‘The idea of having a body makes me cringe,’ says artist Shuang Li, speaking via Zoom from her chilly Berlin studio. ‘Once you have a physical form, you’re trapped. I’ve always felt that – both when I make work and in daily life.’ So, it comes as no surprise that Li feels more freedom online than in IRL....
From An-My Lê and Zoe Leonard to Emilija Škarnulytė and Nguyen Trinh Thi, artists are turning to rivers to illuminate the fluidity of life on earth Fourteen vertical, black-and-white photographic landscapes compose Fourteen Views (2023), a cyclorama created by Vietnamese-American photographer An-My Lê for her survey show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Taken...
Art Basel Miami Beach shrugs off the digital downturn, its main rival’s US expansion and culture war worries Exhibitor numbers may be down 2% on last year, but the forthcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach still tallies a whopping 277 galleries and will feature works by more than 4,000 artists. Those numbers are easily...
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) was by most accounts a sweet kid. He had a baby face and a distinctive walk, one foot pigeon-toed, so he was easy to spot from a block away. He was a pussycat – at least the girls said so – soft-spoken and polite. And he liked to draw. My mother-in-law, an art...
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...
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...
