Art Basel

As a cast of the artist’s own flesh, the piece captures her hand in motion as if conjuring a natural world into existence. Recreating two different living forms—flowers and flesh—this work ponders our human interaction with nature.  A reoccuring theme in Akashi's practice, Cultivator presents the possibility of growth from decay, and joins together materials that are at once delicate and durable. In doing so, Akashi’s sculpture takes on qualities that are at once uncanny, appealing, and familiar.

Martin Boyce’s works poetically investigate the intersections between art, architecture, design, and nature. Since the beginning of his career, he has incorporated a palette of shapes and forms that frequently recall familiar structures from the built environment, yet presents them in a way that is entirely new. Collapsing distinctions between past, present, and future, Boyce’s works seem to exist in their own autonomous world, untethered to any fixed time or place.

Long Distance (Present Tense) incorporates the recognizable form of the wall-mounted telephone set against a large, perforated panel painted pink. While the phone seems to be a relic of a bygone era, the retrofuturist color and design make it seem like an oracle from the future. Alluding to its battle against obsolescence, Boyce examines the phone’s territorial relationship as a portal between two fixed points in space and time and observes the conditions and circumstances in which information and memory operate in relation to today’s digital technology. 

Since the early 1990s, Sandra Cinto has developed a rich vocabulary of symbols and lines to create lyrical landscapes and narratives that hover between fantasy and reality. Using drawing as her point of departure, the artist renders intricate and mesmerizing seascapes, rainstorms, and celestial skies that frequently engage with the surrounding architecture to create seemingly weightless, immersive environments. Evoking stories of human hardship and redemption, Cinto's fantastical imagery serves as a metaphor for the human odyssey, while also pushing the limits and possibilities of drawing.

Olafur Eliasson will present an outstanding  new light scultpure, Radiant existence sphere.  A beautiful example of the light–based sculptures and installations for which the artist is well known, this new glass sphere combines geometric patterns in an architecture that creates immersive projections.  

Olafur Eliasson has long combined glass and mirrors to investigate the properties and effects of light refraction and reflection. Unfocused but joyous morning, 2021, is one of a series of glass works that the artist has been developing for over ten years. These works, originally inspired by watercolour investigations on paper, translate the transparency and layering of the watercolours into shallow three-dimensional space, using multiple layers of handblown, coloured glass sheets. Circles and ellipses, the salient compositional elements of the paintings, are found again in the glass works as cut-outs excised from each pane. Depending on the arrangement of the cut-out shapes, many more colours come to light than are found in the original tones of coloured glass.  As often with these works, the panes rest upon a shelf made from a log of driftwood scavenged from the coast of Iceland.

Laura Lima’s continuously changing ‘Leviane’ works consist of transparent fabric and dry ice. Engaging with concepts of gravity and density, fragments of dry ice slowly evaporate from the pores of these lightweight fiber constructions. Referencing the history of landscape painting, Lima uses the smoke as a painting tool to blur the color and details of the pieces, creating shadows akin to how one creates painterly atmospheric qualities. Chemically and physically, traditional oil paintings change very slowly over time. Accelerating this concept, Lima’s use of dry ice creates an immediate transition of materials, cycling through existence and dispersion as the ice melts and is repeatedly replenished. In a domestic setting, the dry ice is optional and can be added as frequently as desired.

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s new series of sculptural flowers offer a fragile beauty and an untamable, organic logic of their own. Constructed from mixed media – employing modelling clay, paint, fabric and resin – the sculptures recall real species of lilies or orchids, as well as fantastical floral arrangements in other-worldly colors and forms. Flowers recur in Djurberg & Berg’s practice due to their abiding interest in the fleeting nature of human emotions and their shared symbolism for human themes of love, joy, desire, sadness and vulnerability. Representing the circle of life, from a shy bud to a beautiful blossom to a withering plant, the flower form has been a constant interest in Djurberg and Berg’s practice.

In 2009, the artists created their first major work inspired by flora and fauna, a subversively surreal and immersive Garden of Eden, entitled The Experiment, for the 53rd Venice Biennial, for which they were awarded the Silver Lion for best emerging artists. 

Since the mid-1990s, Ernesto Neto has produced an influential body  of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural  world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience.  Drawing from biomorphism and Minimalist sculpture, along with Neo- concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s & 70s, the artist both references and incorporates organic shapes and  materials, that engage all five senses, producing a new type of sensory perception that renegotiates boundaries between artwork and viewer, the organic and manmade, the natural, spiritual and social worlds.

