Art Basel

Referencing Baroque and Renaissance painting, literature, daily life, and her own body, Grace Carney (b. 1992) eschews easy categorization in paintings that hover between abstraction and the suggestion of figurative forms. Often restricting her palette, Carney begins each work from a place of discomfort or constraint, wrestling with distinct personal narratives, memories, and relationships with bold vulnerability. In Turn of the Screw, 2026, Carney works outward from a central axis, digging into the canvas's surface as a world of color expands and unfolds in an act of metamorphosis. Born in Minnesota, Carney received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2014, and her MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School, New York, NY, in 2022. Carney was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022. Her work is in the collections of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; Marquez Art Projects, Miami, FL; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; and Scharpff-Striebich Collection, Berlin, Germany. She has been featured in various publications, including Galerie Magazine and W Magazine. Her group exhibitions include I’m Not Your Mother, P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Three Women: Grace Carney, Jeane Cohen, Abigail Dudley, Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York, NY; Considering Female Abstractions, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and Table Manners, Barbati Gallery, Venice, Italy. Carney has presented solo exhibitions internationally, including Wrestle, Beacon Gallery, Munich, Germany; girlgirlgirl, New York, NY; and Subrisio Saltat, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong. Her second exhibition with P·P·O·W will open this October. 

Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984) conjures a saturated, densely layered world of transformation and multiplicity. Inviting amorphousness in her subjects and environments, Glaessner’s surreal universe is populated by evocative forms in various states of becoming or undoing. In her review of Glaessner’s 2022 exhibition at P·P·O·W, Johanna Fateman writes, “Glaessner’s vaporous figuration and dreamy backgrounds can recall such symbolists as Edvard Munch and Odilon Redon, but her color is bolder. She deploys a singular alchemy of high-key stains and pours, overlaid with rich oil paint, to achieve a hazy deep space and smoothly modelled volumes.” Referencing the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which a sculptor falls in love with one of his statues after it is brought to life by Aphrodite, In Labor, 2025, explores the connection between artistic creation and the act of birth. Glaessner received her BA from Trinity University, San Antonio, TX in 2006, and her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, New York, NY in 2013. She was awarded a postgraduate fellowship at the New York Academy of Art in 2013. Glaessner has presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Perrotin, Tokyo, Japan and Paris, France; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; and Consortium Museum, Dijon, France. Her work has been included in group shows at Timothy Taylor, New York, NY; James Cohan, New York, NY; Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Brigitte Mulholland, Paris, France; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Kasmin, New York, NY; Asia Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan; and Public Gallery, London, UK; among others. Her fourth exhibition with P·P·O·W, Running Water, was on view in Fall 2025. Glaessner was recently highlighted as an Artist to Watch in Art in America’s New Talent 2026 issue, and her work is currently on view in small life small deaths, curated by Ksenia M. Soboleva, at Brigette Mulholland, Paris, France.  

In her meticulously rendered small-scale paintings, Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) fuses traditional techniques with a distinctly contemporary sensibility to explore power struggles inherent in sex, race, and class systems. Working in episodic series that take years to complete, Harkness wields unparalleled skill and imagination to elevate the stories and intersectional experiences of women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Showcased in our Kabinett presentation, Moses, 2026, depicts contemporary artist Moses Leonardo posing as one of Harkness’s beloved protagonists, Arabella Freeman, a fictitious Civil War Era Virginian who is free, landowning, and prosperous, imagining what real power looks like in our contemporary age.  Harkness earned her BA from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, West Palm Beach, FL; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; and Seavest Collection, New York, NY; among others. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews Award and participated in the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La Napoule, France. She has lectured widely at leading academic and cultural institutions. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY. In 2023, Harkness’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Prisoners from the Front, was the largest presentation of her work to-date, and her first in over a decade. The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times, BOMB, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. In 2024, Black Dog Press and P·P·O·W co-published Hilary Harkness: Everything for You, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work, featuring texts by Lynne Tillman, Dr. Ashley Jackson, as well as an interview with American painter Ivy Haldeman. Harkness's work is currently featured in the group exhibition Matisse's Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, accompanied by a catalog published by Delmonico Books. 

Within her multifaceted practice, Hortensia Mi Kafchin (b. 1986) unites a highly classical painting style with a distinctive set of motifs and an enduring fascination in our media age’s hybrid, visual environment. Through a kaleidoscopic and hopeful lens, Kafchin vividly portrays her daily life through utopian scenes that comment on the technological, environmental, and socio-political realities of our time. Continuing her exploration of self-portraiture with Blue Hortensia, 2026, the artist casts herself in an unearthly, electric blue glow. Kafchin was born in Galati, Romania and now lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York, NY. She received a degree from the University of Art and Design in Cluj in 2010. Her work can be found in the permanent collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY; and Ludwig Museum, Köln, Germany. Kafchin has presented solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania; Galerie Judin, Berlin, Germany; Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara, Romania; Lyles & King, New York, NY; and Museum of Art, Cluj, Romania; among others. Kafchin has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; New Museum, New York, NY; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; The Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; and Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, among others. She presented her third solo exhibition with Galerie Judin, Cheerful Melancholia, in early 2024. Kafchin's second solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, Paintings Made for Aliens Above, was on view in Fall 2025. Her work is currently featured in House of Nisaba: New Stories of Painting at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. 

