Art Basel Online Viewing Room

Theaster Gates
Some Remember Sock Hops, Others Remember Riots
2020
Wood, denim and decommissioned fire hose
84 x 84 x 3 1/2 inches (213.4 x 213.4 x 8.9 cm)

The new civil tapestries continue my investigation into the material culture of the civil rights while adding the question of denim to the decommissioned fire hose. Working with American denim manufacturers and jean makers, I’ve implicated this material as both a material of resistance and an appropriated material of White supremacy. As I reflect on the telling of the protests, not only am I struck by the dignity of freedom fighters, but also the swag – the beauty of a particularly proud Black moment. The tapestries insert a new material alignment that shifts my preoccupation from the weaponized tools of White supremacy to the resilience reflected on the bodies of protestors. This work starts to offer a political/material palette that allows both the subjected and the subjector to be present in one frame.

- Theaster Gates

"The new civil tapestries continue my investigation into the material culture of civil rights, while adding the question of denim to the decommissioned fire hose. Working with American denim manufacturers and jean makers, I’ve implicated this material as both a material of resistance and an appropriated material of White supremacy. As I reflect on the telling of the protests, not only am I struck by the dignity of freedom fighters, but also the swag — the beauty of a particularly proud Black moment. The tapestries insert a new material alignment that shifts my preoccupation from the weaponized tools of White supremacy to the resilience reflected on the bodies of protestors. This work starts to offer a political/material palette that allows both the subjected and the subjector to be present in one frame."

– Theaster Gates

Toba Khedoori
Untitled (detail)
2019–2020
Wax, graphite, and oil on paper
98 x 86 inches (248.9 x 218.4 cm)

Toba Khedoori has created a comprehensive oeuvre of drawings since the mid-1990s. Her subjects were, and are, individual objects – a building, a window, a fence or rows of seats in a theatre. These objects are rendered in the manner of technical drawings, and placed on a vast empty expanse of paper removed from their usual contexts. Yet appearances are deceptive: the position of the subject turns the expanse of paper into an active part of her representation, makes it a space in which the precisely rendered object appears to hover uncertainly.

It’s not just the drawing that is a constituent part of Khedoori’s art, but also the motifs themselves. As unexpected as they are, their choice is deliberate. The fence, the grid, the rope or undergrowth – all are somehow penetrable, susceptible to disorder, change, and what we project onto them.

- Theodora Vischer, from Resonating Spaces

Toba Khedoori
Untitled
2019–2020
Wax, graphite, and oil on paper
98 x 86 inches (248.9 x 218.4 cm)

Toba Khedoori has created a comprehensive oeuvre of drawings since the mid-1990s. Her subjects were, and are, individual objects – a building, a window, a fence or rows of seats in a theatre. These objects are rendered in the manner of technical drawings, and placed on a vast empty expanse of paper removed from their usual contexts. Yet appearances are deceptive: the position of the subject turns the expanse of paper into an active part of her representation, makes it a space in which the precisely rendered object appears to hover uncertainly.

It’s not just the drawing that is a constituent part of Khedoori’s art, but also the motifs themselves. As unexpected as they are, their choice is deliberate. The fence, the grid, the rope or undergrowth – all are somehow penetrable, susceptible to disorder, change, and what we project onto them.

- Theodora Vischer, from Resonating Spaces

"Toba Khedoori has created a comprehensive oeuvre of drawings since the mid-1990s. Her subjects were, and are, individual objects — a building, a window, a fence or rows of seats in a theatre. These objects are rendered in the manner of technical drawings, and placed on a vast empty expanse of paper removed from their usual contexts. Yet appearances are deceptive: the position of the subject turns the expanse of paper into an active part of her representation, makes it a space in which the precisely rendered object appears to hover uncertainly."

"It’s not just the drawing that is a constituent part of Khedoori’s art, but also the motifs themselves. As unexpected as they are, their choice is deliberate. The fence, the grid, the rope or undergrowth — all are somehow penetrable, susceptible to disorder, change, and what we project onto them."

