If you’ve never been to the Swiss version of Art Basel and Design Miami/Basel, what they say about it is pretty much true: If Miami’s overall vibe seems to put partying, relaxation, and hedonism first and serious business second, Basel is decidedly the other way around. Yes, people like Dasha Zhukova and Craig Robbins throw fancy dinners, and spending at least one night out until 4AM at certain local bars is a required rite, and the sales numbers are probably quite similar for both events, but being in Basel just feels different. For one, there’s no offsite scene to speak of, so you spend almost the whole time in massive halls that are jam-packed full of people, leaving no room to forget that you’re basically inside a shopping mall for the filthy rich. And the banks of the Rhine, pretty as they may be, are no South Beach. People wear more clothes in Basel. Everything is twice as expensive.
If there’s one obvious advantage — for a journalist or casual observer — to attending Basel over Miami, it’s that you’re far less likely to be distracted by hangovers, pool parties, boozy brunches, and beach FOMO. You spend the entire day scrutinizing the actual work, and if you’re lucky, like we were, you come home with a camera full of satisfying discoveries. See a handful of them here, then proceed immediately to our Facebook page for four times as many more.
Design Miami/Basel swelled to 51 exhibitors this summer, making it an increasing challenge to document every amazing thing the show has to offer. One of them was certainly this project by Studio Swine for Pearl Lam — called Hair Highway, it’s lined in herringbone panels of resin-encased human hair.
Also by Studio Swine for Pearl Lam, two sculptural curio cabinets resembling Chinese scholars’ rocks, made from foamed aluminum.
Johnson Trading Gallery’s booth contained great new work from Chris Schanck and ArandaLasch, which you can see in our Facebook album. But we also really loved this metal cabinet by Paul Evans, from his Argente series.
Another favorite vintage piece was this lamp at Galerie Kreo, which had an interesting backstory: In 1971, after seeing a 1925 drawing of the lamp by Aleksander Rodchenko, Gino Sarfatti asked the designer’s estate if Arteluce could manufacture it, and they said yes. It’s no longer in production, sadly.
This table by Gio Ponti looked lovely against a backdrop of one of Martino Gamper’s House Plan rugs, this one created especially for the show.
Gallery Fumi’s presentation was especially exciting to us, as it featured almost all new works by almost all up-and-coming designers. These lamps by Jeremy Wintrebert — who will have a solo show at Fumi during the London Design Festival this fall — are entirely mouth-blown, despite their impressive size.
This blue-resin Element Table by Faye Toogood for Fumi is from 2011, but we had to include it anyway because it’s just so stunning.
Similar in scale if not concept was this brand-new urushi lacquer low table by Max Lamb.
One of the most clever projects in Fumi’s booth was a series of three vases by Amsterdam-based Studio Markunpoika made from Faber-Castell pencils that have been glued together into a block and then turned on a lathe.
There were several new pieces at David Gill gallery’s booth, but we couldn’t pry ourselves away from this Gaetano Pesce Puddle table from 2012, which we’d never seen in person. Great colors.
Salon 94 had some great new tables by Kueng Kaputo, which we had a hard time getting a great photo of. The amazingness of these new ceramics by Maria Muzquiz was a bit easier to capture!
When we first saw this chair at Jaques Lacoste, we had one of those moments where we couldn’t tell if it was vintage or contemporary. It’s an extremely well preserved 1930s Jean Royère.
And speaking of preserved, this was one of the coolest things at the whole show, a series of laminated wood furnishings designed for a competition in Domus magazine by Ettore Sottsass, when he was only just starting his career. Prototypes were made but the series was never produced, and only just recently discovered in the archives of the woodworking studio Sottsass worked with.
At Caroline Hoek Gallery, we couldn’t help but swoon over this ring by Italian artist and contemporary jewelry designer Giampaolo Babetto.
More experimental jewelry could be found at the offsite exhibition Craft & Bling Bling, for which the Depot Basel team asked a bunch of interesting young jewelry designers to create experimental pieces around the theme of “fake.” Our favorites were these necklaces by Julia Walter.
