The 15 Best Booths at Art Basel in Basel

Two hundred and ninety galleries are currently showing more than 4,000 artists for Art Basel’s hometown edition, on through Sunday. The fair opened on Tuesday with a number of significant sales, particularly of works by Joan Mitchell. Many of the fair’s most worthwhile gems to seek out are located away from the mega-galleries that line the Messe Basel’s central courtyard. Here are 15 presentations you shouldn’t miss.

Installation view of work by Jacolby Satterwhite at Morán Morán’s booth at Art Basel in Basel, 2018. Courtesy of Art Basel.

Rare is the booth that is so immersive it transports you out of the fair, far away from the confines of high-priced transactions in expo centers. Jacolby Satterwhite does that and more at the solo booth of Morán Morán in the Statements sector, with work that expands on how his giddy, computer-animated science-fiction visions are actually grounded in real life, reflecting his relationship with his mother and his history of growing up black and gay in South Carolina. The work spans wildly different media and approaches, but is linked by the artist’s mother, who passed away two years ago after battling mental illness.

First, there are her sketches of potential new appliances—one is an ice bucket on wheels—that she would mail to QVC in hopes that the company would mass-produce them, making her rich on royalties. (Some of these items have been physically produced by Satterwhite, who places them on shelves made to house a home-entertainment center.) A CGI video work provides a glimpse into the artist’s futuristic landscapes: a vision of a factory in outer space where there is no hierarchy; the Boschian scenes of gleeful bodies atop one another. And then there’s an accompanying VR work, where viewers can feel like they are actually flying on the sort of drone that might have been used to film Satterwhite’s virtual universe. Morán Morán co-owner Mills Morán told me that Satterwhite wanted to get people “out of the flat zone”—out of the fair, and into the artist’s head.