– Theodora Vischer, Resonating Spaces

Gary Simmons
Balcony Seating Only
2017
Oil paint on aluminum, steel
Staircase Dimensions: 159 x 142 x 36 inches (396.2 x 487.7 x 76.2 cm)

Gary Simmons
Balcony Seating Only (detail)
2017
Oil paint on aluminum, steel
Staircase Dimensions: 159 x 142 x 36 inches (396.2 x 487.7 x 76.2 cm)

In Balcony Seating Only, Gary Simmons evokes America's dark past, namely the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation until the mid-1960s. This large sculptural staircase depicts the word "colored," a reference to the separate entrances that African Americans were forced to use in order to access the balcony sections of movie theaters. Simmons’s sculpture confronts the viewer with historical references to the Black experience and the injustices of our nation’s past.

Doug Aitken
Get lost (behavioral inertia)
2020
Chromogenic transparency on acrylic in aluminum lightbox with LEDs
51 x 93 3/4 x 7 inches (129.5 x 238.1 x 17.8 cm)
Edition of 4 + 2 AP

"I see these works as portraits of our modern landscape; the space that exists in the twilight space between natural landscape and man-made environment. I started by searching and scrubbing through real estate listings, looking for photographs of empty houses and vacant lands. I must have seen hundreds of thousands of images by now, banal images, usually photographed by amateurs or salesmen who don’t care about image making. At times in my image mining, moments are revealed that appear out of synch or are inadvertently mysterious with strange and unsettling compositions. I use those raw images as a starting point to build new images off their compositions, and reduce the noise and clutter in a search for the minimal structure of the dormant image underneath. I often reduce the image down to the bare essentials, water, sky, form, architecture, etc. I’m interested in using these representational forms to create a new narrative that is much more abstract and allows the viewer room and space to get lost."

– Doug Aitken

Walead Beshty
Steel Surrogate (48" x 120" 16 Gauge 304 Stainless Steel Alloy, Convex Curve) / Steel Surrogate (48" x 120" 16 Gauge 304 Stainless Steel Alloy, Concave Curve) / Steel Surrogate (48" x 120" 16 Gauge 304 Stainless Steel Alloy, Convex Curve)
2019
Polished steel, 3 parts
48 x 33 x 17 inches (121.9 x 83.8 x 22.9 cm)
48 x 33 x 9 inches (121.9 x 83.8 x 43.2 cm)
48 x 33 x 17 inches (121.9 x 83.8 x 22.9 cm)

Starting, as he often does, from the circumstances of technical standards and commercially available material, Walead Beshty’s Steel Surrogate works consist of standard industrial sizes of sheet metal curved into 120-degree convex and concave arcs — the exact field of vision of the human eye. Each panel is an independent work, but is modular in format, and may be arranged in conjunction with other panels for display in any configuration or number. Through their reflective material, the Steel Surrogates display and distort their immediate environment on their surfaces. Through their modular logic, these works suggest the possibility of infinity with the potential of configurations to reflect and distort one another endlessly. This and other works by Walead Beshty are currently on view in a major traveling retrospective titled Standard Deviations at Kunst Museum Winterthur in Switzerland until August 9, 2020.

Liz Larner
Asteroid (pebbles)
2020
Glazed ceramic
19 1/2 x 13 13/16 x 13 3/8 inches (49.5 x 35.1 x 34 cm)

Liz Larner's work in ceramic is intended to refer us to the terraqueous nature of our planet and how it is formed by what seems to be beyond us. Her new series of Asteroid sculptures looks toward the many known and unknown bodies moving in space which contain the real possibility of violent collision, even as their presence and number in our solar system are always being discovered. Continuing her investigation into the means by which material ecologies and geologic timescales inform human experience and cultural forms, Larner’s Asteroids embody a small piece of the heavens as art, and ask us to consider our connection to that which is known but is not always seen. Her work will be the subject of a major exhibition opening at Kunsthalle Zurich in the summer of 2021 titled Below Above.