Oppenheim’s starting point for this work is a poorly lit photograph she found in the German National Archives taken by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (a Nazi Party organization dedicated to pilfering cultural property, mostly from Jewish owned businesses and people) of a pendant pair of still life paintings stolen from Bacri Frères, a Parisian art and antiquities gallery located at 141 Boulevard Haussmann on August 18^th, 1942.  The paintings were last registered at 54 Avenue d’lena, Paris, on January 8^th, 1943 and then ERR’s paper trail ends. The only other note provided was that these paintings were set aside for Hermann Goering’s personal collection. They were never repatriated to France nor restituted to the Bacri family, and their existence remains unknown. 

Embracing the paintings’ mysterious disappearance and seizing upon the only record of its existence, Oppenheim transforms and fragments a pendant into its reproduced elements. Utilizing her smoke technique, she uses a flame to expose and then solarize the negative in her darkroom. In Oppenheim’s work, fire becomes a generative force allowing not for a recreation of what was lost, but rather the creation of a new artwork based on what was left, a single negative. 

Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. This body of work continues Saban's investigations into the relationship between paint, pigment and canvas. In this work, thin layers of dried acrylic paint is woven through the linen, physically embedded into the fabric of the painting. 

Resembling a classic pie chart, this work addresses our society’s obsession with statistics. Heightened over the last few years, we have become even more consumed with measuring, quantifying and categorizing. The circular motif also makes reference to geometry and its importance throughout art history. The viewer immediately questions what is being measured by this graphic and the relationship between the different sections. Instead of representing specific data, the chart could represent anything. Playing on our ability and inclination to attach meaning to this motif, Saban reminds us that bias is always at play when it comes to collecting, presenting and interpreting data.

Informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences and engineering, Tomás Saraceno’s floating sculptures and interactive installations propose new, sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment. Embodying one of the core concepts in Saraceno's work, TOI-2136 b/M+W  presents a model of life floating in space and suggests an architectural vision of the future. Suspended from the ceiling as if a luminous cloud or a collection of beautiful bubbles, the complex geometric shape of the modules are derived from the artist's continued experimentation with a structure termed the "Weaire-Phelan Model," which describes an idealized mathematical geometry of foam. 

Among the leading German artists of his generation, Thomas Scheibitz has developed his own conceptual language that bridges the realms of figuration and abstraction, at times dissolving them entirely. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes and architectural fragments in ways that challenge traditional contexts and interpretations. While centrally concerned with principles of classification and systems of order, the artist's paintings, sculptures, and works on paper resist traditional categorization.

Haim Steinbach transforms everyday objects into sculptural works by taking them out of their original context and staging them on meticulously-crafted, laminated wood shelves. Combining elements of the Duchampian tradition with the geometric simplicity of Minimalism, Steinbach investigates the relationship between the functional object and the “art object.” The artist often selects commercially produced items to display, such as the black rubber “Kong” dog toy, perfect in its machined symmetry. The petite Kong is juxtaposed with an object that is in many ways its opposite: a large carved wood bowl, irregular in shape and texture. The third object is a fin from a surfboard, detached and positioned to resemble the dorsal fin of a shark peaking out of the water, creating a simple but effective visual pun. There is humor in its transparency, as the fin is made from smooth fiberglass and marked with a logo that belies its origins, but it also invokes the primal fear of sharks, a subject that has been memorably featured in popular culture, such as the 1975 blockbuster Jaws. 

Self Portrait as My Sister Jane Wearing is an important work central to Wearing's iconic series called Album. In this series, Wearing uses her immediate family as the subject including pictures of her mother, brother, sister and father, uncle and herself as a teenager. However instead of having them pose for the photographs, Wearing creates each photo as a self-portrait, layering her family member's visage over her own. Wearing uses snapshots from years past as the starting point, capturing a time of youth and innocence. Through these images Wearing delves in the complexity of human relationships within a familial structure and how they influence the individual. Using typical modes of transformation such as makeup, styling, props and locations, Wearing inhabits each family member and her younger self both physically and psychologically. As in her earlier work, Wearing utilizes the device of the mask as a source of illumination and inspiration, dealing with issues of identity through a lens of personal history.