Art Basel 2023

13 - 18 Jun 2023

Artworks
TACITA DEAN
Purgatory (Mount I), 2021
Purgatory (Mount I) is associated with the sets Tacita Dean designed for Wayne McGregor’s ballet The Dante Project, which recently received its French Premier at Palais Garnier, Paris.

The image relates to the ballet’s second act Purgatorio. Dean made large-scale photographs from negatives of Jacaranda trees which she photographed while in Los Angeles. The trees, which bloom May–June in hot climates, are remarkable because the entire foliage turns into purple blossoms, without any sign of leaves. Printing the photograph as a negative, Dean saw that the purple became an otherworldly green. The background streetscape has been meticulously worked in pencil over the photo’s surface, further emphasising the strange intermediary state the pieces symbolise.

The work was included Tacita Dean’s solo exhibition at Mudam, Luxembourg in 2022/23. Dean’s solo exhibition Geography Biography continues at Bourse de Commerce, Paris until 23 September 2023. Her work is on display at Schaulager Laurenz Foundation, Basel, 9 June–29 November 2023.
Artworks
MAŁGORZATA MIRGA-TAS
Kana Som Ando Swetos Kieren Amengie Than, 2022
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s practice addresses anti-Roma stereotypes and engages in building an affirmative iconography of Roma communities. Her work depicts everyday life: relationships, alliances and shared activities. The artist’s vibrant textile collages are created from materials and fabrics collected from family and friends, which imbues them with a life of their own and a corresponding immediacy.

Patchworks made of curtains, jewellery, shirts, and sheets are sewn together to form so-called 'microcarriers' of history, just as resulting images revise macro perspectives. Pieces such as this one depict a society which is physically and emotionally close. The work is inspired by overheard conversations, scenes of work, leisure and rest, which are interwoven with such motifs as the sun, flowers or domestic animals. Ordinary life and people are thus transformed into Romani archetypes.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas will have her first UK solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery in September 2023.
Artworks
THOMAS SCHÜTTE
Männerkopf, halb Nr. e.a., 2022
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.

Männerkopf, halb Nr. e.a., is from a new series of half heads made in Murano glass, a medium which the artist returns to time and again. Its strong facial expression echos the artist's ceramic works, yet its material quality is utterly different.

The De Pont Museum, Tilburg, will present a solo Thomas Schütte exhibition, 16 September 2023–28 January 2024.
Artworks
CORNELIA PARKER
Endless Tea, 2022
Endless Tea is one of a series of suspended works which features found, acquired, or modified objects. To achieve the effect in Endless Tea, Parker laid out an arrangement of silver tea pots and then crushed them in a 250-ton press, flattening the pots and transforming them into silhouetted reminders of what once was.

By crushing the objects, Parker breaches the decorum and deference we bring to what is valued as precious, rare or symbolic in our culture. Yet she resurrects the objects, giving them new life, as ghostly objects of contemplation. About her crushed silver works, Parker has commented, ‘I like the perversity of trying to make an act of destruction take on a formal quality, a deliberate symmetry.’

Cornelia Parker’s large-scale installation PsychoBarn (Cut-Up), will be featured in Art Unlimited. In 2022, Parker had a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain, London.
Artworks
DAYANITA SINGH
Studio Contact Sheet, 2023
Dayanita Singh’s practice focusses on the ways viewers engage with photography. Driven by a determination to liberate the image from the wall, Singh has been developing her ‘photo-architectural’ structures for more than a decade. Most recently these structures have developed into large wall-mounted panels where the images can be endlessly rearranged.

Studio Contact Sheet is a continuation of Singh’s investigation of architectural spaces. Here, the twelve selected images are uniquely abstract, emphasising line and form to blur the boundaries between photography and drawing. Taken in an architectural studio, Singh selects images that range dramatically in scale and perspective, removing any tangible sense of space.

Dayanita Singh's work is on display at Schaulager Laurenz Foundation, Basel, 9 June–19 November 2023. Singh’s touring retrospective Dancing with my Camera is at Mudam, Luxembourg until 10 September when it will travel to Serralves Museum, Porto. Singh was the recipient of the 2022 Hasselblad Award.
Artworks
CALLUM INNES
Exposed Painting Bluish Violet Red Oxide, 2019
One of the most respected painters working today, Callum Innes’s practice interrogates the qualities and possibilities of oil paint. Innes works in series, allowing processes to build upon each other and gradually evolve. He makes several kinds of painting at the same time, each discreetly different yet informing and reflecting upon the others.

