The radical (and very chic) artists to see at Art Basel Paris

Hot on the heels of Frieze London, Art Basel Paris returns to its former home inside the Grand Palais, filling the space with almost 200 different galleries and plenty of Issey Miyake-clad collectors dotting between booths.

Where the talk on the ground at Frieze had leaned financial, related to concerns over Brexit’s effect on the British art market, Art Basel Paris felt more assured. No doubt because some of the most monied cultural philanthropists (see also, wealth hoarders) are now flocking to the Continent, where they get better bang for their buck as non-doms.

Add to this a Miu Miu-funded satellite project at the Palais D’Iéna, Tales and Tellers, a Louis Vuitton and Frank Gehry activation (très chic), and plenty of other fashion-art crossovers, including a literal talk entitled ​“Fashion x Art”. It’s clear that Art Basel Paris has also stepped in on high fashion patronage where Frieze – remember the Matches Fashion partnership? – has perhaps fallen behind. Did we mention that Sarah Andelman, the founder of OG concept store Colette, debuted the first Parisian edition of Art Basel Shop this year, lining the shelves with some of the most IYKYK gallerina fare going? Think Claire Fontaine tees, Jeff Koons skateboards and Balenciaga fave artist Anne Imhof’s anticipated Sex book.

Of course, none of this matters if the art on show amounts to little more than flipper fodder. Which is why we’ve been delighted to find that not only is Art Basel Paris seducing the big pockets, it’s also spotlighting and showcasing some of the most radical artists, past and present. Alongside your Murakamis and Kusamas, there’s swathes of talent to sink your teeth into, whether it’s a cutesy, bow-wrapped seascape No Refunds (2024) by Demna’s old fit model Eliza Douglas, or the chaotic, technicolour mural – complete with a twinky Justin Bieber reference image pasted across it – by Loewe AW24 collaborator Richard Hawkins. Here’s a potted list of names you should not miss.

No doubt you’ll have seen the late David Wojnarowicz’s work at some point in fashion lore. As early as 2018, Loewe worked with the artist’s estate – looked after by PPOW Gallery – on a series of T‑shirts, each emblazoned with one of Wojnarowicz’s most famous artworks. On it, a small child appears with text surrounding him that outlines the hideous future he might face as a gay person living in the USA in the early 1990s.

For the 2021 Met Gala, that same image appeared on actor Dan Levy​’s clutch, teamed with a custom polo, embroidered and caped with Wojnarowicz’s legendary, Fuck You Faggot Fucker (1984) work, in which the artist had aped a homophobic cartoon in an act of resistance.

This year, at Art Basel, a lesser known painting from that same oeuvre, Untitled (1985 – 87), is on display, showing two men going at it bareback, backdropped by torn maps akin to those seen at the Met. Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington, the downtown fixtures behind PPOW, have represented the artist since circa 1987 – 88, by which point he was already diagnosed as HIV positive and focusing his energy towards the AIDS crisis in the US. Wendy points to the blood cells, sperm and stirring words that cross-section the work, explaining its poignance and giving insight into the man behind it.

“David could be extremely funny, he could be extremely frustrated and he could be extremely angry also,” she says. ​“He was sick when I worked most closely with him. I think that we felt we just needed to support him as much as possible.” Wendy would travel with David, as well as helping him source materials to make work. ​“We talked mostly about the symbolism of his dreams and boys, and smoked a lot of cigarettes,” she remembers. ​“And I’d get him where he had to go and just make sure he got back to his hotel.” The work on show translates that same urgency, moving between planes with collaged antique and prehistoric images as well as world maps, at once historical and zoomed-in, on the precipice of something catastrophic.

Jack O'Brien, Allowance (2024)

It’s been quite the year for the South London-based sculptor. Besides fronting the cover of Frieze magazine’s October issue, he’s also just opened a solo show at Camden Art Centre, taking over the space with several austere assemblages of otherwise mundane objects. From the outside, they’re formalistic, a little perturbing, and elusive. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and the queer, metropolitan references come to the fore.

Taking cues from the pressure, anticipation and release that might characterise gay cruising and life in a city where space is capital, the artist mainlines this very tension into his works, stretching sheer materials or wrapping cold steels to give an air of imminent release, climax and flux. For Art Basel Paris, Jack presents an equally precarious structure Allowance (2024), comprising two sousaphones (essentially, a larger iteration of the tuba) centred by a starched street lamp, complete with resin bubbles. Suspended from the ceiling, each sousaphone is wrapped in clear PVC, hoicked into place with metal wires.

“So much of my work has been shaped by a shifting sense of instability in London,” says Jack. ​“You can see in quite a lot of pieces, this kind of honesty around how things are made. Within an instant, things could collapse or be taken apart.” Elsewhere in Capitain Petzel gallery’s booth, a horn, a white stocking and electrical cables are contorted into one unnerving sculpture, spray painted where the horn tapers out. Entitled Lead Eye (2024), this is yet another taste, alongside Allowance, of what’s to come at the artist’s next solo in January 2025 for the Berlin-based gallery.

