Art Basel In Basel

There's one favourite destination for art lovers from around the world: Art Basel, the most prestigious international art fair. For the New York Times it's the "Olympics of art world", for the parisian daily Le Monde it's "The best of the world", for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it's "Art in its best form" and Vogue calls it "the most beautiful temporary museum of the world." 

The 2016 show, one of the most successful in Art Basel’s history, brought the international artworld together, with more than 280 of the world's leading galleries showing the work of over 4,000 artists. A full program of artworld talks took place each day. Exhibitions and events were also offered by cultural institutions in Basel and the surrounding area, creating an exciting, region-wide art week. 

Hans Op de Beeck has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects.

Marinus Boezem (1934, the Netherlands) is one of the first artists who introduced conceptual art in the Netherlands in the 1960's. He discovered that he could use elusive elements such as air, weather, wind and light as visual materials. 

Chelpa Ferro is an art group formed in 1995 by the Brazilian artists Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler. Barrão made a name for himself in the 1980s, by using banal materials – from refrigerator components, to television parts and other fragments of household appliances - to create sculptures with a sense of humour. 

For Nina Canell, sculpture is a condition. Grounded as much in the chance encounter as in close study, her work places material forms and immaterial forces in proximity, whereby each shapes the other, allowing dynamic relations to emerge.

Shiota's oeuvre links various aspects of art performances and installation practices. Mostly renown for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, windows, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Besides installation works, she frequently collaborates with choreographers and composers for opera, concert and dance projects.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. 

Roth, most influential in invigorating the genre of artists' books in the 20th century, produced work as radical as it is varied, incorporating unconventional materials, such as meat, pudding, and newsprint. The twenty-one "books" and a complete set  of the Collected Works on display embody Roth's wild experimentation that challenges the conventions of art and language. 

Gretchen Bender was an American artist who worked in film, video, and photography. She was from the so-called 1980s Pictures Generation of artists, which included Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons and Richard Prince.

Always rooted in the medium of film, Tony Oursler conjures sculptural and immersive experiences using technologies that hark back to magic lanterns, Victorian light shows, camera obscura and auratic parlour tricks, but that also look forward to the fully networked, digitally assisted future of image and identity production. 

How multifaceted, rich in variants, and rhythmic can a concentration on black, white, and shades of gray be? For a demonstration, see Tobis Pils. The artist, who lives in Vienna, draws the beholder of his work into a cosmos of painterly and graphic forms—structures and gestures that, the moment they are applied to canvas or paper, seem to vanish.