says: ‘Caviar is, of course, a source of life, and because it’s an egg, it's a very rich source of nutrients. We've got quite a few different forms of caviar, and we've studied their benefits at different levels. What we've seen is that most of the forms of caviar that we've developed have an action on fibroblasts, which boost the formation of collagen.’

She continues, ‘Then what we've seen is that in different forms, the caviar can have different effects. So when we talk about caviar retinol, you get all the benefits of retinol, which are quite well known – it boosts epidermal renewal, and it also acts on collagen formation – together with the ingredients in the Skin Caviar.’

‘All the ingredients in the formula will help with three different things – improving the skin surface as far as deep lines; skin firmness, and there we got really great results; and increasing the barrier function, because your skin barrier gets less efficient at night naturally, but it gets even less efficient with age and we want to compensate for this.’ 

The product is packaged, like all other Skin Caviar creations, in the brand’s striking cobalt blue jars, which pay homage to the late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who suggested that La Prairie use this distinctive colour. 

Art meets science

‘The link between the house and contemporary art has been there from the very beginning,’ says La Prairie’s global chief marketing officer Greg Prodromides. ‘That's why it feels like it is at the very core of who we are.’ He refers to the establishment of La Prairie clinic, in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1931, which went on to host artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the fact that its founder Dr Paul Niehans was an art collector himself. 

‘There was always a kind of artistic effervescence in the clinic that actually continued to strengthen with the beginning of [the skincare line] in the 1980s with the encounter with Niki de Saint Phalle,’ Prodromides continues.

‘In recent years, we wanted to be a bit more vocal about this link and to share it with a larger audience. Hence, our decision to collaborate with Art Basel in all its editions, but also other contemporary art fairs.

‘When we choose an artist to work with [on these projects] we are always looking at a couple of things. First, artists with whom we share a common set of values; where we see that they will help us tell the story of the house but via their creative paradigm, via their eyes,’ says Prodromides.

‘And we always try to work with younger artists that are emerging, and often women artists since women are underrepresented in the world of contemporary art.

‘So for this project, we were looking for somebody who could really bring the values of Skin Caviar to life, which are the audacity behind Skin Caviar, the audacity of using [actual] caviar in skincare, and also this fusion of art and science. The choice of digital art became much more evident, for its audacious characteristics and because it was a form of art with which we could push the boundaries of what we’ve already done.’ 

Speaking about the connection between art and science further, Maotik says: ‘When it comes to artists and scientists, we do the same thing. Everything is a series of experimentations that eventually brings together a [beauty] product or an artwork.

‘We move ahead, sometimes into the unknown, developing new techniques. Our work is like that of scientists – we do a lot of tests, creating prototypes and guiding ourselves according to the results. We can come across unpleasant surprises, as well as stunning outcomes.’ 

In the case of the brand’s latest launch and its Frieze debut, from the 13-17 October, the results are certainly a ‘stunning outcome

Information

laprairie.com

Art Basel 2021 will take place in Messe Basel from 24 – 26 September. As is now the status quo for art fairs, the event will embrace a hybrid format, blending physical and digital offerings to engage with a broad international audience. Building on its history as a catalyst for radical contemporary art, this year promises a mix new commissions and iconic works. Also in Messe Basel, Design Miami/ Basel 2021, curated by Aric Chen, will stage its 15th edition. 

Marking Art Basel’s first physical fair since the pandemic began, the line-up will include 272 galleries from 33 countries and territories. We look ahead to highlights at Art Basel 2021.

Art Basel 2021: what to see at the fair 

Unlimited, Art Basel's platform for large-scale projects, is curated for the first time by Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. It will feature 62 large-scale projects by renowned and emerging artists including Urs Fischer, Etel Adnan, Frank Bowling, Carrie Mae Weems, Marion Baruch, Elmgreen & Dragset and Ryoji Ikeda. 

UBS, Art Basel’s lead partner, will introduce the hybrid exhibition ‘Reimagining: A Better World’. A selection of works will be shown physically in the UBS Lounge, with a larger version available virtually. Artists such as Richard Mosse and Catherine Opie highlight the consequences of humanity’s exploitation of natural resources.

Rashid Johnson explores anxieties that result from racial discrimination, and compositions by Olafur Eliasson, Jeppe Hein and Tomás Saraceno reflect on the fragility of the physical world. 

Art Basel on the Messeplatz

This year, the Messeplatz – Art Basel’s outdoor incubator for radical art – will host two site-specific interventions selected by the fair's Unlimited and Parcours curators. Monster Chetwynd will develop a large-scale installation and performance, while Parcours curator Samuel Leuenberger will work with Cecilia Bengolea on a video installation and performance staged within the fountain of the Messeplatz.

