Regen Projects is pleased to participate in OVR: Basel with a selection of works by gallery artists. This digital showcase reflects the gallery’s in-person presentation for the 2021 edition of Art Basel, which runs concurrent with the online fair.

Materiality and process dictate an object’s ultimate form in Liz Larner’s wall-mounted ceramics, Alex Hubbard’s poured urethane and resin paintings, and Sergej Jensen’s singular painting process.

Meaning is inextricably linked to the histories embedded in the material, as in Theaster Gates’s use of fire hoses and ascots and the newspapers in Walead Beshty’s Blind Collages.

Painterly exploration is fundamental to works by Elliott Hundley, Silke Otto-Knapp, Lari Pittman, Daniel Richter, and Sue Williams. Through accumulation, fragmentation, and dissolution ideas and figures emerge.

The artifice of identity is explored in the works of Catherine Opie, Gillian Wearing, and Marilyn Minter. Representation itself is called into question.

Written language plays a role in works by Doug Aitken, Glenn Ligon, Raymond Pettibon, and Jack Pierson. The legibility of words, figures, and objects is subsumed into the process of its making, highlighting the possibilities inherent in abstraction and the desire to create new meaning through obfuscation.

Glenn Ligon’s wide-ranging multimedia art practice encompasses painting, neon, photography, sculpture, print, installation, and video. Perhaps best known for his monochromatic and highly textured text paintings that draw their content from American history, popular culture, and literary works by writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Genet, among others, his work explores issues of history, art history, language, cultural identity, and race.

Ligon’s Debris Field paintings mark a departure for the artist. Rather than generating the work from a specific text, Ligon focuses on letter forms themselves, using images of his own etchings and stencil-and-ink drawings to create silkscreens, which are then printed in etching ink on canvas, and sometimes further redacted in ink marker. Each screen is overlapped to create a dense pattern of letter-based shapes, resulting in an improvisatory, cumulative abstraction.

Alex Hubbard achieves his multimedia paintings through a process of layering nontraditional, industrial materials like resin, fiberglass, pigmented urethane, and auto-body paint. In Vaper's Salon, Hubbard nested images of eyes, sleeping bags, and decorative patterns between these layers using UV printing technology. As a result, figurative and material elements alike appear to emerge and recede from the indeterminate crevices formed in the process. While predominantly abstract, the painting evokes the narrative traces of its making, namely Hubbard’s process of creation and destruction, agency and chance.

“In Wearing’s Me as Meret Oppenheim (2019), the artist’s mirror reflection is fractured into a polymorphic vision of self. Best known for her canonical Surrealist Object (1936), a fur-lined teacup, saucer, and spoon, Oppenheim (1913–1985) was also a model and muse for Man Ray, the innovative photographer who recorded Duchamp’s performances as Rose Sélavy. While Wearing’s long-standing love for Surrealism would naturally draw her to Oppenheim’s work in painting and sculpture, her masked self-portrait of the artist, with its enigmatic image and monochrome tonality, invokes the history of Surrealist photography. However, Me as Meret Oppenheim does not recreate an existing image but rather imagines the results of a collaboration between Oppenheim and Man Ray, mediated by Wearing. The edges of Wearing’s mask are visible from several angles, reflected from under her chin and at the sides of her face. This reveal of her living skin, in addition to her eyes, summons Wearing’s presence, bringing the photographic homage to life."

— Jennifer Blessing, “Gillian Wearing: Wearing, Gillian” in Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, published by the Guggenheim Museum (forthcoming)

In his recent series of fabric works, Doug Aitken reflects on the tension collectively felt between our isolation from the exterior world and newly created spaces for turning inward to explore the subconscious landscape. The works came about during a period of lockdown when, searching for materials inside his home, he began to cut clothes and fabrics into shapes articulating words and phrases that spoke of a shifting world in continuous change. Aitken excerpted the passage depicted on I Lost Track from an essay by Joan Didion, whose writing is among the artist’s influences.  

Raymond Pettibon’s distinctive style combines pen and ink figuration with hand-inscribed text and collage elements to create incisive works that probe the deeply embedded dualities of American culture. The deep well of sources and influences from which he draws—everything from comics, world history, American politics, and baseball to film noir, literature, and surf culture—coalesce into a lyrical rapture of high and low. His remarkable aesthetic is the result of the brazen approach Pettibon takes to drawing, unconcerned with the slipshod markings and concomitant blots, smears, and retracings that appear in its wake. This outwardly crude manner is underwritten by technical and linguistic mastery—an interplay that has made Pettibon’s work an emblem of countercultural disaffection since he emerged on the art scene in the early 1980s.

Theaster Gates turns his attention to loss, love, memory and “cloaks” with Memoriam 2. As in Matthew 5:40: “And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.”

Evoking retail space and worldly possessions, the work consists of a wall-mounted bronze structure on which are draped a group of ascots crafted in tribute to the late curator Okwui Enwezor. Using Gates’s own wardrobe as raw material, he emblematizes a moment of clearing and movement toward freedom, even as the work acknowledges his inability to reconcile the loss of his friend and the memory of his ascots.

