Jun 14 2017

Art Basel in Basel, 2017: Part 1

by HG Masters

Warm, sunny weather in Basel on the Messeplatz, where, after last year’s rain-soaked event, a new canopy has been constructed to shelter guests during the newly implemented security screenings that include metal detectors and bag inspections. All photos by HG Masters for ArtAsiaPacific.

Once a decade, the stars of Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster and the Venice Biennale align to form a constellation of events making up a modern-day grand tour of art festivals in Western Europe. When this special occasion occurs, nearly every gallery with participating artists at these events heads to Basel in June, to visit either Art Basel or the regular satellite fairs of Liste and Volta—and to show off the names featured in these key showcases, wisely capitalizing on collectors’ interest before the art-world stars realign and the sky changes, come September.

Now in its 48th year with 291 participating galleries, Art Basel in Basel remains a premier fair, where the scale of a gallery’s success generally runs from selling well throughout the week to selling out in a few hours. (Well-oiled galleries can re-hang and replenish their booths, and draw up new price sheets, overnight). Here’s a quick look at the large-scale projects presented at Unlimited this year, and at the booths seen on the first preview day of the main fair.

In Halle 1, Unlimited is staged for extra-large projects, including a blue-tentacled OTTO PIENE inflatable sculpture, an OLAF METZEL billboard sculpture and a BARBARA KRUGER light box that reads: “Our people are better than your people, more intelligent. More powerful, more beautiful and cleaner . . .”

SUBODH GUPTA’s house of used aluminum pots, Cooking the World (2017), is designed to host a “cooking and eating performance,” with the artist himself cooking and select guests eating.

The interior of SONG DONG’s installation made with salvaged wooden windows, Through the Wall (2016), which had premiered at the first Yinchuan Biennale, in central China, in September 2016.

EI ARAKAWA, whose work is also shown at Skulptur Projekte Münster, showed movable LED versions of well-known Gutai paintings from 1959, including those by Kazuo Shiraga and Atsuko Tanaka.

After mounting a solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim and participating in the Whitney Biennial in New York (as well as a Kunsthalle Basel exhibition two years ago) ANICKA YI presented a billowing parachute and organ-like forms inside shopping bags on plinths at Unlimited.

A lounging figure, front and center, in the booth of Anton Kern Gallery, by 57th Venice Biennale artist FRANCIS UPRITCHARD.

A DANH VŌ sculpture of a birdcage with a painting by FIRENZE LAI, similar to hers shown in the 57th Venice Biennale, at the booth of Vitamin Creative Space.

Another Venice Biennale participant, KISHIO SUGA, at Blum & Poe, with his work Placement of Unitary Situation (2015).

One of KYNGAH HAM’s Morris Louis-inspired textile works, which are made in North Korean factories, at Carlier Gebauer gallery.

REENA SAINI KALLAT’s multi-panel, multimedia work at Chemould Prescott Road, Garden of Forking Paths (2016), featured fictional hybrid animals from partitioned territories.

After a memorable installation at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ended in March, SUNIL PADWAL showed similar-looking collected and created framed images, Imbricated Minutiae (2017), at Gallery Ske’s booth.

HG Masters is editor-at-large of ArtAsiaPacific.

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