What Are Galleries Showing at Art Basel 2024?

Founders and directors at BANK, Crèvecœur, Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, Xavier Hufkens, and MadeIn Gallery share highlights of their booths at this year's fair, which opens to VIPs on 10 June.

Mathieu Borysevic, Founder of BANK, Shanghai

We are bringing a very special historical presentation of fibre artworks by Maryn Varbanov and Song Huai-Kuei, aka Madame Song, to the Feature Section of Art Basel. Varbanov and Song worked together and also independently, and these works, made in Paris in the late 1970s, mark a very significant time in both of their careers.

Over the last years, there has been substantial reconsideration of these two cultural icons' work, both in China and Europe, including Madame Song's recent solo show at M+ in Hong Kong and the acquisition of Varbanov's work by the Tate and other European institutions.

Bleu Mise en Rapport (1978), pictured top, is Varbanov's largest and grandest creation currently not in an institutional collection. Made of sisal, silk and wool, the complicated tree-root form has an otherworldly, ornamental and organic quality about it. This work was originally shown at the 1979 FIAC in Paris, where it caught the eye of fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who acquired it and subsequently exhibited the works at his Éspace Cardin in NYC.

Madame Song's Butterfly (1979) is one of the largest and only remaining butterfly pieces of this calibre in private hands. The work, based on the philosopher in ancient China Zhuangzi's classic Butterfly Dream, is bold, beautiful, and fiery red with an elephant-like trunk adorned with knitted bells centring it. It is at once unmistakably feminine and quite aggressive.

Alix Dionot-Morani, Co-founder of Crèvecœur, Paris

Our project gathers together artists who explore some failed possibilities of modernism. Video, painting, installation, and sculptures by the presented artists function as a polysemic object, a reminder of art, architecture, cinema, and the decorative arts' ambiguous relationship with power over the centuries.

Yu Nishimura, who is soon opening a show at ARCH Foundation in Athens, will show a new body of works pursuing his pictorial research about how two states can crossfade in one canvas.

Louise Sartor will unveil new paintings on found small-sized objects, recalling that after all, today's painting is measured against the screens of iPhones.

We will also present a site-specific installation by Sol Calero, a video by Shana Moulton that showed at MoMA earlier this year, and new oil on wood works by Martine Bedin, one of the co-founders of the Memphis design group.

Maria Ana Pimenta, International Director at Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo

By weaving organic dialogues between established and emerging voices in our roster, we're highlighting the visual synergies between the artists and their respective practices. The wealth of media, ranging from sculpture to painting, from embroidery to drawing, is united by the quality and curiosity of the work on display.

Two highlights of our booth are the works of Tadáskía and Janaina Tschäpe.

Tadáskía's pieces in Basel complement her current solo presentation at MoMA, also featuring her abstract drawings of colourful, creature-like tangles. Parallel to the fair, Tadáskía will show a site-specific installation at Claraplatz, as part of Art Basel's Parcours sector.

Her work provides a complementary universe to Janaina Tschäpe's gestural, meteorological dreamscapes, which will prominently feature on our booth, as well as in a monumental suite of nine paintings at Art Basel Unlimited.

Xavier Hufkens, Founder of Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Our presentation includes artists ranging from prominent art historical figures such as Robert Ryman, Alice Neel, and Louise Bourgeois to younger generations of artists such as Matt Connors, Ulala Imai, and Qiu Xiaofei.

One of our highlights this year is undoubtedly Series #2 (White) (2004–2005), a major work by Robert Ryman whose first show at the gallery I organised in 2000. Although commonly associated with minimalism, Ryman never subscribed to the term and instead drew his attention towards sublimating the medium of painting through sensitisation of perception. This is evident in Series #2 (White), in which he incorporates the particular light sensitivity of the white paint, allowing the subtle details and nuances to become visible to the naked eye.

Another major highlight this year is Room with All Existing Words, (2005-2024) by Mark Manders as part of our presentation in Unlimited. Having recently joined the gallery, Manders employs his meticulous craftsmanship across various mediums to visualise his poetic explorations of language and temporality.

Room with All Existing Words, (2005-2024), in particular, was created in the span of almost two decades, which is characteristic of Manders' practice challenging the coherence of linear temporality without a clear beginning or an end. Manders will present a large-scale solo exhibition at the gallery this October.

Vigy Jin, Co-founder of MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai

In our shared both with ShanghART, we're showing artists ranging from major figures in Chinese contemporary art history, such as XU ZHEN® and Wang Jianwei, to a younger generation of Chinese diaspora artists like Shen Xin and Su Yu-Xin.

In XU ZHEN®'s 'Alien' series, the relationship between the Han-dynasty dancer and the Roman column, rendered soft, may well be one of companionship as they dance together, or of confrontation and mutual probing. The artist thus creates a metaphorical scene of contemporary geopolitics and civilisational interaction.

Shen Xin is primarily known for their moving image installations and performances that empower alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states.

We would like to bring attention to their paintings as well, where the energy of what's perceived as connections of the interspecies existence is borrowed to portray the creation of an image. Here, stories of dying, nursing, capturing, landing, slicing, and eating together compose an ecosystem of what wants to be told.

Sequin Ou, Director of Programme Development at ShanghART, Shanghai

Along with XU ZHEN®'s 'Alien' series, a major work in our shared booth with MadeIn Gallery is Yang Fudong's huge mural-like scroll Beyond GOD and Evil-H Wave (2019), which combines the royal court of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) with Nietzsche's quotations in a multi-layered narrative landscape about power, desire, and individual will. More than 20 photographs from the series 'Dawn Breaking' are collaged together to form the main narrative line.

As Yang Fudong's most extensive creation to date, combining photography and painting, the artist seeks to help people realise their Hopes in life, their Heart's true feelings towards themselves, and the Height of their ideals and beliefs. —[O]