Exposed Painting Bluish Violet Red Oxide is part of the Exposed series which exemplifies his technique of creating a play between addition and removal. In these works, successive layers of oil paint are applied to the canvas, which is then entirely covered in black. This in turn is removed by repeated washes of turpentine dissolving paint from part of the surface, here leaving all but the faintest veil of slightly striated 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 colour, surface and even time.

A solo exhibition of new works by Callum Innes continues at Frith Street Gallery until 1 July.
Artworks
SHILPA GUPTA
Untitled, 2021
Shilpa Gupta is interested in the interventions, alterations and transgressions that occur across spatial and conceptual boundaries of urgent contemporary concern. Her multi-disciplinary practice comprises a wide array of media and processes, which explore our fragile relationship with identity, right to expression and systems of culture, as well as the indiscriminate mobility and malleability of borders – not only of nation-states but also nomenclature-based definitions.

Gupta’s Untitled features a cast of her own hand that appears sliced into three parts, the gaps are in fact the width of a jail bar yet one that is imaginary and invisible. The piece relates to her iconic installation For in your tongue I cannot fit, which was the outcome of a years-long research project into persecuted poets across time and geographies, highlighting her preoccupation with freedom of speech, censorship and its consequences.

Visibleinvisible: Shilpa Gupta and Marisa Merz, is on show at Maxxi L’Aquila, Italy until 1 October 2023. A major new monographic publication from Phaidon on Gupta’s work is now available.
Artworks
POLLY APFELBAUM
PA Abstract Shooting Star, 2022
PA Abstract Shooting Star is part of a body of work Apfelbaum developed for her 2022 exhibition For the Love of Una Hale at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania (the state where the artist grew up). These highly personal works are the result of a residency at the University's ceramics studio.

Apfelbaum has been making ceramics for over a decade and the Arcadia residency provided both the freedom to experiment as well as an opportunity to develop her skills. Working with highly trained ceramicists Apfelbaum produced a range of bespoke handmade glazes.

The exuberant colour palette of these pieces, which read like abstract paintings, often derives from memories of early exposure to Pennsylvania German art; other motifs are inspired by dartboards, Chinese Chequers and the coins which were often used as a template for quilt patches.
Artworks
NANCY SPERO
Balinese Dancer, 1990
Throughout the five decades of her radical career the artist and activist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) placed the lived female experience at the heart of her practice.

'One of my main strategies', commented Spero, 'has been to construct a simultaneity of women through time – to put Artemis, for example, alongside a contemporary media image of a female Olympic athlete, and a prehistoric shadow figure dancing behind them. I think that many women are now interested in the idea of the Goddess – of a powerful, self-sustaining and autonomous being capable of moving through life as freely as a man.'

Balinese Dancer combines a range of historical and mythological figures in the same pictorial space, not least the titular dancer at the top of the scroll. The open expanses of space in the scroll are typical of Spero's work from the 80s and 90s – she considered these areas of contemplation, where the viewer's own imagination can create the connections and relationships between the various figures 'through time'.

A two-person display of Nancy Spero and Leon Golub works are featured in Artist and Society at Tate Modern.
Artworks
MASSIMO BARTOLINI
Dew, 2009-2021
Dew is a subtle monochrome work made using industrial enamel paint on aluminium. Its iridescent surface is covered with a delicate layer of artificial dew. The moisture seems fleeting, even incidental, as if it was a reaction to atmospheric changes or the breath of a passer-by.

The piece references the work of artists such as Barnett Newman, who adopted the monochromatic as a “form of indifference to painting”. For Bartolini, the Dew series seeks to engage with this approach, while introducing an element of changeability. Each work thus adopts two colours, fluctuating over the surface of the painting. Likewise, the artificial dew itself moves slowly over time, shifting and congealing into subtly altered patterns. Like many of Bartolini’s works, Dew is an ongoing series recurring over time, defying any definite moment of conception or completion.

