Here are the galleries participating in Art Basel's 2020 edition in Basel
Discover the unique stories behind five of them, from Dubai to London
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The galleries participating in Art Basel in Basel's 2020 edition have just been announced. Strolling the halls filled with their best artworks come June, one might forget that behind every booth there’s a story. On the occasion of the fair’s 50th anniversary, five participants reflect on their beginnings and how these early years have shaped their programs, often to this day.
After a decade working for other galleries, Bridget Donahue decided it was time to open her own in 2015. ‘I was at a fork in the road and thought: no better time to give it a shot,’ the New Yorker says. Her eponymous gallery on the Bowery is one of this year’s first-time participants, with a solo booth by Jessi Reaves presented in Statements, the sector devoted to emerging artists. Jake Miller became a bona fide gallerist eighteen years earlier. He turned The Approach – his artist-run space on the floor above the namesake London pub – into a fully-fledged gallery in 1997, which he has co-run with business partner Emma Robertson since 2003. Also known for spotting young talents, Miller and Robertson's gallery has since then become a mainstay of the London art scene, and a regular participant in Art Basel’s main sector, including this year.
Reflecting the noughties’ shift towards the digital, Umer Butt started his gallery Grey Noise in 2008 as a website in Lahore, Pakistan. Six months later, he rented a small space in a friend’s office and staged the Grey Noise’s first show. ‘Back then I was not at all aware of what art galleries do, other than making exhibitions, which I was interested in’, he says. Butt relocated to Dubai in 2012 and partnered up with Hetal Pawani to run the gallery. Grey Noise will return to the Statements sector for its third participation, with works by Shreyas Karle.
A sense of inspired spontaneity often transpires from these stories. Olivier Antoine, who founded Art: Concept in Nice in 1992, says he felt he ‘had to open a space’. At a time where the glitz and excess of the 1980s still rippled through the artworld, he titled his first show ‘Fiasco’. ‘I’ve always had a penchant for contradiction’, he adds. Emanuel Layr started his namesake space in 2011, encouraged by Vienna’s cultural dynamic, which had enabled local artists to reach a new level. Antoine’s gallery has since become a fixture of Art Basel’s main sector, while Layr’s will join it for the first time this year.
As some of these galleries evolved, so did the wider cultural context. The Approach’s Jake Miller and Emma Robertson mention the rise of the Young British Artists in the 1990s and the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 as major factors in putting London on the global art map. Donahue has also witnessed a host of changes since she first started working in the artworld, noting the arrival of ‘new voices, models, collectors, geographies, and media’. While some of the old models might soon be a thing of the past, Antoine also foresees the arrival of a new art economy, ‘perhaps less ostentatious but closer to the tangible aspects of life’.
This closeness to ‘beings and substance’ is something Antoine has always advocated for through his program, which includes Ulla von Brandenburg, Michel Blazy, and Jeremy Deller. Emanuel Layr pinpoints ‘clear models of thought, models of inner and outer worlds’ as a recurring topic of the exhibitions he has presented since the gallery’s inception. His Art Basel presentations of Cécile B. Evans in 2017 and Stano Filko in 2018 are good examples of that self-assessment. Bridget Donahue articulates the core of her motivation in a particularly poetic way: ‘When I decide to work with an artist it is usually because I’m in awe of what they do,’ she says, ‘I’m confounded by it. I want to inhabit their world.’
Discover the full list of galleries participating in Art Basel in Basel’s 2020 edition here.
Top image: Installation view of Ragen Mos's exhibition ‘8 Animals’ at Bridget Donahue, New York City, November 2019. Photo by Gregory Carideo. Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York City.