We spent most of our time at Design Miami — so much so that we only made it through ONE of the two floors at Art Basel (an undertaking that still took us three hours). There seemed to be a lot of op-art and shapes in the show this year; some of our favorites, with credit info, follow. Be sure to check out our Facebook page for more! Above: Sophie Taeuber Arp, Bandes Cercles et Lignes, 1932
Jesus Rafael Soto, El Cuadrato Verde, 1988
Julian Stanczak, Vanishing Red, 2011
Tauba Auerbach, Ghost/Ghost, 2013
Guilio Paolini, Untitled, 1965
Ben Willikens, Nacht-Cut, 2012
Robert Jacobsen, Balder, 1985
Auguste Herbin, Composition Sur Les Lettres and Violon, 1945
Tom Wesselman, County Line, 1998
Joan Miro, Homme et Femme dans la Nuit, 1969
Fausto Melotti, I Magnifici Sette, 1973
Wolfgang Tillmans, Nite Queen, 2013
William Leavitt, Sidreal Time, 2014
Haegue Yang, Accomodating the Epic Dispersion — On Non-Cathartic Volume of Dispersion, 2012. (It’s made out of window blinds!)
This week, I got more than a few emails from friends and family members flummoxed by my trip to Art Basel. "You're where???" exclaimed my mother, halfway believing I'd temporarily left my annual summer sojourn in Berlin to double back to Miami for three days. That's because while Sight Unseen has been a longtime devotee of the Floridian version of the international design and art fair — stretching back to our I.D. magazine days — we've never managed to make it to the Swiss edition, which is even more extensive. Turns out 2013 was a pretty amazing year to call our first: Design Miami/Basel moved into the incredible new Herzog & de Meuron building, expanding its show in the process, and Art Basel totally killed it with the Untitled show of large-scale works, featuring a new piece by the wonder twins of contemporary installation art, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Artsy made my trip 10 times easier with its extensive online preview of both shows (not to mention an ingenious iPhone-charging station at its ROLU-designed fair booth), and Craig Robins put the cherry on top by letting Kanye West preview his new album — and perform a song a mere 8 feet in front of me — with less than 7 hours' notice. You totally should have been there, but if you weren't, here's the Sight Unseen rundown.
If you spent even an ounce of time at the pool while in Miami for Basel last week, or having cocktails with friends, or sleeping late thanks to an epic hangover, there's an excellent chance you failed to see everything that was on view at the various fairs and satellite exhibitions around town. We ourselves had so little time at Art Basel itself that we did an embarrassingly inadequate skim through what amounted to about a third of the show, promising ourselves we'd come back later in the week (yeah right). And then there were the personal moments we missed just by virtue of not being able to be at every gathering of friends, every party, or every impromptu beach hang at any given time — the weird, wacky, and wonderful experiences our friends had amidst the hyper-stimulation that is Basel, which we witnessed fragments of during the rare times when we were able to sit down and catch up on our Instagram feed. Because we couldn't be everywhere nor see everything, we decided to ask some of our favorite design-world folks to share with us what they saw — the one favorite photo they took in Miami last week, from droopy hot dogs to Modernist masterpieces.
When Design Miami rolls around each winter, it’s hard to resist the siren’s song of sunshine in December, no matter how much you've decided you hate standing in line for parties or how high the hotel rates might balloon during that frenetic week. We’ve been known to pool resources with friends far and wide in order to hop on flights and hightail it out of New York on the promise of a stolen afternoon at the Standard’s pool, or even a press brunch at some Collins Avenue hotel du jour. But we’ve never made it to the event that started it all: Design Miami/Basel and its legendary accompanying art fair. Lucky for us, then, that we alighted this year on the perfect correspondent: Marco Tabasso, known in design circles as Rossana Orlandi’s right-hand man, who took advantage of a rare two-day break (the gallery sat this year out, after having debuted a massive Nacho Carbonell installation in 2011) to zip around the Swiss metropolis, capturing everything he saw for us on proverbial film.