Art Basel 2022: Hall 2.0 Booth C8

One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Thomas Schütte’s real and invented forms, often distorted and unsettling, explore themes of cultural memory, struggle and the impossible utopian ideal. The past and present of the history of sculpture collide in the artist’s work. His motifs, which look seriously at the human condition, find their form in expressive physiognomies and typologies. This work is from a new series of half heads made in Murano glass, a material which the artist returns to time and again, its strong facial expression echos the artist's the ceramic works, yet its material quality is utterly different.

A solo exhibition by Thomas Schütte continues until 25 June at Frith Street Gallery.

Polly Apfelbaum developed a new body of ceramic work for her recent exhibition For the Love of Una Hale, at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania. Exploring contemporary ideas surrounding craft, gender and identity, Apfelbaum’s new work melds painting, ceramics and installation. It examines the formative impact of Pennsylvania German art on Apfelbaum's hybrid sensibility, informed by the artist’s engagement with art history, applied arts and popular culture.

‘The goal is to interpret the personal as political’, says Apfelbaum, citing her long history of working with materials associated with craft and everyday life – such as fabric and rugs. The exuberant colour palette of these wall-mounted ceramics, which read like abstract paintings, is derived from Apfelbaum’s memories of her early exposure to Pennsylvania German art. These works have become a means for Apfelbaum to reflect on the inception of her artistic sensibility and its investigation of the materiality of colour. The title of this six-part work refers to a popular Amish quilt motif inspired by the Morning Star and the celebrated love poem by John Keats which opens ‘Bright Star! Would I were steadfast as thou art’.

Polly Apfelbaum’s two-person show with Josef Herzog at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland runs until 19 June. Her solo exhibition Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea at Magazin III, Jaffa, Israel runs until 15 July.

Callum Innes is known for luminous abstractions that push at the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Composed of opaque sections juxtaposed with thin, translucent washes that appear almost permeable, his paintings invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. 

Innes generally works in series, allowing his methods to build upon each other and evolve gradually while he works on several paintings at the same time. Untitled Lamp Black / Caribbean Turquoise (2021), appears at first to be only two colours, but a closer look reveals a range of complex hues and shades. Innes started by painting the entire canvas black before applying repeated washes of turpentine to remove paint from part of the surface, leaving all but the faintest vestigial traces of pigment. The remaining black part of the canvas is then painted with another colour, resulting in a luminous, shifting surface that evokes different registers of time.

John Riddy’s practice is rooted in encounters with place. Returning time and again to specific locations, the artist is interested in the transformation that occurs when the familiar world is described as a photograph on paper.

Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works taken from a single viewpoint on the Norfolk Coast Path looking towards Blakeney Point, not only a place visited by Riddy for over 30 years but a common walking path and an everyday experience for thousands of people. The horizon, which carefully divides the composition in two, indicates a shingle ridge that protects the marsh from the North Sea, disrupted by a single building silhouetted against the white-grey sky. 

While Blakeney (1), 2021 offers a new subject matter for Riddy, the series adopts earlier formal and thematic tropes. The half-and-half division between land and sky, for example, echoes the composition of the New York (Black Star) series (2016). Indeed, both bodies of work also capture a single viewpoint in meticulous detail as it changes over a period of time ­– for Black Star, a series of pictures over 24 hours; for Blakeney, the series was made over two years. Each resulting photograph is attached to a specific moment, tracing the effects of time, weather and shifting light, describing those temporal changes in silence and stillness.

Also evident in Blakeney (1), 2021 is Riddy’s preoccupation with the history of art and photography. The influence of Gustave Le Gray, whose nineteenth-century photographs of Palermo inspired Riddy to take a series of the same city between 2012–16, may be found in the division of land and sky, while references to landscape painters such as John Constable, Antoine Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich link the series to Riddy’s early training as a painter.

Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works by John Riddy that will be exhibited as a solo presentation at Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square in November 2022. 

The landscape orientation of Slow Horizon is rare but not unknown for the artist. Although abstract, many of the artist’s paintings allude to landscape, both the pastoral hills of his native northern Spain and the busy grids of his adopted New York City. The blue foreground of the painting might evoke waves, while the forceful horizon, in bars of black, green and red, could mark a shoreline. The rusty-brown upper section of the painting features a series of cadenced marks typical of the artist: Uslé pushes the pigment slowly across the canvas, with a pace that echoes the homeostatic rhythms of the body, such as our heartbeat or our breath.