The 7 best booths at Art Basel's extraordinarily swanky new Paris+ fair:
Some of the most memorable works on the stand of this taste-making French gallery are testaments to the power of collaboration. Iranian artist trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian teamed up with the blacksmith Mohammed Rahis Mollah to create a sculpture out of terracotta produced in the Middle Eastern tradition. Painted with images drawn from news reports, they offer sometimes-dystopian views that rarely make it onto your typical dinner plate.
Meanwhile, an intricate tapestry by Duchamp Prize-winning duo Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, created in collaboration with the TextileLab in the Netherlands, depicts images of archaeological sieves that were lost when the couple’s studio was destroyed in the Beirut Port explosion of 2020. “Tapestry to me is related to photography,” Joreige told Artnet News at the fair. “We wanted to keep renewing the way we were telling stories.
The Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre has transformed A Gentil Carioca’s booth into a labyrinth of paintings on paper, depicting Black figures making their way through an imagined museum. Part of the artist’s “New Power” series, which was the subject of a recent solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the works position members of Alexandre’s Afro-Brazilian community inside the often-sterile white cube.
After a long afternoon on your feet, sometimes you just want to reset your eyes with some really good painting. For that, Mariane Ibrahim gallery is the place to go. A darkly painted room that feels a bit hushed, its stand presents an all-star selection, from Amoako Boafo’s arresting double portrait to Carmen Neely’s lyrical, graphite and oil abstractions .