Art Basel in the city

The 12th edition of Parcours will showcase 20 site-specific artworks across the city of Basel. Responding to the theme, ‘Can We Find Happiness Together Again?’, works include 12 large-scale paintings and performances by Claudia Comte at the Stadtcasino, and a public walk by Hamish Fulton titled ‘Walking in Every Direction’ on Basel's Marktplatz. 

Elsewhere, the city’s leading institutions will host major shows during the Art Basel festivities. At Fondation Beyeler, the group show ‘Close-up’ spotlights the work of key women artists from 1870 to the present day. Focusing on myriad depictions of the human figure, featured artists include Berthe Morisot, Cindy Sherman and Elizabeth Peyton.

Kunstmuseum Basel will show American artist Kara Walker’s long-awaited ‘A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be’. Presenting 600 drawings from her personal archive, alongside new works, Walker’s show brings themes of racism, gender, sexuality, and violence into sharp focus.

INFORMATION

Art Basel (in Basel), 24 September - Sun, 26 Sept 2021. artbasel.com

ADDRESS

Messepl. 10, 4005 Basel

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There’s much talk in the art world about the untapped potential of virtual gallery viewings, online curator’s tours and digitally driven sales, and, propelled by world events, Art Basel Hong Kong is putting them to test.

This year’s edition, from 20-25 March is an online-only event, with 234 galleries from 31 countries displaying works through virtual viewing rooms.   

More than 90 per cent of exhibitors from the cancelled Hong Kong fair decided to take part in this experimental iteration, and since more than half of these have exhibition spaces in Asia, art from the region was an obvious highlight.  

Lisson Gallery collaborated with Antenna Space from Shanghai, Beijing’s Boers-Li Gallery, Singapore’s STPI and Taipei’s Tina Keng Galleries and TKG+ to provide a VIP virtual walkthrough of their booths. Each gallery gave a ten-minute presentation to an online audience of hundreds, providing descriptions of its artists and insights into their methods. Up to ten works can be displayed per booth and unlike a real-time fair, these come with a title and a price tag. 

Technical hitches aside (and there were a few), David Tung, Director of Lisson Gallery Shanghai who master-planned the virtual walkthrough, reveals other challenges; ‘You lose texture and feeling online, so we selected works differently to try and replicate this.’ Among Lisson’s heavy-hitting pick were Julian Opie, Ai Weiwei, Cory Arcangel and Carmen Herrera, whose Camino Negro sold at the preview for 850,000 USD. Lisson’s Alex Logsdail explains, ‘While a viewing platform is not a substitute for the pace and interaction of a fair, business is still active and we have made sales in parallel to the fair this week.’

STPI director Rita Targui adds: ‘the online format provides an opportunity to be nimble. We can change works round with ease.’ Each day, two different artists are exhibited at its booth, accompanied by images of the works in progress, (adding narrative that might well be lost in the traditional fair setting). All the works on show have been made in STPI’s on-site paper mill. First up were Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi and his Autumn Trees series and paper pulp pieces by British artist Jason Martin, while additional exhibitors include South Korean artists Do Ho Suh and Haegue Yang who incorporated ground spices purchased in Singapore markets into her canvases. 

Opie’s distinctive, reductive language may work well online, but other artists translate with less success; viewing Antony Gormley's Breathing Room II, an environment that uses phosphorous to conjure architecture as if from the air through Galeria Continua’s portal, or seeing James Turrell’s new circular glass work at OMR’s online gallery, leaves you feeling underwhelmed. You just wish you could be there.

Perhaps inadvertently, Heemin Chung, on show at P21 Gallery, sums up the reality of this year’s Art Basel. The Seoul-based artist explores the lack of tactile sensations – and our desire for them – in a modern world that is filled with virtual images. She strives to capture those senses that are overstimulated or deficient in the digital realm and portray them on canvas; direct touch, not digital media, provide true reality.  

But who gets to touch big-ticket artworks anyway? Collectors often know what they want without having to see it at a fair, and a time when we need to reduce our carbon footprint, Art Basel’s virtual version may just be a trailblazer.

INFORMATION

Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms, 20-25 March. artbasel.com

It was the duct-taped banana that launched a thousand memes. Galerie Perrotin could have hardly anticipated the furor that would erupt over the course of four days at Art Basel Miami Beach last month, sparked by the debut of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s first new ‘sculpture’ at a fair in more than 15 years.

The seemingly innocuous artwork – titled Comedian – barely caused a stir among collectors who descended on the Miami Beach Convention Center during preview day. After all, this was a clique hardened to the most outré of artist stunts (Banksy’s shredded painting, anyone?) Local media, however, soon picked up that a humble banana was being hawked for $120,000, in an edition of three no less.