Alex Hubbard
Untitled
2020
Urethane, acrylic, UV print, epoxy resin, fiberglass and oil on cotton
58 x 64 inches (147.3 x 162.6 cm)

In his most recent series of paintings, Alex Hubbard deploys UV printing technology to achieve intricate layers of varying materials and opacities through which traces of figuration emerge. In his multi-media practice, Hubbard is known to humorously provoke orthodox categories of genre. Employing industrial materials like resin, fiberglass, pigmented urethane, and auto-body paint toward abstract ends, Hubbard synthesizes image, painting, and sculpture into a single piece.

Glenn Ligon
Come Out #8
2015
Silkscreen on canvas
95 1/8 x 120 inches (241.6 x 304.8 cm)

"Sound informs Glenn Ligon's Come Out series. In these screenprint paintings, Ligon's recurrent phrase 'come out to show them' uses the space between the lines, between word and word, letter and letter, to expand on his primary source — Steve Reich's 1966 taped-speech composition Come Out — and lay down their own tracks. The text quivers and vibrates. Though nearly illegible, your only company is the echo of those disembodied words, more tangible than readable. In whirring repetitions, Ligon perfectly captures what Richard Serra called Reich's 'sound of sheer anxiety.'"

"Ligon's layered paintings of 'come out to show them' are works of light and shadow. During the silkscreen process, individual screens were shifted to the left or right to create intermittent areas of greater density. The resulting vertical bands form unpredictable impediments to the text; a great deal of movement, but going nowhere. Words establish themselves only to be wiped out by successive silkscreen passes. Clotted-together letters hint at the troubling fragility of an appararent order.

Blurred at a distance, the paintings only become less clear the closer you get. Shouting capital letters are muffled and garbled by their own shadows; reading the words, you can't be sure of what you see, what you hear. The fragmentary text is self-redacted, unreadable. You're off the hook, it seems to say. Yet you're anything but relieved. Those nagging congealed letters something you might recognize but would sooner forget."

– Megan Ratner, "The Come Out Notebook"

Glenn Ligon
Come Out #8
2015
Silkscreen on canvas
95 1/8 x 120 inches (241.6 x 304.8 cm)

Elliott Hundley
Plank
2020
Oil, oil stick, encaustic, paper, fabric, plastic, photographs, string and pins on foam over panel
48 x 48 1/8 x 4 3/4 inches (121.9 x 122.2 x 12.1 cm)

“It is my belief that art can help us begin to accept and even comprehend the irreconcilable. Assemblage is a process of reconciling and corralling the dissonance and in many cases embracing it despite our rage to order.”

– Elliott Hundley, “Taking up Space”

Catherine Opie
Untitled #5 (Political Collage)
2019
Digital video on monitor
1:52, looped
75 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 17 inches (191 x 80 x 43 cm)
Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Part of her most recent body of work, Untitled #5 (Political Collage) continues Catherine Opie’s examination of the current American political landscape. Comprised of numerous magazine cuttings culled by Opie over the course of Trump’s presidency, this moving image work represents themes articulated in the news cycle embodying contemporary political issues, specifically the diminishment of natural resources and climate change. Arranged on hand-painted blue grids that reference modernism with their simplistic structural form, the animation develops over time, slowly building and integrating images until it forms a coherent collage. Although its subject matter communicates a sense of urgency, the collage is imbued with humor that references the political satire of Monty Python, whose films were a source of inspiration for the artist.

To view Opie's latest exhbition at Regen Projects, Rhetorical Landscapes, click here.

Marilyn Minter
Red Hots
2020
Enamel on metal
48 x 36 x 2 inches (121.9 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm)

In Red Hots, 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, depicting her subjects as empowered objects of desire. A pane of steamy glass creates an opaque, abstracted surface through which Minter's subject is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

Silke Otto-Knapp
Forest
2019
Watercolor on canvas
3 panels, overall:
59 1/8 x 118 1/8 x 3/4 inches (150 x 300 x 1.9 cm)

Installation view of Silke Otto-Knapp: In the waiting room
The Renaissance Society, Chicago
January 11 - March 29, 2020
Photo: Useful Art Services