The Dew series was recently displayed as part of the solo exhibition Massimo Bartolini: Hagoromo at Centro Pecci, Prato earlier this year. The exhibition was accompanied by a major new monographic publication on the artist of the same title.
Artworks
JUAN USLÉ
At dusk, 2022
The abstractions of Juan Uslé evoke a range of associations, from the cadence of human breath and the beat of a pulse to the environs and energy of his homes in northern Spain and New York City.

'I move the brush and press down until the next heartbeat occurs', says Uslé. 'I try to follow a sequential rhythm, marked by the beating of my pulse... and in general it turns into a sequential field or territory of marks and routes reminiscent of the sea, a landscape, or a pentagram.'

The work’s poetic title refers to the onset of a physical and metaphorical dusk, of things becoming less visible, being consumed by darkness.
Artworks
RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE
Tears (are not only from weeping), 2021
Raqs Media Collective explain: ‘Tears are not only for weeping, they lubricate the possibility of vision. Sometimes we see things better when we cry, out loud, or laugh, till the tears come unbidden.’

Tears and laughter contain enough power to threaten constituted authority. When the body is moved, it can speak without words, it cannot be controlled. If we find something sad or funny, it is very hard to stop our tears or laughter, we become like children.

Tears are what make us human. We are the only species who cry as the result of an emotional response. The human teardrop is a unique and rare thing to look at up-close. Raqs sought out images of teardrops taken using an electron microscope. They have animated these images so the salt crystals that you see begin to dance across the screen.

Raqs Media Collective's Provisions for Everybody (2018/2022) and The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone (2023) will be screened in the Art Basel Film programme on Wednesday 14 June.
Artworks
FIONA BANNER AKA THE VANITY PRESS
Onyx, Optima, Charter, 2023
Fiona Banner’s Full Stop Seascapes are a series of interventions into found genre paintings, military seascapes acquired from local antique shops. She has erased their original subjects, august galleons, battleships and destroyers, replacing them instead with hand-painted full stops drawn from her personal archive, as a way to assuage her dream of sending them out to sea. The intriguing titles of these works refer to the fonts the full stops are rendered in.

Fiona Banner’s work is currently on view at Hangar Y, Paris as part of Dans l’air, les machines volantes until 11 September and in Scale: Sculpture (1945-2020) at Juan March Foundation, Madrid until 2 July.
Artworks
JOHN RIDDY
Blakeney (8), 2022
John Riddy’s practice is rooted in encounters with place. Blakeney is a new series of works taken from a single viewpoint on England's Norfolk Coast Path looking towards Blakeney Point which is not only a place visited by Riddy for over 30 years but also a common walking path for thousands of visitors. 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 offers a new subject matter for Riddy, the series adopts earlier formal and thematic tropes. 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.
Art Basel Unlimited
Cornelia Parker
Frith Street Gallery is presenting Cornelia Parker's major new installation PsychoBarn (Cut Up), 2023, at Art Basel Unlimited.

The work consists of selected elements of the earlier Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) arranged as a deconstructed set, in what the artist terms an 'exploded view'. The windows, doors and roof panels, were all once part of a century old red barn from upstate New York and have been weathered by seasons spent on both sides of the Atlantic.

These architectural pieces are formally presented in a salon hang, seeming to hover on the surface of three walls with some occupying the floor. The sections are ordered: shingled roof at the top, windows in the middle, porch and stairs at the bottom, creating a new composition, a kind of inside-out barn raising.

More information about Cornelia Parker's PsychoBarn (Cut Up) can be found here.
Artworks
Art Basel Film
Raqs Media Collective
This year’s Art Basel Film Programme, curated by Filipa Ramos, features the work of Raqs Media Collective who will show a new video The Bicyclist Who Fell Into A Time Cone (2022) as well as the earlier Provisions for Everybody (2018). The screening takes place at Stadtkino, Basel 14 June 7pm CET.

The Bicyclist Who Fell Into A Time Cone was commissioned by the Jencks Foundation and is on display at The Cosmic House, London, as part of the solo exhibition 1980 in Parallax, until 29 December.

More information about Raqs Media Collective's Art Basel Film screening can be found here.

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