Everyone had an opinion. Team Wallpaper* encountered bootleg versions of the banana at every turn, from satellite art fairs to the street. Artnet published six stories about the banana (and then another rounding up said coverage). It was the most-talked about artwork at Miami and arguably of 2019, eventually spawning its own Instagram account.

By Friday, fairgoers were queuing to get a selfie with the now-infamous perishable fruit. On Saturday, New York-based artist David Datuna helped himself to the banana, peeling it off the wall and devouring it in seconds. (The gallery swiftly manned the replacement work with a burly security guard.) Come Sunday morning, Comedian had been removed entirely with Perrotin citing safety concerns in a statement. #Bananagate had run its course – or so we thought.

Perrotin today announced it is harnessing the viral sensation for a worthy cause, teaming up with Cattelan to release Comedian t-shirts at the gallery’s New York bookstore on the Lower East Side. Profits from each sale will benefit Feeding South Florida, a hunger-relief organisation serving Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. ‘Feeding South Florida is a small, but mighty organisation that fights hunger all across South Florida. For every $1 donated, the organisation provides 7 meals. I am proud to partner with them and I hope you will join me in supporting this worthy cause,’ says gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin.

Available from 25 January and priced at $25 each, the t-shirts are also available for pre-order via Perrotin’s online store, to be shipped from the gallery’s Paris location. It’s 2020, and we’re still talking about Cattelan’s Comedian. Bananas.

INFORMATION

perrotin.com; feedingsouthflorida.org

ADDRESS

Perrotin
130 Orchard Street
New York

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When Mera and Don Rubell began collecting in 1964, they diligently assigned a budget of $25 (a quarter of Mera’s teaching salary) each week to art. Five decades on, the genial couple have amassed an enviable collection of 7,200 works by more than one thousand artists – and counting. Together with their son Jason, the family recently opened the doors to their collection’s new home in Miami’s emerging Allapattah neighbourhood, enlisting Selldorf Architects to reimagine a disused rice storage complex as the newly minted Rubell Museum (previously known as the Rubell Family Collection).

The New York-based architecture firm gutted and transformed six warehouse units into a cohesive 100,000 sq ft campus – tripling the exhibition capacity of the collection’s previous space, a two-storey former Drug Enforcement Agency building less than a mile away in the city’s Wynwood district. The Rubell Museum now unfolds across a single level, comprising 40 galleries, a flexible events and performance space, a richly stocked research library, a bookstore, an outdoor bar and new restaurant LEKU, serving Basque cuisine.

Inside the museum, Annabelle Selldorf – the go-to architect for blue-chip galleries including David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth – has largely hewed to the building’s industrial origins. The structure’s factory bones are palpable in the expansive ceilings and concrete columns, tempered by a museum-quality finish of white walls and refinished concrete floors. Hurricane-safe windows have been strategically placed in the warehouse structure to allow Miami’s abundant daylight to filter into the space, while an internal street branches off into the galleries to the west, and leads to administrative spaces to the east.

Selldorf addressed the needs of the collection with scaling galleries, to accommodate monumental works from Sterling Ruby, Keith Haring, Kehinde Wiley and more, through to installations, such as Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, and more modestly sized pieces. At the heart of the site – where the loading dock was once located – is a leafy courtyard garden designed by La Casona Garden in collaboration with Juan Roselione-Valadez. The garden was conceived as a ‘restoration project’ using rare plants native to the Everglades and the Florida Keys.

The Rubells were instrumental in luring Art Basel to Miami Beach 18 years ago, so it’s only fitting that the influential collectors timed the opening of their new museum on 4 December during Miami Art Week. They’re in good company too: fellow Miami art power player, the philanthropist and magnate Jorge M Pérez, similarly opened his own private museum, El Espacio 23, several blocks directly west, in Allapattah. As development hots up in this swiftly changing area, we’ll be on neighbourhood watch.

INFORMATION

selldorf.com; rfc.museum

‘I wanted to focus on line and gesture,’ says Shinique Smith of her display for the UBS Lounge at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, which includes new paintings, a site-specific installation, and totemic sculptures incorporating hand-bound recycled textiles. ‘When I go to make a painting, there is an immediate, intuitive gesture that comes through my brush,’ explains the artist, who counts Japanese calligraphy and graffiti among her influences. ‘Sometimes it begins with writing and one big, sweeping movement – you have to be confident and make your mark.’ Fittingly, the presentation in the UBS Lounge featured works on paper by other artists from the UBS Art Collection including Cecily Brown, Cy Twombly, Julie Mehretu and Helen Frankethaler – selected personally by Smith to accompany her own drawings and extend the theme of line and gesture. From 27 January, 2020, ‘Indelible Marks’ will be on view at the UBS Art Gallery in New York – a recently opened public gallery situated in UBS’s headquarters at 1285 Avenue of the Americas.

