German playwright Heiner Müller once dubbed Paris Bar the ‘hell of Berlin bars.’ Müller lived in the Communist East, but had documents that allowed him to pass between East and West when the Berlin Wall still divided the city. In the 1980s, he was a regular at Kantstrasse 152. Then as now, Paris Bar felt...
Wherever he goes, Guadalupe Maravilla plays a childhood game called tripa chuca, or ‘rotten guts’. Two people take turns connecting numbers on paper by drawing lines that cannot touch, creating a map that tracks how they charted a path in relation to each other. Maravilla played tripa chuca throughout his journey from El Salvador to the United States in...
In the first interview in a new series dedicated to artists’ work beyond art, we (Art Basel) speak to Yto Barrada about her vision for The Mothership, a community-led research center grounded in the Moroccan landscape. Artists don’t just make art. Over a decade ago, this realization led to the launch of ‘The Future of Art Practices:...
Contemporary art has found its footing in the home of Salone del Mobile When contemporary art and Milan come up in conversation, many observers point to one seminal event that put the city on the art world’s radar: Expo 2015. Before the world’s fair, Milan’s two leading creative industries – fashion and design – routinely...
The haute couturière behind Rihanna’s iconic Met Gala dress creates wearable masterpieces that put Chinese cultural heritage center stage. Art Basel’s ‘Inner Worlds’ film series visits creatives in the places that most inspire them Discover the world of Guo Pei, the renowned Chinese couturière and founder of Rose Studio. For the latest episode of our...
Art Basel and UBS present The Art Market Report 2023, an annual global art market analysis. The Art Market Report provides a review of the international art market, highlighting some of the most important trends and developments taking place each year. Authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, it is an independent and...
In collaboration with Stetson, the artist personifies the hidden Black cowboy, reimagining Lon Megargee’s iconic painting ‘The Last Drop From His Stetson’ The American West has its own mythology, bolstered by characters who’ve taken on their own significance over the course of their representation across film and painting and literature: Natives and cowboys, the horses...
In recent years, there has been a significant explosion of interest in Modern and contemporary art by artists from Africa and of African descent. Yet, works in this category still only amount to a small percentage of global art sales worldwide, despite the decades of artistic development made explicit in two groundbreaking survey exhibitions. ‘Afro-Atlantic...
Throughout the world the generation that grew up in the 1990s found in manga, anime, and their game spinoffs a mesmerizing universe. On the one hand, they saw young protagonists achieving justice where their elders had been unable to do so, in dynamic environments ranging from sci-fi planetscapes to verdant, mythical never-pasts of our own...
In her painting United States of Attica (1972), the artist Faith Ringgold presents the familiar American map in a new light. It is darkened and covered with a jumble of texts that give it a confused appearance – a confusion heightened by the solid blocks of red and green supported by black lines, reminiscent of the Pan-African...