Through painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation, Hew Locke OBE RA (b. 1959) explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, and the symbols through which different cultures assume and assert identity. Fusing historical source material with a keen interest in current affairs, often through the juxtaposition or modification of existing artifacts, Locke focuses attention especially on the UK, the monarchy and his childhood home of the then newly independent Guyana. Confederate States of America Loan 2, 2018, renders a strumming banjo player above authentic a Confederate Government Bond, exploring black minstrel history and truths that have been left behind in the name of nationalism. Locke spent his formative years in Guyana before returning to the UK to complete an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. Locke's work belongs to the permanent collections of the Tate, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and British Museum, London, UK, among others. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Here’s the Thing, which opened at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK, in 2019 before traveling to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. In March 2022, Locke presented The Procession at Tate Britain, London, UK, which later traveled to numerous institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Locke unveiled Gilt, the Façade Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in September 2022.  His groundbreaking show, Hew Locke: what have we here?, opened at the British Museum, London, UK, in Fall 2024. Hew Locke: Passages, the largest solo exhibition of Locke's work to date, debuted at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2025, and traveled to Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, 2026. The exhibition will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, on June 21. A work by Hew Locke will make its public debut in our Basel Exclusive showcase, and his third exhibition with P·P·O·W will be open this September. 

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) activated the female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that spanned sixty years and included painting, assemblage, performance, and film. She received a BA in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Illinois. Originally a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Schneemann was uninterested in the masculine heroism of New York painters of the time and turned to performance-based work, primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the individual in relation to social bodies. Although renowned for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter, stating, "I'm a painter. I'm still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas." A compositionally dense painting, Palliation II… evinces Schneemann’s use of saturated colors to masterfully convey movement, tension, and motion in equal measure. It serves as a harbinger of what was to be produced in the decades to come —most notably Meat Joy, 1964 — through its use of line, color, shape, and body to push the painted medium into contemporaneous time and space. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain. The comprehensive retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting traveled from Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria to the MMK Frankfurt, Germany and MoMA PS1, New York, NY. In 2017, she was awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, honoring lifetime achievement. The major survey Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics was on view at the Barbican Art Centre, London, UK, in 2022.  Her work was presented in Of Course You Can / Don’t You Dare at P·P·O·W in early 2024 and in her first solo exhibition with Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, in 2025. Her work is currently featured in the group exhibition Strip through July 31 at P·P·O·W. 

Known for their large-scale paintings of stylized, sentient figures, Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) meticulously deploys oil, airbrush, marbling, and staining to construct deeply textured and complex compositions that transcend an identifiable medium. With a masterful technical understanding and an innate sense of curiosity, Williams fuses imagery from social media channels with references to early modernism, pop culture, advertising, and cinema to challenge the systemic conventions around representations of female-presenting bodies. Exploring our increasing dependence on digital technology, Infinite Scroll, 2026, Williams depicts a female figure simultaneously tethered to and detached from the world around her as her iris morphs to mirror the brick shape of the phone. They received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. They have presented solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Morán Morán, Mexico City, Mexico; Perrotin, Tokyo, Japan; and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You, Williams’s first solo institutional exhibition, was on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH, in 2024. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at Perrotin, Tokyo, Japan; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Canada; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; CC Foundation, Shanghai, China; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and X Museum, Beijing, China; among others. Their work was recently featured as part of The FLAG Art Foundation's Spotlight series accompanied by a newly commissioned text by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh. P·P·O·W will present Williams’s first solo exhibition in the UK at No.9 Cork Street in conjunction with Frieze London this fall. 

A documenter of the constellation of social life, Martin Wong (1946-1999) developed innovative approaches to technique and form, creating rich surfaces and intricate details from astrology, architectural space, modes of language, and a wide-ranging art historical and pop cultural canon, using the latter to make wry political commentary about contemporaneous politics with a focus on marginalized groups. Wong was born in Portland, OR and raised in San Francisco, CA. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968. Wong was active in the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York City in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown New York galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS-related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; M+, Hong Kong; Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Tate, London, UK; among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. The first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez-Rubio, debuted in 2022 at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, Spain. The exhibition traveled to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany, and the Camden Art Centre, London, UK, in 2023 before concluding at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2024. His work has most recently been included in prominent group presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. He is currently the subject of the major solo exhibition Martin Wong: Chinatown USA at Wrightwood 659, Chicago, IL, featuring over 100 works from Wong’s multimedia practice, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Halsted A&A Foundation and Gregory R. Miller & Co. P·P·O·W’s solo presentation Martin Wong: Popeye recently debuted a body of kinetic paintings from the last decade of the artist’s life. The exhibition was reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, T Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine, among others.