June Art Fair is my respite. Situated in a concrete bunker, redesigned by Herzog & de Meuron architects, the fair is small-scale and open-plan. The perfect place to actually see and discuss the artworks on offer. Now I am no buyer, but if I were, June would be my place to splash out — it seems of note that the ethos guiding the fair aligns with all the rhetoric about what collectors value nowadays: community, conversation and a sense that they are supporting artists to grow and develop. This year, I made June my starting point for Basel Art Week; a gentle way in to the carnage to follow. Featuring 15 galleries from 9 countries, and about 22 artists (not including the special projects and collaborations unfolding over the fair’s run), here are the top three artists that would get my cash flowing (again, I am not a buyer — sorry).
Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, showing Patricia L. Boyd
Boyd’s presentation features a range of light-box vitrines housed within used packing boxes, the refuse of their content alongside. This stuff looks arbitrary — mismatched forks and spoons, glassware, jars, the remnants of a duck feather pillow perhaps split in transit — like the ‘useful’ stuff one might collect over the course of a day-to-day living. Precisely choreographed, these works are not emotionally expressive; each constellation renders the transitory materials of life disquiet, fragile: an inventory of an existence waiting to be trashed by the powers that be. It is of note that alongside these boxes, Boyd has pinned a large Excel-like printout, listing the typical details a shipping company would need to process a house move — the type of box, its dimensions and contents as well as its originating and intended destination. Standing in Christian Andersen’s booth, this printout eerily recalls Boyd’s artist’s CV, documents used to quantify a life, a practice, allowing this to move between spaces, value intact. In this way, Boyd’s artworks critically refract the logistics of contemporary life, exposing how world-systems render human beings disposable.
Lagune Ouest, Copenhagen, showing Kåre Frang
Frang’s artworks solicit naïvety. Riffing on childhood toys, the artworks presented in June embrace an aesthetic of innocence and unsophistication to question the things we inherit and how these linger with us throughout our lives. Attachments (2021) is something of a doughy recreation of the artist’s childhood violin. Created out of individually cast ‘Marie’ biscuits — an up-market Rich Tea with a quasi-Grecian border — the sculpture’s mosaic-like structure embodies the discordant breakages of a beginner as they attempt to play a part of a symphony. Seemingly sweet and harmless, the artwork has a psychoanalytical quality, appearing as a cracked memory of childhood shame — a physical reflection of an adult’s condescending laugh as they listen to a child stutter through a tune; let’s not forget how these insignificant moments hamper a person’s psychic development.
Charim Galerie, Vienna, showing Julian Göthe
Göthes’s recent drawings Sala dei Giganti I, 2, and 3 (all 2025) are cartoony pastiches allusive of Giulio Romano’s frescoed halls. Romano’s depictions tell allegorical stories, aiming to impress mythological virtues. To me, these enveloping room paintings operate as an early form of propaganda. Göthes’s artworks co-opt Romano’s baroque style as well as more modern methods of propagation. Each drawing is a meticulous pool of flamboyant swirls, at once organic and architectural. Anachronic impressions, with no sense of scale, none of these artworks are figuratively suggestive. Totally abstract in this regard, each can be read as a joyful splurge or indeed as a disquieting reflection — the smooth surface of the world rendered in ripples. Constructed from individual pencil lines, Göthes’s images can be seen as precursive sketches, working drawings, for a larger painting or the beginnings of an etched print series — a form of mass image making coeval with modes of socio-political coercion.
June Art Fair 2025
June 16-22, 2025 Riehenstrasse 90B, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
june-art-fair.com