Balenciaga

The French fashion brand is putting the circular economy and need for greater transparency at the very heart of the home, with an oblong sofa designed by Crosby Studio’s Harry Nuriev. The design is familiar, referencing the overstuffed recliner we would all recognise, subverting it through material choice. The transparent vinyl exterior replaces what would traditionally be leather or fabric, allowing the stuffing to be clearly seen. Within, damaged, unsellable and obsolete Balenciaga stock fills the sofa with colour, texture, patterns and even visible tags. Closer inspection reveals all the details you would traditionally expect: stitched seams and button details on the backrest, as well as a row of seat cushions, armrest and extendable footrest. The aim? To promote environmentally conscious design, encourage sustainable practices and recognise the responsibility designers have to counterbalance their environmental impact.

Versace

In ‘South Beach Stories’, interior designer Sasha Bikoff reunites with Versace, building on their spectacular Salone del Mobile showcase earlier this year. Bikoff’s one-of-a-kind furniture pieces are every bit as bold, bright and brash as you’d expect, drawing from archival Versace prints and sitting glamorously alongside Doug Ordway’s archive campaign shots. The original publication by the same title gathers a selection of heartfelt stories told by Miami residents in the nineties. If the acerbic neon lights don’t get you, the nostalgic vibe will.

Gucci
Fresh from the #ComeAsYouAre_RSVP campaign, starring Iggy Pop, Alessandro Michele called upon experimental filmmaker Harmony Korine once again. This time though, the duo also teamed up with Snap, road testing their latest video-capturing glasses, Spectacles 3. The result is a trippy journey through Miami, titled Duck Duck, a surreal blend of reality, wearable cinema and spontaneous storytelling. (Read: Life-size cartoonish animals, a man clad in a hot dog costume, and a range of 3D and augmented reality effects.) To coincide with the film's premiere, Gucci and Snap unveiled a set of 50 limited edition specs. 

Fendi

Bringing a spot of Eternal City to the Sunshine State, the Roman fashion house enlisted Swiss studio Kueng Caputo to create ten pieces of furniture, ranging from stools and benches to a stylised palm tree. Inspired by the iconic Palazzo della Civiltà HQ, the immersive installation is as playful as it is bright, inviting spectators to take a seat and get up-close-and-personal with the Zurich-based studio’s intriguing material combination: glazed terracotta bricks and supple Selleria leather. ‘Fendi has a DNA of contrast and dialogue, which we wanted to celebrate by choosing a strong and heavy counterpart to its soft and flexible leather,’ Sarah Kueng told Wallpaper*. The artisanal bricks create architectural forms, referencing the HQ’s own construction – swooping arches and undulating surfaces – while the soft leather sits cleanly on top. Beyond creating a refined salon space, these pieces pay homage to Fendi’s tradition of craftsmanship and experimentation with style. 

Louis Vuitton

American designer Andrew Kudless joins the prestigious stable of Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades this Design Miami with his Swell Wave Shelf. The unit, crafted from oak and leather, is an elegant meditation on the powerful forces and delicate balance of the natural world, sensitively evoked through the undulating, smoothly polished wood planks, perfectly held in place by leather straps. As is tradition, the San Francisco-based designer’s addition sits surrounded by other limited-edition pieces from previous years, including the work of India Mahdavi, Patricia Urquiola, RawEdges, Nendo and the Campana Brothers. Each piece is both elegant and practical, faithful to the ‘art of travel’ ethos that the maison’s founder started.

From Fendi’s playful furniture by Kueng Caputo, to Danile Lee's chunky chains, to Balenciaga’s environmentally conscious couch, we round up the fashion set’s highlights from ‘Art Week’...

Loewe

Now in its fifth year, ‘Chance Encounters’ returns to the Spanish luxury brand’s Miami outpost, transforming the imposing 18th-century Spanish granary that runs the length of the boutique into a sensational setting for dialogue once again. ‘It is an opportunity to create conversations across time, between artists whose work resonates strongly with my own creative approach,’ says Jonathan Anderson, the brand’s creative director. This year he’s brought together two British artists: Turner Prize-nominated Hilary Lloyd and Ewen Henderson. Lloyd’s films – displayed on monitors dotted throughout – are praised by Anderson for their ability to capture the way we relentlessly consume images. Her textiles echo her rough-cut, spontaneous videos, which in turn relate to the late Henderson’s textured large-scale ceramics. 

Bottega Veneta

If the promise of The Pouch or the Italian leather brand’s sought-after slides doesn’t lure you into Bottega Veneta’s new store in the Design District, that sweeping staircase of pink Portuguese marble certainly will. Marking creative director Daniel Lee’s first foray into interior design, the two-story space proves that there is little Lee can’t do. Fresh from winning big at the Fashion Awards in London, this Design District outpost is the perfect fold to Lee’s design aesthetic. Rough materials play with polished surfaces – plaster, marble, concrete, brass and, of course, leather – creating a balance that is at once familiar and surprisingly refreshing. Womenswear and accessories occupy the ground floor, with Lee’s trademark chunky chains on display in glass cabinets. Snake your way up the spiral stairs to reach menswear and come face to face with what might be the most satisfying changing room yet: a sliding round door of polished plaster which encases you in a perfect circle. 

