10 Debut Exhibitors at Art Basel 2018

United States

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Based in New York since 1994, this gallery represents a number of well-known international artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Liu Shiyuan, Mark Manders, Analia Saban and Tomas Saraceno. Solo shows are its focus, with recent exhibitions such as Eliasson’s The Listening Dimension, which transformed the gallery’s two-storey space into a work that explored light, vision and movement. Liu’s recent exhibition Isolated Above, Connected Down continues the Beijing-born artist’s journey through transnational identities.

Germany

Barbara Wien Galerie

This Berlin gallery has been going strong since 1988, when it began with an exploration of the revolutionary conceptual art movement of the 1960s. Three decades later, that spirit continues to inform the gallery’s programming, with artists such as Nina Canell, Jimmie Durham, Haegue Yang and Ian Kiaer. Recent exhibitions include Peter Piller’s Behind Time, which used birdwatching as a springboard of enquiry into the concepts of patience, tolerance and the artistic process.

South Korea

Johyun Gallery

With spaces in Busan and Seoul, this gallery represents some of South Korea’s best-known talent, including pioneering video artist Nam June Paik and painter Anh Chang Hong, whose often twisted works reflect a dark relationship with family and society.

China

MadeIn Gallery

This Shanghai gallery opened in 2014 with a focus on Chinese contemporary art. Its exhibitions reflect an unmistakable fascination with post-internet pop culture. Miao Ying’s 2016 show Content Aware tapped into the “features for dummies” embedded in many photo-processing applications, which she used to create strange, kitschy compositions. More recently, Lu Pingyuan’s Home Alone borrows popular animated characters such as Thomas the Tank Engine to explore the impact of mass-market fantasy on real life.

Japan

Maho Kubota Gallery

This Tokyo gallery is just two years old, but it is already making a name for itself through its focus on contemporary Japanese art. Its artists include Yurie Nagashima, who exhibited vintage photographs of her family members posing nude – an enquiry into her identity as a woman – and Aki Inomata, a young mixed-media artist whose work includes animal-themed collaborations such as the creation of hermit-crab shells using a 3D printer.

Iran

Dastan’s Basement

The first Iranian gallery to participate at an Art Basel fair, this Tehran space was launched in 2012 with a focus on emerging Iranian artists. It later expanded to include the work of more established Iranian artists such as Sam Samiee. Recent shows include Saman Khosravi’s Shared Genes, which used drawings, installations and video to free himself from “a sense he does not fully comprehend”, according to the gallery. Mirmohammad Fattahi’s An-Denken used paintings and drawings of fish as a metaphor for death.

Turkey

Öktem Aykut

Since 2014, this Istanbul gallery has trod where other Turkish galleries haven’t ventured before. With the dual goal of exposing wider local audiences to contemporary art and more international viewers to Turkish art, the gallery represents artists such as Inci Furni, whose 2016 exhibition Where is Eros? Vol 3 continued an exploration of Istanbul’s collective memories in art that references Islamic visual culture. Other artists include painters Gökçen Cabadan, Elif Boyner and Aret Gicir.

United States

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

This punchy New York gallery was founded in 1994 and has since expanded to Rome, where it maintains a space inside a deconsecrated eighth-century church. Its expansive roster of artists includes Avery Singer, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mark Handforth, with an emphasis on provocative exhibitions that speak to current events. A recent New York show by photographer Latoya Ruby Frazier took aim at the legacy of racism, while Karl Holmqvist’s Rome show Kapalbhati looked at the fundamental instability of language.

India

Gallery Espace

One of India’s leading contemporary galleries since it opened in New Delhi in 1989, Gallery Espace features a broad and diverse range of artists, most of whom are concerned with social, cultural and political issues on the subcontinent. Last year’s exhibition Ether is all that is, by GR Iranna, used paintings and mixed-media installations to ponder the nature of life, death and religion.

Taiwan

Asia Art Center

With two galleries in Taipei and one in Beijing, this cross-strait art institution aims to promote the established masters of Taiwanese art, many of whom were working at a time when mainland China was embroiled in the Cultural Revolution. Among the gallery’s artists is Fong Chung-Ray, a member of the Fifth Moon Group, which aimed to modernise traditional ink art; and Chu Weibor, who was an adherent of Spatialism, an art movement born in Italy that espoused the synthesis of colour, sound, space, movement and time.