"Silke Otto-Knapp’s large-scale paintings, such as Forest, are often mounted on free-standing structures to form a kind of multidimensional stage set within the gallery. In context with paintings thematically linked to performance and dance, these structures gesture towards conventions of theatrical staging, where decorative facades frame the set for a fixed audience. Their positioning in the space generates vantage points and patterns of movement, a loose choreography enacted by whomever is viewing them. And within the bounds of the canvases themselves, the stage is set for the kinds of complex interplay painting makes possible: referential connections, material traces, embodied perceptions of time and space, the sedimented weight of history, and more ineffable experiences of emotion and affect, all collapsed into and mediated by the pictorial surface."

– Solveig Øvstebø, curator of Silke Otto-Knapp: In the waiting room

Jack Pierson
VALOR
2020
Brass, aluminum, steel, gold leaf, paint and baked enamel
39 1/2 x 138 x 4 inches (100.3 x 350.5 x 10.2 cm)

Jack Pierson began creating his word sculptures in 1991, salvaging typographical components from junkyards and commercial signage like theater marquees and Las Vegas casinos. In Pierson’s hands, the neglected letters become raw materials for innocuous phrases and grandiose clichés — testaments to faded glamour and timeworn idealism. Yet such ironic detachment belies deeply affective currents. Shrouded beneath pop exteriors, Pierson’s sculptures course with themes of memory, desire, longing, and absence.

A new work created by Pierson during a period of lockdown, Valor elicits the sort of folkloric morality characteristic of medieval legend or the American Western. So devoid of substance, the message beckons viewers to animate it according to their individual belief systems. The audience becomes a party to Pierson’s meaning-making, unconsciously charging even the most anodyne sentiments with biases and projections, like a game of telephone. As with the foraged letters that compose it, the message proves as disjointed as the eyes beholding it.

A new work created by Jack Pierson during a period of lockdown, Valor elicits the sort of chivalric morality characteristic of medieval legend or the American Western. Salvaged from junkyards and commercial signage, the neglected letters composing the sculpture lend it an air of timeworn grandiosity and faded glamour. Devoid of context, a word like ‘valor’ acts as a void that beckons viewers to animate it according to their individual belief systems. Steeped though it is in the detached irony of pop, the work betrays deeply affective currents — themes like memory, desire, longing, and absence — which course through it.

Raymond Pettibon
No Title (The Values Evoked)
1987
Ink on paper
Paper Dimensions: 24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Framed Dimensions: 26 3/8 x 20 3/8 inches (67 x 51.8 cm)

"Raymond Pettibon's early baseball drawings mimic the format of baseball trading cards, with portraits of fictitious players, albeit ones often blighted by addictions, personality disorders, and disfigurements. As Pettibon began, in the ’90s, to incorporate more text borrowed from poetry and literature, it is only natural that the sport that most fascinated twentieth-century American novelists and essayists came to have a greater presence in his thinking. Baseball represents a shared mythology that has gradually faded during the course of his lifetime, and the heroes that Pettibon chooses to represent all serve as personifications of hopefulness, creativity, and failure, both individual and collective."

"His encyclopedic knowledge of baseball history and studied insight into the gracefulness and intricacies of the sport manifest in the care with which he renders famous historical players such as Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Bob Gibson, who are tied to charged moments in American history, from the Great Depression to the Civil Rights movement and others. These images of ball players may initially seem like a particularly masculine form of nostalgia, but they are equally an exercise in preserving collective social memory and the larger narratives of American history and identity these ghostly figures inhabit."

– Gary Carrion-Murayari, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work

Lari Pittman
Iris Shot: Opening and Closing #1
2020
Cel-vinyl and lacquer spray over gessoed canvas on Titanium and wood panel
80 x 96 x 2 inches (203.2 x 243.8 x 5.1 cm)

Lari Pittman’s Iris Shot: Opening and Closing #1 takes its cue from the iris shot, a cinematic device particularly popular during the silent film era whereby a circular form expands or shrinks to transition between scenes. In such a way, Pittman frames the experience of the painting to reveal a crow in the upper left, followed by mountains and a cityscape below. Slowing down the painting like a scene in a film, Pittman puts emphasis on the symbolism and complexities of the landscape within.