Berluti
In the 1950s, Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret created a series of solid furniture pieces for Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This year, Berluti creative director Kris Van Assche – who used the building as the location for his A/W19 digital campaign – and François Laffanour, founder of Paris’ Laffanour Galerie Downtown, teamed up to restore17 of Jeanneret’s pieces back to their former glory. Though that isn’t to say they no longer bear the signs of their age; the hardwood -- solid teak -- retains the holes and marks of its origins and use. The upholstering, on the other hand, has been dotingly replaced with Berluti’s Venezia leather by Paris-based upholstery and leather workshop Domeau & Pérès. The hand applied patina enhances the depth of colour and curves of each piece with beguiling effect. 

Thom Browne

If you were a palm tree, what would you wear? Seersucker, pincord and gingham, according to Thom Browne. The New York-based designer unveiled his first large-scale public work, a soaring 20 foot-sculpture, at Zaha Hadid’s instantly recognisable Moore Building. Curated by Deana Haggag, president and CEO of United States Artists, ‘Palm Tree I’ holds deeper meaning than its cheerful, pop art exterior belies. The tropical tree may symbolise paradise and relaxation, but it is also a meditation on the disturbing similarities between the workplace and holidays with their respective recognisable uniforms and schedules. Aside from creating an Insta-ready backdrop, the nearby sandpit and mirrors also reflect the performative nature of holidays and continues Browne’s exploration into Americana iconography.

Miu Miu

Following on from the popular M/M Colour Stool launched at Salone del Mobile earlier this year, Miu Miu and M/M (Paris) have joined forces once again. Their latest creation? The M/Marbles Stool: a three-legged design crafted from walnut and palm wood (paying homage to the tree-lined roads of Miami), rubber and glass. Only 40 seats have been created, and are on show at the Design District Post Office and The Standard Spa. Like its predecessor, the M/Marbles Stool is punctured with perforations that transform the functional seat into a rather playful one. Individually crafted glass matchsticks inject each seat with colour and delight.

The swimming pool isn’t a new motif in the work of Scandinavian art duo Elmgreen & Dragset. From a diving board sticking out of a window at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1997 to a silicone mannequin floating face down at the 2009 Venice Biennale or, more recently, a deserted public pool at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the artists’ fascination for all things aquatics has been a driving force across their multi-faceted, witty oeuvre.
 
This time, the subversive pair take to Miami Beach with an ambitious installation erected outside of the Convention Center, seasonal home to Art Basel Miami Beach. Titled Bent Pool, the 20ft tall curved swimming pool draws on minimalism’s geometric forms as much as on pop art and conceptualism’s use of readymade objects and imagery. But it also pays homage to the city’s architectural tradition, while providing a commentary on luxury in the age of climate change. ‘Swimming pools are woven into the very fabric of Miami Beach,’ Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset said of their site-specific work, ‘what they represent is actually something in danger of becoming frivolous, rather than remaining iconic.’

Indeed, it is no secret that, while extravagant condominiums continue to rise along its shores, Miami Beach is, in fact, drowning. In recent years, the growing threats associated with rising sea levels and stronger tropical storms have cast uncertainty over the coastal city’s scenic, pastel-tinted streets and art deco buildings, leading to rampant climate gentrification across the surrounding county. ‘You have this illustrious legacy of iconic hotels and swimming pool design, luxury and leisure, which is nowadays juxtaposed with this undeniable fragility that comes from the city’s very geography,’ said the Berlin-based duo, who are currently enjoying a solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas.
 
The sculpture, which mimics the frame of an otherwise oval swimming pool, bent in an inverted U-shape and standing upright on a two-tier plinth, is reminiscent of the monumental architecture of a triumphal arch. Such structure traditionally marks historical battles or the ceremonial entrance to a city – here, suitably greeting the art crowds as they march into Art Basel Miami Beach and neighbouring Design Miami, where they’ll put their bet on the next hot thing. But the artists explain that the piece ‘creates a more intimate and everyday kind of arch’, one which can only be crossed by one person at a time; perhaps a nod to the relentlessly fast-paced and speculative nature of the art market.