Pulling from and expanding on the history of automatic drawing, Elliott Hundley builds up the surfaces of his works with a technique that moves between gradual accumulation and spontaneous mark making. For example, this untitled 2013 oil painting on linen is composed of a chaotic excess of marks that collect in a dense central tempest, which appears to expand outward toward wildly loose and vibrant margins. While such willfully freeform lines and impulsive swaths and smears recall forebears like Cy Twombly and Willem de Kooning, Hundley possesses a signature ability to weave a diversity of materials and influences into intricate compositions, crafting new meaning from both subtle and expressive gestures that are unmistakably his own.

In Cornucopia, Marilyn Minter continues her interest in the art historical trope of the bather. Poised between abstraction and figuration, this painting is meticulously constructed using many layers of enamel paint. Slowly built up layer-by-layer, its sensuous surface is finished by fingertip to eliminate traces of brushstrokes, resulting in a softened, tactile quality. Minter challenges the problematic treatment of women in art and reclaims the female sitter as the subject of her own sexuality, rather than an object. A pane of steamy glass creates an opaque, abstracted surface through which Minter's subject is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

Jack Pierson’s multi-disciplinary artistic practice utilizes the visual languages of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture to examine themes of memory, desire, longing, absence, loss, and despair. Working with narratives that are both familiar and removed, Pierson constructs fiction to explore memory. Utilizing commercial signage and theatrical elements of glamour, A MOVIE STAR IN THE ROOM consists of type cast in classic shades of black, white, and the kinds of variously shimmering and dull gray metal tones that could once be seen on the “silver screen.” As much the drama of art deco as the fallen comedic smirk of Comic Sans, the work is a prime example of Pierson’s ability to subtly coax the poetic from the everyday, manifesting romantic affect and hopeless desire through the seemingly banal. 

Catherine Opie's Being and Having series was shown in 1993 in Dress Codes at the ICA Boston. Presented in exaggerated male facial hair and costume, her subjects are posed against identical bright yellow backgrounds as they stare directly into the camera lens—a formal composition that was to recur in the artist’s later work. The series was groundbreaking, in part, in that it served to expand contemporary understanding and perceptions of lesbian identity by showing how lesbian sexuality is both heterogeneous and complex.

"When I made Being and Having I knew I wanted to make work that related to a documentary practice, but take it out of the documentary practice where friends are photographed in their homes. Like, what else can we do to the site of the body? I found that bringing people into the studio also helped me to really engage with how I wanted to think about being a documentary photographer. Even though there were friends that were transitioning at that point, a butch identity or trans masculinity was still often something that was really performed in the clubs. It was the drag king shows, it was us putting on mustaches and going to the bars and trying to offer rides home on our motorcycles to women that we might meet. (They were very confused about that here in LA compared to San Francisco!) So I was interested in capturing this kind of performative aspect for the female gaze. In terms of the camera, through this odd cropping, the choices of the moustaches, the consistency of the yellow background, and the direct gaze back—all of that was not just thinking about the performative nature of masculinity but also desire, and trying to change the way that we think about it, as well as the relationship between humanity and play. I mean, the plaques with the nicknames under the photographs are funny to me. Like 'Oso Bad.' So there’s a wit and a sense of humour within the work."

— Catherine Opie in conversation with Amelia Abraham, from AnOther Magazine

Working from the lineage of post-war German painting that includes artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter’s recent methodology prioritizes the gestural and improvisatory possibilities of painting to create colorfully bold and graphic compositions that evoke images of spectral silhouettes and quasi-figures that abut and collide at times violently and at times with an elegant passion. Utilizing a wide variety of techniques in oil on canvas, Richter’s work can evoke the technical appearance of infrared photography, informational mapping, and our modern visual culture as much as the long history of figurative and abstract painting that serves as his inspiration and reference. In Schmerzvoller Genuss, 2021, the contrast of rapid gestural marks and palette knife work testify to the painting’s materiality. Fragments of a body can be seen through a pictorial space of indeterminate depth where organic forms outlined boldly in black, orange, and blue never quite cohere into outright figuration.

"By working with accumulation and removal of pigment at the same time, I try to keep figure and ground in an active relationship to each other. I start with a primed white surface and paint the motif using black watercolor. The painting process involves a repetitive adding of pigment and its subsequent removal by spraying a fine film of water onto the painted surface. Every positive mark is made with a view to what it’s going to look like when I remove it….I have always found it productive to work with restrictions and to concentrate on a few elements only."

— Silke Otto-Knapp in conversation with Solveig Øvstebø, from In the waiting room, published by The Renaissance Society

For over 30 years Sue Williams has created a transgressive body of work that has established her as one of the most significant painters of her generation. Emerging as part of the East Village art scene in late-1980s New York City, Williams’s subversive anti-art aesthetic quickly gained recognition. Referencing the history of painting, particularly the fraught legacies of artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, her canvases combined figuration with feminist cultural critique. 

Williams’s recent works continue to be inherently political but utilize the language of painted abstraction paired with explicit titles to convey meaning. Providing a synthesis of the themes and modes of painting evident throughout her oeuvre, these compositions feature exposed fields of canvas ground punctuated with explosions of color and form.