Andrea Zittel
Study for Cellular Grid #5
2019
Watercolor and gouache on paper
Paper Dimensions: 22 5/8 x 30 inches (57.5 x 76.2 cm)
Framed Dimensions: 30 1/8 x 37 1/8 x 1 1/2 inches (76.5 x 94.3 x 3.8 cm)

Over the last 25 years, Andrea Zittel has developed a practice in which spaces, objects, and acts of living all intertwine as a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today. "How to live?" and "What gives life meaning?" are core issues in both Zittel’s personal life and artistic practice. Study for Cellular Grid #5 was created as a study for a large-scale outdoor sculpture installed at the 16th Istanbul Biennial in 2019.

Personal Plots
2019
Concrete block, plaster, paint, and gravel
18 x 634 x 433 inches (45.7 x 1610.4 x 1099.8 cm)

Installation view of the 16th Istanbul Biennial
Istanbul, Turkey
September 14 - November 10, 2019
Photo: Onur Dogman

Personal Plots, Zittel’s work for the 16th Istanbul Biennial, responds to notions of private property, space, and inherited structures of debt and bondage. Zittel — who asks, "Is space something that can be owned at all?" — presented a sculpture made of concrete blocks to demarcate human-sized, cell-like spaces. The units recall an office cubicle, a private bedroom, or a cemetery plot. The work points to the way in which space, and its delineation, can be used as a medium for control and alienation, even while it is marketed as a source of security, privacy, and individualism.

Lawrence Weiner
REMOVED FROM VIEW
2020
Language + the materials referred to
Dimensions Variable

“Lawrence Weiner’s employment of language allows the work to be used by its receiver. It is purposely left open for translation, transference, and transformation; each time the work is made, it is made anew. Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception is different – each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.”

– Ann Goldstein, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE

Christina Quarles
For Sorrow or Inspiration
2020
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 60 x 2 inches (182.9 x 152.4 x 5.1 cm)

Christina Quarles creates rich and evocative work that teeters on the edge of representation and abstraction. The figures appearing in For Sorrow or Inspiration, a new painting created during lockdown, seem to possess an excess of limbs, which stretch, multiply, contort, and intertwine with apparently endless intimacy and possibility. Informed by her identity as a multiply situated queer woman of mixed race, Quarles visualizes the often fraught experience of inhabiting a body. In a recent monograph of her work published by The Hepworth Wakefield, Andrew Bonacina writes, “Quarles’s explorations of ambiguity take her to a place of excess, where her layering of information bypasses singularity for simultaneity. In the process of becoming, Quarles’s bodies are also simultaneously coming undone.”

Daniel Richter
Polis
2020
Oil on canvas
90 1/2 x 70 7/8 inches (230 x 180 cm)

In recent years, Daniel Richter’s paintings have prioritized the gestural and improvisatory possibilities of his medium, drawing on a variety of painterly techniques to create large-scale compositions that embody a violent tension between abstract forms and propulsive figuration, as characterized by works like Polis. Richter’s life-sized silhouettes are emblematic of this radical shift in his practice. Rendered in thick swathes and outlined in heavy oil stick, such spectral figures appear to materialize out of a vibrant mire of pure, formal abstraction.

Wolfgang Tillmans
still life Ethiopia
2019
Inkjet print on paper mounted on Dibond aluminum in artist's frame
57 1/8 x 85 3/8 x 2 3/8 inches (145.1 x 216.9 x 6 cm)
Edition of 1 + 1 AP

"In my daily experience, I don't consider portraits separately from still lifes. Now I look at you, and I see a portrait; now I look over there, and I see a landscape. If I look over here, I see a still life. So it is this experience of daily life: how all art comes out of the ordinary of daily life and how everything has a potential to be extraordinary. And that transformation of living in the moment, and then translating that into something of a larger meaning is not just talking about a specific moment or a specific item, but more generally about a human experience that ideally can be shared by others and felt by others. Pictures are always the transcription of an experience we have had in the world; ideally, they pose the question of there being another way to experience the world in all its complexity."