Officially inaugurated during Art Basel Miami Beach, Bent Pool is the final in a series of six site-specific public art works, permanently installed in and around the Miami Beach Convention Center. Other artworks launched earlier this year include a ceramic-tile installation by British artist Sarah Morris, a mural by German artist Franz Ackermann, outdoors garden sculptures by Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout and hand-painted glass panels by British-American artist Ellen Harvey. They were selected by the City of Miami Beach’s Art in Public Places programme in concurrence with the $620m revamp of the 1950s Miami Beach Convention Center, completed last year by American firm Fentress Architects. Having cost $7m (the programme allocates 2 per cent of all capital costs for City projects), the series represents the largest public art project of its kind in American history installed on a single site – that is, while it’s still afloat.

INFORMATION

elmgreen-dragset.com; miamibeachfl.gov

ADDRESS

Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach

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When she talks about her practice, Hilary Lloyd is always quick to point out that she is ‘not a filmmaker’. And yet, video footage always makes its way into her works, shot in her singular style and identifiable for its repetitive movements, jump cuts and sweeps. It’s a frenetic rhythm that’s been related to the restlessness of the contemporary viewer, who consumes images hard and fast.

Lloyd is, by her own admission, something of a techie when it comes to equipment. Her favourite piece of technology is currently ‘the mobile phone’ – although she doesn’t actually own one. Her latest installation includes scenes from a nightclub in Turin, shot spontaneously on a borrowed iPhone and edited together with choppy cuts. You never quite get a clear image of what you’re looking at other than a sense of the atmosphere of the lived moment. ‘Earlier this month I was in Turin, installing the first exhibition in Federica Panelli and Annalisa Stabellini’s new gallery BAR,’ Lloyd tells us. ‘The film was made during the opening night and afterwards we went clubbing and the film was shot using Federica’s phone, because I don’t have one.’

The urban landscape is Lloyd’s muse for ‘Car Park’, her current exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, and particularly the surroundings of her new studio in Thamesmead. The southeast London locale appears in multiple video works that make up the exhibition, becoming the surprising subject of a series of mural paintings in muted palettes on the gallery walls, reproductions of smaller-scale paintings in pale emulsion. It’s the first time the Turner Prize-nominated artist has tried her hand at the medium, 30 years into her career – a sign of her willingness to experiment and keep curious.

Taking time out from installing her exhibition in London before she heads to the US for her next project, Lloyd explains: ‘The studio I recently moved to used to have two nightclubs in the building and I’ve heard that everyone in Thamesmead used to go to them, I think they were hugely popular. I think about them a lot and fantasise about what it would be like if they were still there – I’ve been working above these spaces and most of all wishing that they were still here so I could go.’

It’s perhaps no wonder that Lloyd, who constantly blurs the borders between inside and out, image and abstraction, physical and digital, is interested in an area like Thamesmead. It’s on the cusp of the countryside and at the edge of a heaving metropolis where postwar architecture pans out into Southmere Lake.

‘Inbetweenness’ or perhaps, the interconnectedness between what Lloyd refers to as ‘stuff’, is a leitmotif that runs through the works: men standing around in the eponymous car park, rats and birds, sights and sounds blend together at a lingering pace. ‘I like the way Thamesmead looks and that its homes are built among hills and trees, with wide rolling green open spaces and a boating lake,’ she says. ‘There’s loads of wildlife, including horses, and I love the freedom that this landscape creates for everyone to do whatever they like.’

Meanwhile in Florida, from 3 December and coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach, Lloyd will transform Loewe’s Miami boutique with some of the works from the Thamesmead project. The artist has been tapped for the fifth entry in the Loewe Foundation’s ‘Chance Encounters’ exhibition series. In their American setting they inhabit quite a different context, more strange and exotic than they appear to the local back in London.

The exhibit incorporates prismatic textile works stitched by Lloyd in a technique that’s not dissimilar to the way she edits her digital works: both have the same handmade, rough-cut and spontaneous feel. Tailored specifically to the site, as with all of Lloyd’s work, the installation demonstrates why the artist is ‘perfectly attuned to the contemporary moment and the way in which we engage with the visual world around us’, as Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson notes. Lloyd’s films – displayed on monitors – meet the equally rough-and-ready surfaces of large-scale ceramic sculptures by fellow Brit, the late Ewen Henderson.

INFORMATION

‘Car Park’, until 20 December, Sadie Coles HQ. ‘Chance Encounters V’, 3 December – 21 January 2020, Loewe Miami. sadiecoles.com; craftprize.loewe.com

Art Basel Miami Beach

The fair’s Miami Beach edition is welcoming 20 new exhibitors to the 269-strong fold this year, including New York gallery Karma and Hong Kong-based 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. Also making its debut this year is the Meridians sector, comprising large-scale projects by Mario Merz, Theaster Gates and Adam Pendleton and others, which will be staged in MMBC’s new Grand Ballroom. Highlights include a pseudo-Miami travel agency by Laure Provoust, and a nine-screen film installation by Isaac Julien exploring Lina Bo Bardi’s architectural legacy.

