Art Basel in Basel kicks off next week on Monday 12th June 2023 and there are multiple fairs and hundreds of galleries to see. Below FAD has chosen 5 London Galleries to see in Basel during Art Basel Week all are super interesting – have FUN navigating – * Oh and one from Athens as well.
Ginny on Frederick present Alexandra Metcalf at Liste Art Fair 2023
Ginny on Frederick will present new works by Alexandra Metcalf (b. 1992) for Liste Art Fair Basel 2023. Alexandra Metcalf is a London-born, New York-based artist. Her hand-crafted works address the social and personal history of femininity in conjunction with themes of fantasy, identification, domesticity, anxiety and loss. Drawing on a personal archive of specific traditions of craft and ornamentation (Brit-Punk, The Arts and Crafts Movement, and Victorian England), Metcalf elaborately allegorizes and reimagines the mother-daughter dyad. Her works have previously been exhibited at Fitzpatrick Gallery (FR), LOMEX (NYC), Downs and Ross (NYC), 15 Orient (NYC) and Ginny on Frederick (UK).
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South Parade present Judith Dean at June Art Fair 2023
Judith Dean’s paintings question the way in which we look at images and art. Using her non- writing hand to overcome the control exerted by the conscious mind, Dean makes painting that explore perspective and the singularity of the mind’s eye in framing and authorship. Using the contingency of found pictures on the internet, the compositions are framed as receding stages or galleries. We see walls, floors, ceilings and separated rooms emerge from blind alleys, dead ends and shifting horizons. The digital world is a multiverse of images in which our attention is manipulated to focus on what is narrow and commercially and politically expedient. By painting numerous images within one painting, Dean distracts or prevents us from focussing on one subject – making us aware of both the mind’s natural control and society’s. The original images come from a variety of cultural, geographical and historical sources and the painting process assembles these disparate images into a world of staged inevitability.
Judith Dean (b. 1965, Billericay, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from Wimbledon School of Art, London (1988) and Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (1993). Recent selected exhibitions include The World Was All Before Them, TULCA (Ireland, 2022), The Void, White Columns Online curated by Daisy Sanchez (New York, 2021), twelve years in the making, Galeria Cadaqués (Spain, 2019) and 1D for Abroad, Tintype (London, 2019). Since her first solo in 1990, Dean has exhibited extensively internationally including exhibitions/ performances at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (1997) and in Germany, Japan, Czech Republic and France, with solo exhibitions at Hales (London, 1997, 2000 & 2002). Dean was also the winner of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize (2005) and is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at South Parade in July 2023.
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Belmacz present Abbas Zahedi at June Art Fair
Abbas Zahedi’s (b. 1984, London, UK) work questions. It questions the every day, the ‘common sense’ and how bodies come to operate within systems that surround. Through installation, sound, performance and sculptural gestures, Zahedi’s artistic outputs cast new light on the seemingly insignificant in order to abound the social politics of a space, a system or given situation, making these more hospitable.
First emerging within the context of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Abbas Zahedi’s (b.1984, UK) route into ‘art proper’ can only be described as otherwise. After studying to become a Physiology and Pharmacology at University College London, in 2011 Zahedi left the medical field and began working as a community organiser in West London. Following years creating spaces for togetherness and critical thought, Zahedi was approached to be one of the artists included in the first Diaspora Pavilion—one of the collateral Pavilions that formed Christine Macel’s 2017 Venice Biennale Viva Arte Viva, a Biennale envisioned as a series of interconnected pavilions designed to reflect art’s capacity for expanding humanism. Something of this expansive understanding of art and social life suffused Zahedi’s practice, giving his works a distinct voice and sensibility.
Since this first foray into art Zahedi has risen to become one of the most poignant contemporary artists working today. Following solo exhibitions at CAPC – contemporary art museum of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France (2022-23); Anonymous Gallery, New York, USA (2022); Belmacz, London, UK (2021); Chelsea Sorting Office, London, UK (2020); and South London Gallery, London, UK (2020), in 2022 Zahedi was awarded the Frieze Artist Award for his project Waiting With {Sonic Support}, a project described by the Art Newspaper as “truly transformative.” Zahedi’s recently opened solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham, UK) furthers this critical interest in the transformative potentials of art spaces.
