An emerging artist’s first time exhibiting at Art Basel is usually a thrill, a challenge, and often a career game-changer. But what is it like to show at Art Basel if you are an art world veteran whose name appears on museum banners and can draw crowds? Is appearing at Art Basel – whether in a booth or featured in a special sector – for the fifth, tenth, or fifteenth time much different from the first? And, even years along, is there a difference in making works for an Art Basel fair, or for an institutional exhibition, biennial, or a solo gallery show?

Zurich-based artist Louisa Gagliardi has, as a Swiss national, long had a special relationship to Art Basel. ‘I’ve been going to Art Basel since I was a kid,’ she says, laughing. The Swiss fair was a must-see event for her culture-minded parents, and at around age 10, she was deemed old enough to go along. That visit was memorable, but she remembers even more vividly her first time as an exhibiting artist at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018: ‘For me to be able to show there was so exciting, terrifying, and I even had a little bit of imposter syndrome,’ she says. ‘Art Basel is 7 days of condensed, important moments, and everyone – gallerists, collectors, and critics – is there. And you’re surrounded by all your idols.’

Her works – digitally-imaged figurative canvases whose hypnotic, liminal images and protagonists often foreground the emotional disconnection within our hyperconnected world – have since appeared in regular rotation at Art Basel iterations in Basel, Paris, and Miami Beach, via her Brussels-based gallery rodolphe janssen, Warsaw-based Galeria Dawid Radziszewski, and Zurich- and Vienna-based Galerie Eva Presenhuber. But even now, years later, she has ‘great reverence for Art Basel. You know that the pieces you show there have to be really good.’

Gagliardi makes between 20 and 25 pieces per year, many of them tracing an overall theme. In the run-up to an Art Basel fair, her galleries might ask her for one or two works to show in their booth presentations – and for these, the artist tends to make pieces that fall somewhat outside the lines. ‘You might have ideas of what you want to do, but they don’t fit into something that could be a whole show,’ she says, so pieces for the fairs are sometimes a way for the artist to experiment. She might even thematically adjust new works to each Art Basel venue – Art Basel in Basel is an institution, she says, but ‘Miami Beach is a bit more playful.’ In 2022, she participated in Unlimited at Art Basel in Basel, preparing a piece for a vast 40-square-meter surface. ‘I knew I needed to make large-scale work. It was an intense 6 months.’ But here, too, she reflected the fair’s underlying atmosphere: in Tête-à-tête (2022), two protagonists sit at a large round dinner table at the end of a clearly long night – a wink, perhaps, at the many meals at which art lovers and professionals gather in the Swiss city during the flagship fair’s run.

British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE recalls his first time at Art Basel; it was around the turn of the millennium, and London-based Stephen Friedman, one of his gallerists, was just beginning to show in the Galleries sector. ‘I remember the excitement when Stephen was first accepted to the fair – for a young gallery, that was a major breakthrough,’ he recalls. But now, having shown at multiple Art Basel iterations with Friedman as well as with James Cohan Gallery and Goodman Gallery, Shonibare is most engaged when he is enlisted to present his work in a special sector. The first time was in 2003 at Art Basel Unlimited with Space Walk (2002), an ensemble of astronaut figures wearing spacesuits in colorful Dutch wax-print batik fabrics, floating near a projected image of the Apollo 13 space capsule (a commentary on ongoing colonization and globalization). In 2011, he took part in Art Basel Parcours with 500 Kites, a public artwork featuring hundreds of kites, again made in the artist’s signature batik fabric, all caught in a cluster of trees in Basel. In 2021, for the Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach, he presented, with James Cohan, a large-scale installation called Moving Up, its figures carrying luggage and climbing a staircase, a reference to the exodus of six million Black Americans from the rural south to northern and western US cities throughout much of the 20th century.

Most works that Shonibare shows at Art Basel are not necessarily fair-specific, but rather offshoots of the subject matter that he is addressing at a given time – migration, restitution, and postcoloniality being longstanding themes. Even if the works might not differ from those made for a gallery or museum show, audiences at Art Basel fairs do: ‘It’s a different kind of importance – there will be a wider range of people and curators,’ says Shonibare. ‘I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of that: [Art Basel] has a much wider reach than a museum in one location.’

The artists have different takes on physically attending the fair. Tayou prefers to avoid the buzz and comes primarily to assemble his works (‘I’m not the seller, I’m the maker,’ he quips), but he has certainly been captured by the fair’s unique atmosphere, especially the quiet before the storm. He remembers installing a piece in Continua’s booth, finishing the evening before the fair opened for its preview days, and, looking around, getting the feeling as if he were in an empty museum. ‘You have this opportunity in one fair, to learn. It’s like walking through the history of art,’ he says. Gagliardi likes to mingle among the crowds during the show’s busiest days (‘some artists hate it,’ she says): ‘Sitting down and watching people, or even seeing your gallerist doing their thing, is a little like seeing everyone naked,’ she jokes. Shonibare stays in London to prioritize his studio practice unless he has meetings with curators, is participating in a sector appearance, or is involved with, say, the Conversations program (in 2023 in Basel, he spoke about his Guest Artists Space foundation and residency located in Lagos and Ijebu, Nigeria). ‘I’m very pragmatic,’ he explains.