5-8 December, Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive. artbasel.com

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Design Miami

The fair is gaining a new curatorial direction from Aric Chen, who has set a theme for 2019 – the fair’s 15th edition. Named ‘Elements: Water’, it’s a continuation of his Basel offering, ‘Elements: Earth’, in which he curated a range of projects that investigated the future of materials, resources and making. Aligning with the theme is Porky Hefer’s inhabitable sculptures for Southern Guild Gallery, while showing for the first time is Melbourne gallery Broached Commissions who will reveal contemporary versions of Victorian antiques. Elsewhere, collaboration highlights to look out for include Fendi and Studio Kueng Caputo; Cosentino and Patternity; and Analogia Project for Perrier-Jouët.

3-8 December, Convention Center Drive between 18th and 19th Streets, Miami Beach. miami2019.designmiami.com

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Pierre Jeanneret at Berluti 

Seventeen original pieces by Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret will be showcased at Berluti’s showroom in the Design District in a collaboration between Kris Van Assche, creative director of the luxury leather brand, and François Laffanour, founder of Paris’ Laffanour Galerie Downtown. These modernist marvels were created in the 1950s to furnish the administrative buildings of Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex, and have been restored by Laffanour and upholstered with Berluti’s emblematic ‘Venezia’ leather. Read more here.

2-8 December, 161 NE 40th Street, Miami. berluti.com; galeriedowntown.com

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Fernando Laposse: Pink Beasts

Splashing colour onto the Design District is this year’s neighbourhood commission by Mexican designer Fernando Laposse. Public spaces have been devised by Laposse, in collaboration with designer Angela Damman, using pink sisal tassels, naturally dyed with cochineals insects. The pink landscape will also will see hammocks created between the palm trees, offering areas of repose during the Design Miami and Art Week bustle.

Until January; Palm Court (NE 39th Street), Jade Alley (NE 40th Street) and Frei Otto Tent (NE 41st Street). miamidesigndistrict.net

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Casacor Miami

For the third year running, Casacor will transform a 25,000 sq m space inside Brickell City Center into a liveable haven with an a showcase of 20 emerging and established designers. Taking cues from our current climate and the urban infrastructure of Miami, an eclectic array of vignettes will be created by the likes of local studios Moniomi and Edge Collection, and international firms newly presenting at the exhibition, including Ukraine-based Yodezeen. Curator Lina Hargrett is introducing panel talks to the Casacor line up for the first time, centreing the conversation around sustainability and the urban environment.

2-21 December, 700 Brickell Avenue, Miami. casacormiami.com

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El Espacio 23

Forty years in the making, El Espacio 23 is a new private museum dedicated to philanthropist and entrepreneur Jorge M Pérez’s vast art collection. A passion project of the billionaire, the space is housed in a repurposed 28,000 sq ft warehouse in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood and designed by Pérez himself who sees it as an extension of his home (amenities include a library, living room and bar area to entertain guests). The inaugural exhibition, ‘Time for Change’, explores conflicts and contradictions in contemporary social spheres, with close to 100 works by 80 artists on display. Open to the public from 9am – 5pm during Miami Art Week, with private tours available upon request.

5-8 December; 2270 NW 23rd St, Miami, FL 33142. elespacio23.com

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Instagram and Studio Swine

Tech institution Instagram is taking timeout from the feed to curate its first Design Miami hub – a bubble-shaped recyclable PVC installation realised by Studio Swine. Promoting the brand’s #designforall campaign that champions inclusive design, four projects will be housed inside the structure, curated by Fabienne Stephan, with additions from Alleles Design Studio, Kano, Deva Pardue and Yona Care. Read more here.

3-8 December, Convention Center Drive between 18th and 19th Streets Miami Beach, USA. instagram.com; studioswine.com

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Leandro Erlich: Order of Importance

Leandro Erlich is bringing Miami to a standstill by way of a colossal installation that recasts the modern traffic jam as 66 life-sized sculptures of cars and trucks in sand. Commissioned by the City of Miami Beach and curated by Ximena Caminos, the largest work produced by the Argentinian artist to date is a timely reflection on the current climate crisis. The work will take shape on the beachfront at Lincoln Road, a short walk from the Miami Beach Convention Center. Read more here.

1 – 15 December. leandroerlich.art

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Cerith Wyn Evans

Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans will light up Miami Design District for an off-site sculpture and installation exhibition staged by White Cube, adjacent to City View Parking Garage. Highlights include his seminal neon work from 2015, The Illuminating Gas... (after Oculist Witnesses).