For June Art Fair, Belmacz will present a number of customised exit signs—small sculptural gestures that constitute one of Zahedi’s ongoing spatial series. Initially developed for his solo exhibition at South London Gallery (2020), these Exit Signs co-opt the internationally known signifier for emergency escapes routes, transforming these otherwise mundane objects into emotive expressions; expressions at once alluding to loss and mourning, and at the same time processes of de-embodiment so pertinent to the ‘logic of the White Cube.’ Furthering Zahedi’s critical interest in the effect of socio-political systems on bodies, each of these Exit Signs explore how processes of exiting have become wholly biopolitical. That is, with their subtle modifications, each artwork point towards how rigid systems differentiate between differently particular bodies in differently particular ways. In turn, they speak to ideas of human agency, loss, and the transformations bodies make in order to become ‘proper’ fixtures within a one-dimension world-system.
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The Breeder presents Georgia Sagri at Art Basel Parcours
Curated by Samuel Leuenberger GEORGIA SAGRI, Deep Cut, Rittergasse & St. Alban-Graben, Basel
Parcours opening: Monday, June 12th, 2023, 1pm to 8pm on view until Sunday 18th June, 2023. Performance: Deep Listening (2001) Friday, June 16, 4pm | Saturday, June 17, 7:30pm Münsterplatz, Basel
Georgia Sagri’s Deep Cut adds a hyper-realistic open wound to a building. The cut facade bleeds in silent, outside of our reach, and implies an embodiment of the architecture. The work invites its viewers to contemplate on the nature of healing and self care as well as raising the question of whose wound we are looking at.
Is it the building that’s hurt or the artist or even ourselves? Is it self-inflicted or the result of a conflict? Will the wound leave a scar? Deep Cut aestheticizes the process of the infliction and subsequent healing of a wound, a process of profound meaning, because it marks the rupture of life and the hope for its return to a stable state. It is the wound of a divided society, a break in the tissue that holds us together, and its socio-political aspects surpass everyday facts and expose us to uncertainty.
Being confronted with the bleeding cut invokes feelings of receiving an injury, even though neither its dimensions nor its place are within the realm of reality. Certainly the scale of the work justifies our shared feelings of empathy.
Ranging from sculpture, installation and video centered in performance as well as writing, Georgia Sagri’s practice is manifold. In it, she deconstructs social binaries and modern power relations and asks questions about identity, beliefs and behaviors, often with focal point her own body and voice. Originally, Sagri studied music and cello at the National Conservatory Athens before receiving her MFA at Columbia University. She continues her open-to-public research practice IASI (recovery) in Athens at her semi-public studio and art space [matter]HYLE. She is the Tenured Professor of Performance at the School of Fine Arts in Athens.
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Cabinet present Caspar Heinemann at Art Unlimited, Art Basel 2023
Caspar Heinemann, Glorie / Festival of Light, 2023: The installation is conceived across two spaces: one light, the other dark. In the lit space, there are a series of cardboard constructed objects in the form of birdhouses. These humble objects are handcrafted from used cardboard packaging and have a folkish fetishist aspect to them. They share a ritualistic sense of purpose. The hole, or orifice, of each suggests both corporeal access and sanctuary. You pass from this space into the next to find a series of electric faux-log fire stoves, each emitting the artificial effects of an open fire, but no heat. The room suggests an inner space both sacred and profane – a place of private contemplation, but also communal warmth and physical intimacy. Conversely, there is an implication of the security offered by traditional family domesticity as illusion, exclusion, or even threat.
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Soft Opening present Sin Wai Kin at Art Basel 2023 Statements
Soft Opening to present Sin Wai Kin in the Statements sector of Art Basel. In ‘Portraits’, Soft Opening presents five moving-image character portraits from London-based artist Sin Wai Kin (b.1991 Toronto, Canada). ‘Portraits’ continues the artist’s exploration of storytelling as a means to interrogate binaries and create fantasy narratives, which interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Drawing on personal experiences of existing beyond categories, Sin’s practice pivots around performance, moving image, writing and print to question idealised images, constructed identities and binary conceptions of consciousness.
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