The sculptors, painters and printmakers to look out for in Switzerland this year.

The great thing about art fairs is that you see lots of different things. The tricky thing about them is often that, in fact, you see so many different things, that it all whizzes past in a blur and inevitably melds into a big, confusing, Mr Jackson Pollock-like mess. This is particularly likely to happen at an event like Art Basel, which this year brought together 291 galleries from across the globe to exhibit (and sell) the works of roughly 4,000 artists. Really, therefore, trying to pick five favourites from the whole lot is a silly task. Yet we at MR PORTER have decided to do it. Scroll down for the names that caught our (slightly red-rimmed) eyes at the fair this year.

Mr Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) – Galerie Löhrl

Germany’s Galerie Löhrl filled its entire Art Basel booth with new and recent pieces by Mr Stephan Balkenhol, a sculptor who works by carving human figures from large blocks of wood. This small yet affecting exhibition saw Mr Balkenhol toy with the language and imagery of the classical world, in works like “Siren” (a bird-woman hybrid) and his Kouros series (male figures, both nude and clothed). The somewhat grandiose names are wry – these figures stand just a few inches tall, dwarfed by their own, chest-height pedestals – but there was an appealing sense of pathos to these rough-hewn, splintery men and women.

Mr Laurent Grasso (b. 1972) – Alfonso Artiaco

Scientifically curious artist Mr Laurent Grasso’s paintings pay homage to the style of 14th- and 15th-century masters, such as Messrs Fra Angelico and Piero Della Francesca, juxtaposing Renaissance-era scenes with ominous, and jarringly anachronistic celestial and paranormal occurrences. New work shown at Art Basel includes the triptych “Studies Into The Past”, 2017, which, with its copious gilding and mesmerising centre panel (featuring a blood-red eclipse) was pretty hard to walk past.

Ms LaToya Ruby Frazier – Gavin Brown’s enterprise

Chicago based photographer Ms LaToya Ruby Frazier is a social documentarian with a difference – unlike early pioneers such as Ms Dorothea Lange and Mr Walker Evans, she makes collaboration with the subjects and communities she depicts a key part of her work. Her photo series A Pilgrimage To Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum, 2016 , which was exhibited in full in Art Basel’s Unlimited section, documents a trip she made with her friend Ms Abigail DeVille to the Mojave desert, with the aim of exploring the still extant sculptures and structures created by outsider artist Mr Noah Purifoy between 1989 and 2004. These large, black-and-white images are haunting and wistful, but also wonderfully surreal – particularly when Ms Deville is caught shielding herself from the heat in an aluminium blanket.

Mr Tabor Robak (b. 1986) – Team Gallery, New York

It was hard to walk away from Mr Tabor Robak’s eye-bending screens at the Team Gallery booth – these are generative artworks that are driven by seemingly more surprising the more they are watched. Mounted on tall, vertical LCD screens, works like “xHow” and “TabCorp” (both 2017) mixed flying emojis with liquid splashes of colour that cascaded around extravagantly rendered 3D landscapes – not entirely the most calming thing to place on your wall, but definitely a whole lot of fun.

Ms Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) – Alan Cristea

An entire section of Art Basel, “Edition” is devoted to works produced in multiples (with accordingly accessible price points), and the standout here was recent work from German artist Ms Christiane Baumgartner. Ms Baumgartner works in woodcut, creating monumentally sized prints based on images taken from film stills, resulting in a pleasing contrast between the turbulence of what’s being represented and the meticulous way in which it has been reproduced. This was most gripping in monumental print “The Wave”, 2017, which took up almost an entire wall of London gallery Alan Cristea’s booth.

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