Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms opens to the public tomorrow Friday 18th and runs until June 26th. Thousands of artworks are available to view from 282 galleries. So obviously 10 artworks cant really give you any kind of overview so we have just chosen the ones that caught our eye with the only proviso being that they havent sold already.
1 Derrick Adams at Luxembourg & Dayan
Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2019 Painting Oil on canvas 152.4 x 213.4 (cm) 60.0 x 84.0 (inch)
The present work represents African American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Adams identifies these sets of emojis as specific figures to honor their achievements while also exposing how their contributions have often been neglected or overlooked in the annals of American history. As writer Tausif Noor has explained in reference to this series, “Though progress requires the slogging efforts of those who have had to justify their position in an unfair and racist society, representation alone is a Pyrrhic victory.” While these radiant canvases from the New Icons series do celebrate Black luminaries, the symbols do not quite capture the individuals who they represent. Although the depicted emojis are now an almost universal language, their meaning would be lost in translation without the titles that accompany the works. With his paintings, Adams reveals how these visual signifiers are both empty and emotive. His pieces convey the difficulty of virtual human dialogue—revealing what depths of connotation go missing when we communicate online. Yet they also demonstrate what is gained in terms of free expression. Minimal in gesture, these works are maximal in feeling. Critic Jan Avgikos described the poignancy of Adams’s New Icons in a review for The Brooklyn Rail that features an image of the present work: Crying and laughing at the same time is an apt description of the expressive dimensions Adams enables in these works. … Lurking in the technical details of these paintings, in the nuances of surface and line and paint, in the undercurrents of the work, in the emojis themselves, the potential for another type of portrait eases into view, one that points in the direction of the increasing dominance of technology, living vicariously through the screen, the unruly frontier of social media and the internet, the hate and racism engendered there—and our seeming obliviousness to it all.”
2 Rafa Esparza at Commonwealth and Council
starshots: blue roses, 2020 Painting Acrylic on adobe panel (local dirt, horse dung, hay, Hoosic River water, chain-link fence, plywood) 174.0 x 114.3 x 4.4 (cm) 68.5 x 45.0 x 1.8 (inch)
esparza depicts his older brother in a nostalgic rendition of Star Shots, ubiquitous glamour photography studios in malls in the 1990s. A popular pastime for pre-Instagram self-representation and sociality among Los Angeles youth, particularly in Black and Brown communities, esparza’s adobe-backed version of the Star Shots backdrop memorializes young lives lost to gang violence, the prison-industrial complex, and other forms of structural oppression. It is a refusal of erasure, a celebration of and mourning for those denied, and who perhaps never had access to, the mythical American Dream.
3 Elizabeth Glaessner at PPOW
Eating the Moon, 2020 Painting water dispersed pigments with binders, oil on canvas 152.4 x 101.6 (cm)
60.0 x 40.0 (inch)
Elizabeth Glaessner (b.1984) creates brightly hued paintings and works on paper that depict a grotesque utopia teeming with life and decay. This universe, which Glaessner has been expanding and repopulating for over a decade, features theatrical and celebratory rituals that blur the line between dreams and nightmares. Using pure pigments dispersed with water and various binders, her saturated and intricately layered scenes champion amorphous and evocative forms, inviting us into a surreal universe populated by androgynous beings, tricksters and changelings. Such figures reflect an unrestricted range of forms in states of ecstasy or hysteria, celebrating the purity of emotional expression that most are too afraid to confront.
4 Dena Yago at Bodega
Virtue and Vice, 2020 Painting Mural (Paint on wall) 290.0 x 550.0 (cm) 114.2 x 216.5 (inch)
Dena Yago’s ongoing series of murals casts characters from Disney, advertising, and other pop culture into allegorical fan fiction tableaus. Here, The Cheshire Cat gives Sleepy the dwarf from Snow White a wet willie with his tongue, mapped with contemporary virtue and vice in the style of Chinese Traditional Medicine tongue assessment.
5 Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet
Welcome, 2019 Sculpture Cellophane, plastic, glass Unique 50.0 x 30.0 x 20.0 (cm) 19.7 x 11.8 x 7.9 (inch)
https://displaydevice.tumblr.com/
6 Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts
Hergott Ore, 2020 Sculpture Cotton, stuffing 60.9 x 182.9 x 15.0 (cm) 24.0 x 72.0 x 5.9 (inch)
Diamond Stingily is an American artist and poet. Stingily’s art practice explores aspects of identity, iconography and mythology, and childhood. Stingily lives and works in New York City. wikipedia
7 Federico Herrero at Sies + Höke
Untitled, 2020 Painting Oil and acrylic on canvas 60.0 x 50.0 (cm) 23.6 x 19.7 (inch)
Federico Herrero’s work is strongly influenced by the landscape and the bright colours of San Jose?, the city where he was born and still lives. Equally influenced by Chilean draughtsmen and painter Roberto Matta, who once described his working process as somewhere between intuition and improvisation, Herrero began to create a coherent visual output – an image world in which the landscape and geometric structures, the organic and the architectural are conceptually and materially combined into one. Not only working on canvas, he also paints on walls, facades, playgrounds and city sidewalks, thus critically reflecting on modern life between the built and the natural. In his presentation Herrero combines a series of new canvases with the extension of painting into the architectural space.
8 Sonia Almeida at Simone Subal Gallery
Work on Paper Permanent pen and oil on gessoed paper 50.2 x 35.6 (cm) 19.8 x 14.0 (inch)
In this new series of paintings and works on paper, Sonia Almeida investigates how shifting models of temporality alter the ways in which society operates. The global quarantine has forced the world to move through time differently, and to question why and how time is normally structured. Almeida incorporates collected images of calendars and mechanisms used to measure time into these new works, and in doing so, emphasizes the uncertainty of constructed timelines.
9 Zhu Jinshi at Blum & Poe
Changzhi Temple 3, 2018 Painting Oil on canvas 180.0 x 160.0 (cm) 70.9 x 63.0 (inch)
Zhu Jinshi produces abstract paintings whose surfaces are built up with thick, near-sculptural layers of oil paint. Resembling colorful landscapes, Zhu’s images range in palette and scale, but the artist is known to always apply his oil paint with spatulas and shovels. Producing dense lashings of color, the artist’s method recalls the style and techniques espoused by the German Expressionists, who Zhu was profoundly influenced by during his years living in Berlin. Artsy
10 Hannah Levy at mother’s tankstation limited
Untitled, 2016 Sculpture Nickel plated steel, silicone 94.0 x 45.7 x 50.8 (cm) 37.0 x 18.0 x 20.0 (inch)
Levy’s sculptures, constructed using a dissonant combination of sleek and synthetic materials such as nickel-plated steel and silicone that she has described as “design desire”, elicit a tactile curiosity within the viewer who is drawn to the conscious yet seemingly counter intuitive coupling of materials hard and soft, assertive and passive, exposing the limits of these physical qualities and making vulnerable our expectations of design principles, whilst disconcerting familiar notions of the erotic.
Public opening Friday 18th until Friday June 26th artbasel.com/ovr
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- Art Basel Basel Online Viewing Rooms
- Art Basel Online Viewing Rooms
- Art Basel OVR
- Blum and Poe
- Bodega
- Cabinet
- Commonwealth and Council
- Dena Yago
- Derrick Adams
- Diamond Stingily
- Elizabeth Glaessner
- Federico Herrero
- Ghislaine Leung
- Hannah Levy
- Luxembourg & Dayan
- mothers tankstation
- PPOW
- Queer Thoughts
- Rafa Esparza
- Sies + Höke
- Zhu Jinshi