30 November – 8 December, 3802 NE First Avenue, Miami. whitecube.com; miamidesigndistrict.net

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Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires

Argentine artists Matías Duville, Graciela Hasper, Marie Orensanz, Pablo Reinoso, Marcela Sinclair and Agustina Woodgate will disrupt Collins Park with a series of large-scale sculptures. Curated by Diana Wechsler and Florencia Battiti, the intervention marks the final chapter of the three-year Art Basel Cities initiative, which sought to amplify Buenos Aires’ cultural ecosystem internationally.

3-8 December, 2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. artbasel.com

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Culture vultures flock in for the two fairs – Art Basel Miami Beach (5-8 December) and Design Miami/ (3-8 December), all the while uncovering satellite showcases ablaze throughout the city, including outdoor beach installations, new museums, fashion drops and hotel collaborations. From Faena District to Downtown, to the Design District and South Beach, our guide helps you navigate through the glamorous urban sprawl, landing you in the shows with monumental impact...

Virgil Abloh: Dollar a Gallon

The ever-tenacious Virgil Abloh is rounding off a blockbuster year with a site-specific outdoor sculpture commissioned as part of Miami Design District’s public art programme. Located in Jade Alley, the work – a Sunoco beacon positioned as a sinking ship – considers the role of advertising and mass communication in modern culture.

Paseo Ponti, between NE40thand 41st
Streets, Miami. miamidesigndistrict.net

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Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch Present: The Extreme Present

Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch have made an annual tradition of joint thematic exhibitions at the Moore Building, and this year is no exception. The fifth in the collaborative series is titled ‘The Extreme Present’, taking inspiration from recent publication, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

4-8 December, Moore Building, 191 NE 40th Street, Miami. gagosian.com; miamidesigndistrict.net

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Thom Browne: Palm Tree I

American fashion designer Thom Browne is still dreaming of summer, evidently. He’s erected a 21ft tall palm street artwork in the atrium of the Moore Building, realised in a dreamy palette of yellow, green, and pink seersucker, pincord, and gingham oxford. Palm Tree I opens to the public on 5 December.

Moore Building, 191 NE 40th Street, Miami. thombrowne.com; miamidesigndistrict.net

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Loewe: Chance Encounters V

The Loewe Foundation has tapped British artist Hilary Lloyd for the fifth edition of its ‘Chance Encounters’ exhibitions She will present a major site-specific textile, sound and video installation that will strike a dialogue with the monumental 18th-century Portuguese granary permanently installed in Loewe’s Miami boutique. Large-scale ceramic sculptures by Ewen Henderson will also be on view.

3 December – 21 January 2020, 110 NE 39th Street, Miami. loewecraftprize.com

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Rubell Museum

Mera and Don Rubell began collecting 54 years ago, having since amassed an enviable collection of 7,200 works by more than one thousand artists – and counting. Together with their son Jason, the family will open a new museum in a 100,000 sq ft facility (80 per cent will be publicly accessible) in Miami’s Allapattah neighbourhood. The former industrial building has undergone a transformation by Selldorf Architects ahead of the museum’s opening on 4 December.

1100 Northwest 23rd Street, Miami. rfc.museum

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Les Lalanne at The Raleigh Gardens

The Raleigh Hotel is paying homage to the late, great Les Lalanne, with the largest outdoor exhibition of the French artists’ whimsical work to date. Initiated by real estate developer and investor Michael Shvo (a longtime friend of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne), the sculptural menagerie will be on display in a new, immersive tropical garden designed by architect Peter Marino and Miami landscape architect Raymond Jungles.

22 November – February 29 2020, 1775 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. raleighhotel.com

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Faena Festival: The Last Supper

After a thrilling debut in 2018, Alan Faena’s festival is back for its second edition. Much to the delight of gourmands, this year’s Faena Festival takes the kitchen as its departure point, positing the shared meal as the crux of social interaction and community. Faena Art chief curator Zoe Lukov is serving up a smorgasbord of new commissions and artist projects, as well as a mobile LED billboard that will screen video installations on Miami’s waterways.

2-8 December, various locations. faenaart.org

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Pulse

There’s a smorgasbord of satellite art fairs that run concurrently to the circus that is known as Art Basel Miami Beach. The 15th edition of Pulse might just be an oasis in the chaos given this year’s theme: ‘The Calm in the Palms’ (some 3,000 sq ft of the fair is devoted to wellness). Newly minted fair director Cristina Salmastrelli is leading the international showcase of contemporary art in Indian Beach Park.

5-8 December, Indian Beach Park, 4601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach. pulseartfair.com 

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Scope Miami Beach

This year’s Scope fair introduces a new experiential multidisciplinary programme – dubbed Oasis –  that features large-scale installations, music performances and panel discussions during the day. It’s not just about the art, however: fairgoers can indulge in an array of wellness offerings, including morning healing, guided meditation and CBD spa treatments, against the backdrop of South Beach.

3-8 December, 801 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach. scope-art.com

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