Jesse Darling, Deeds III (2023)

As an artist, Jesse Darling is rigorous, both in theory and practice. Working largely within sculpture, he graduated Central Saint Martins in 2010, going on to do an MA at Slade. Since then, he’s been using his work as an inherently political tool, unpicking problems – like class struggle, for example – in a way that’s both acerbic and accessible, though never populist. In 2023, he was announced as the Turner Prize winner, which in art world terms puts him up with the likes of Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tai Shani and Gillian Wearing. In other words, he’s kind of a big deal. As the Daily Mail took great delight in announcing, he was also the first trans artist to win the Turner Prize, but therein lies so much of the initial confusion surrounding his work.

This is not, at least exclusively, queer work. Consider Jesse Darling’s installation for the Turner, entitled Come On England (2023), which was shown in Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery and offered a haunting diagnosis of life in contemporary Britain, arranging metal barriers typical of those used at football matches (or to kettle protesters) into meandering, posed formations. Amongst them, patchworked bunting soared above while old Filofaxes were stacked on the gallery floor.

Moments of union in a hyper-individualised world? The grey area between inclusive patriotism and ​“stop the boats” rhetoric? Make of it what you will, but it spoke to a fraught citation in the UK. Now, for Art Basel Paris, the artist reworks that same installation for the Petit Palais, entitling this iteration Vanitas (2024), complete with the same winding roller coaster track and sun-bleached Union Jacks. Here, it takes on a poignant parallel. After all, this is the same country where liberté, égalité, fraternité is touted by officials, while mandating a burqa ban.

For the artist’s main showcase at Galerie Sultana’s booth in the fair’s Emergence section, he treats us to whimsical oddities, be it a phallic candle wick finished with two bells, Bigwick 1 (2024) or, in Deeds III (2023), shrine-encased, ribbon-wrapped hammers that, behind their glass encasing, teeming with malice. ​“It’s a link to workers, industry and labour. He’s very critical about the economic condition in the UK,” says gallery founder Guillaume Sultana. ​“It’s related to his own experience in his life and family when he was in the UK.” We, for one, are convinced.

Another name from Camden Art Centre’s program is Martin Wong. The artist’s estate, run by PPOW, staged a solo retrospective there in summer 2023, Malicious Mischief, which also aired prior at Berlin’s KW Institute in 2022. Although anything but under the radar today, the artist spent most of his living life living on the margins. Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco, Martin died of AIDS-related complications in 1999, but his legacy lives on in several arenas, from the fine art world through to fashion.

Besides an AW19 Supreme collaboration, the artist was long ingratiated in the worlds of graffiti writing (he collected writers’ black books throughout his life) and hip-hop, fascinated by the characters he met in the Lower East Side tenements of New York during his life in the ​’80s and ​’90s. Throughout his work, there are several oeuvres beginning largely in the Bay Area during the ​’70s when he was living among the hippie communities, forming part and parcel of the infamous, psychedelic drag troupe, The Coquettes.

The work on show at Galerie Buchholz, two rather trippy bunnies drawn in ink, Untitled (1970), and pencil, Fern Canyon Easter Bunny (1970), and a costume study from the Angels of Light’s Peking on Acid performance encapsulate this heady era, as well as his long held love for Asian mysticism and Chinese calligraphy. ​“People underrated it for the longest time,” says Galerie Buccholz founder Daniel Buchholz. ​“Sometimes it happens. Keith Haring? Yes. But, Martin Wong? No.” Of course today the estate attracts big figure sums, but the work’s underground appeal remains, telling poetic tales of druggy underworlds, homosexual fantasies (he had a fetish for firemen) and East Asian identity.

Remember the SS23 Miu Miu collection? Good start. As well as the FKA twigs cameo and belted micro-skirts galore, it was also notable for the hulking great white flashing behind the dress room doorway. Well, that dystopian film installation – Miuccia Prada is an arthouse cinephile and art film diehard – was by Shuang Li, the Chinese contemporary artist whose practice spans hyper-real film, sculpture and mixed-media assemblage. ​“It was such a special experience! It was my first time working in fashion but also attending a fashion show,” remembers Shuang Li. ​“I had totally no idea what I was in for. We had a lot of brainstorming sessions with Mrs Prada and OMA, which was very inspiring.”

Beyond fashion, Shuang Li’s works are fabricated in everything from found objects – noughties car dice and black-out platform dress shoes – plus delicious, beaded resin moulds, channelling the tools of escape (My Chemical Romance, MySpace and fake Nintendo games) she deployed during her youth in Wuyishan, southeastern China. Today, her predilections for digital-first life (she’s a millennial, FYI) manifest in bizarro motifs including, but not limited to, an AI sex doll, 3D tadpoles and Chinese school uniforms.

For Art Basel Paris, she’s showing with Antenna Space, a Shanghai-based gallery. Entitled The Guillotine (Future), 2024, it’s a cold, lacquered bow in stainless steel. Both the pinnacle of coquette and a more astute commentary. ​“For me it’s all about [the] reverting and mutating of popular culture on [and] off screen,” says Shuang Li. ​“Like how the body takes on different forms on screen, and how it in return affects the physical body. That’s why it’s called The Guillotine.” Sharp! In the meantime, look out for her solo show coming to Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, in two weeks.

Art Basel Paris is ticketed and open to the public from 18^th to 20^th October, 11am – 7pm, at the Grand Palais.