– Wolfgang Tillmans, "New Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans in His Studio in Berlin"

Matthew Barney
Recurve
2020
Graphite on paper in ultra high molecular weight plastic frame
20 7/8 x 17 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches (53 x 45.4 x 3.5 cm)

In his recent graphite drawings in signature artist frames, Matthew Barney expands upon his fascination with classical mythology, as well as myths of the American West. Recurve draws from Barney’s latest body of work and film, Redoubt, which adapts the myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who accidentally trespasses on her and is punished. The Diana of Redoubt is both the protector of the natural world and a predator in it — a present-day sharpshooter in the frigid Idaho wilderness. Accompanied by her attendants, the Calling Virgin and the Tracking Virgin, Diana traverses the mountainous terrain in pursuit of the elusive wolf. The Engraver, played by Barney, happens upon the hunting outfit in the forest and begins stalking the trio, furtively documenting their actions in a series of copper engravings.

Gillian Wearing
Me as Mona Lisa
2020
Framed c-type print
25 1/4 x 20 1/8 inches (64 x 51.1 cm)
Edition of 6 + 2 AP

Me as Mona Lisa, a new work by Gillian Wearing, takes on the mantle of an art historical icon, the Mona Lisa. Little is known about Leonardo da Vinci’s famously inscrutable sitter, who, while well-recognized, is presumed to be little more than the object of the great master’s talent. Wearing, in her role as both author and sitter, is uniquely positioned to critique the presumption of authorship. Translating the work to photography, Wearing creates a jarringly modern portrait that calls attention to the constructed nature not just of representation, but of history.

James Welling
Head of a goddess. 2nd century A.D. marble imitation of a 5th-4th century B.C. chryselephantine (gold and ivory) sculpture
2019
Oil pigment, electrostatic print on polyester (Winsor & Newton Artists' Oil Color, HP Color LaserJet CP5225 on Pronto Plate)
Image Dimensions: 17 1/4 x 11 1/2 inches (43.8 x 29.2 cm)
Framed Dimensions: 24 x 18 3/4 inches (61 x 47.6 cm)
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

In recent work, James Welling reimagines the spirit of antiquity through its relics and artistic processes. This bust of a goddess is part of a new series he calls Cento. Named for a type of poem that is made up of quotations, the body of work comprises photographs of Athenian architecture, sculptures, and objects that, to Welling, articulate the material culture of Greece. Welling describes his process of discovery and experimentation:

“Last summer I visited Athens, where I became fascinated by Greek architecture and sculpture. I took scores of photographs while I was there. When I returned to my studio I adjusted the digital files so that the photographs would mimic black and white nineteenth-century film. The earliest film was not sensitive to blue light and skies were rendered a uniform white while red and yellow tones read darker. In doing this I felt that I was turning photography into a veritable time machine.

I began printing the Athens work as photolithographs. As I ran the plates through my press, I noticed that the richly inked surfaces were more interesting in themselves than the impressions I was getting. So, I began to think of the inked plate as the final work. Initially I printed the Athens work in black and white but I soon began working in color. Like many photographers I came to the medium through books, and these lithographic plates that I am exhibiting recall the intense black and white, and strange color, photogravures found in my first photography books.”

– James Welling

Sue Williams
Dementia Related
2020
Oil on canvas
50 x 60 inches (127 x 152.4 cm)

Sue Williams’s recent work continues to be inherently political, conveying meaning through the language of painted abstraction paired with explicit titles. Providing a synthesis of the themes and modes of painting evident throughout her oeuvre, these relatively minimalistic compositions feature exposed fields of canvas ground punctuated with explosions of color and form. Dementia Related depicts fragmentary images of domestic life and architecture through a fusion of ethereal swaths of bright color and elongated bodily forms. The effect conjurs a flood of vivid memories pouring forth from the unconscious and straining to cohere, while composing a logic all their own.

June 19 – 26, 2020

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