Right now, the global art world is packing its Rimowa suitcases and Louis Vuitton trunks, preparing to descend on a small but mighty little financial center we call Switzerland. They pick out evening wear, flex their stomachs for the ungodly amounts of asparagus and champagne, and their accountants feel inexplicable neck pain. It’s true, it’s Art Basel season.
During this year’s edition of the fair’s flagship edition, there are many artists who deserve your attention. But with 283 galleries on display and a slew of exhibits taking place at satellite events, museums and institutions across the city, it can be hard to filter out the noise. Do not worry; we have you. Here are five artists whose careers we think are poised to soar to new heights.
Diamond Stingily (born 1990)
miserly diamond, How did he die (2016). © Stingily Diamond. Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Cabinet, London.
Represented by: Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Cabinet, London
Or: Unlimited Art Basel
What: Chicago-born New York artist Diamond Stingily’s ambitious and precise installations often encompass ready-mades that delve into memories of suburban life, childhood, racial identity and racial violence. For Unlimited, the artist will present a massive floor-to-ceiling projection called How did he Die. The 2016 piece projects black-and-white film footage from 1967 that shows young Los Angeles girls playing call-and-response songs and dancing in a schoolyard. To see it, viewers will look through a free-standing chain-link fence that cuts across the screen – like most of Stingily’s intricate artwork, there’s a note of eerie, surveillance and haunting alongside a feeling of commemoration.
How did he die is an edition of three (plus an artist’s proof); one is already in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Stingily’s work will also be exhibited on a smaller scale at the stands of Isabella Bortolozzi and Cabinet in the gallery area of Art Basel.
—Kate Brown
Sin Wai Kin (born in 1991)
Sin Wai Kin, Change (movie still) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Soft Opening, London.
Represented by: Soft Opening, London
Or: “Portraits”, the artist’s solo presentation that marks the gallery’s debut at Art Basel in the Statements sector
Known for their adoption of drag as a medium while drawing on references to traditional roles and the aesthetics of Cantonese opera, Sin examines themes of desire, identification and consciousness in the narratives of fiction and storytelling through their work, whether performance, moving image, writing or print. The “boundary-pushing nature” of their work impressed a wide audience, including last year’s Turner Prize judges. After earning a nomination for the coveted Turner Prize last year, the youngest artist to receive the honour, at the age of 31, the London-based Sin designed the ‘Portraits’ project for their presence at Art Basel. The project presents five almost life-size “living” portraits of five characters created by Sin: “The Universe”, “Change”, “The Clowns”, “The Constructions” and “The Storyteller”. It serves as the artist’s continuation of his exploration of storytelling as a way to interrogate binaries and fantasy narratives while examining how stories are created. Movie editions start at $15,000.
—Vivienne Chow
P staff. (born in 1986)
Always from The American night by P. Staff. All images courtesy of the artist and the Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico.
Represented by: Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
Or: Kunsthalle Basel
What: Patrick Staff, the filmmaker better known as P. Staff, invests the oldest art gallery in Switzerland with an installation centered on the concept of necromancy. The extensive exhibition, titled “In Ecstasy”, is the 36-year-old artist’s largest solo exhibition to date.
Through a series of intricate wires and pipes evoking livestock containers, viewers will journey through a maze-like structure and encounter video and sculptural works that immerse them in richly colored scenes illustrating Staff’s mystical perspective on the ubiquitous brutality of life as we know it. he. Along the way, found objects including doorknobs, floor panels, electrical outlet covers and locker tags were installed in the walls of the Kunsthalle. At first they may seem everyday, but look a little closer and they have a rusty patina, which the staff created using animal blood collected from slaughterhouses.
—Annie Armstrong
Holly Herndon (b. 1980) and Mathew Dryhurst (b. 1984)
Mathew Dryhurst and Holly Herndon x_o 4 (2021). Courtesy of the artists.
Represented by: Not represented by a commercial gallery
Or: Display in “Whistlers», a special project at List, and «Collaborative Worldbuilding – Art in the Metaverse” at HEK Basel
What: Berlin artists Herndon and Dryhurst are pioneers, not only with their experiments with the latest technology, but also in their work to create industry standards regarding how the work and likenesses of living artists are used to form models of AI.
At HEK Basel, they are showing works from their 2021 “Classified” collection, a series of portraits that explore what OpenAI’s CLIP model thinks “Holly Herndon” comes from internet scraping. They will also show footage of AI training performances held from 2018 to 2020, a song generated using a collective voice model that artists trained on over 50,000 voices, and a terminal that people can use to see if their work or likeness has been used to inform a large dataset that most AI image generators use for training, haveibeentrained.com. (The duo is also working on another tool called spawnwhich allows users to set permissions on how their artwork and likeness is used by machines.)
Mathew Dryhurst and Holly Herndon ∞IV (2021). Courtesy of the artists.
At List, artists exhibit in a group show that is part of the fair’s special projects program. They bring an eerily serene landscape to their “Infinite pictures“, a collection of large murals that experiment with the concept of creating images that endlessly continue in all directions, which is one of the first images made with the AI DALL-E text to image generator. They print the artwork on perforated paper, so people can destroy it or take pieces home during the exhibition. “We liked the idea of treating one of the first works of art made with this generation of technology as something anyone can take with them, or do anything, instead of treating it like a rare or finished work of art,” said Dryhurst. “By their nature, these images are infinite.”
Responding to collector interest, they are still pricing the “Infinite” images, although Dryhurst said he sold one in 2022 to a collector for around $20,000. The “ranked” images are all sold out, and their floor price is currently 20 eth (about $36,000 at the time of this writing).
—Naomi Rea
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