40 Outstanding Works to Hunt Out at Basel

Art Basel is less an art fair than a living organism—restless, sprawling, and always in motion. It’s where the world’s art converges to be seen, debated, and, above all, to surprise. This year’s Ocula Basel selection highlights outstanding works, from large-scale and small-scale sculptures to paintings by both well-known and increasingly known artists.

The selection includes works by established artists, such as William Kentridge, whose work is currently the subject of a significant exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in New York. This follows the gallery’s recently announced shared representation of the artist with Lia Rumma and Goodman Gallery, the latter of whom is bringing the striking work on paper contained herein. Kentridge’s art is a kind of visual jazz—improvisational, urgent, and always riffing on the chaos of history.

Also featured are small-scale sculptural works that beg further attention, including an elegant ceramic work by Lucie Rie and two compelling installations by Haegue Yang and Trevor Yeung. Yang is showing a new body of work at the Nasher Sculpture Center, where her installations transform everyday materials and folk traditions into uncanny, hybrid forms, and the work showing with Galerie Chantal Crousel—a concoction of pinecone, artificial plant, corkscrew hazel, fluorescent paint, lacquered driftwood —points to this new direction. Equally intriguing is the fusion of aquatic motifs by Trevor Yeung, whose reworked Venice Biennale presentation is showing at M+ in Hong Kong. His work at Basel, presented by Magician Space, animates what appears to be a shell within a detailed vitrine, presenting a sealed world where longing and memory drift.

There are also works by artists whose focus is painting, such as Emma McIntyre and Yu Nishimura. McIntyre, who made her Asian solo debut at David Zwirner in Hong Kong earlier this year, creates lush abstractions in scale and medium, while Yu Nishimura’s dreamlike canvases are inspired by suburban Japan and street photography.

Main image: Chen Ching-Yuan, Not the Season of Spring (2024). Oil on canvas. 100 x 80 x 3 cm. Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery.