PREVIEW ART BASEL 2023

Combining conceptual, personal and archival photographic approaches, Iñaki Bonillas investigates the materiality and semiotic depth of the medium. Bonillas addresses the cultural history of photography to highlight the medium’s structural behavior and its relationship to the creation of identity.

Endless Mirror (2023) is a set of 4 photographs in the form of a collage in which Bonillas recovers four portraits of Mr. Plaza (his maternal grandfather). Photographs taken unaltered from the original albums, which Bonillas places on top of various old issues of Life magazine that deal with themes similar to those of the J.R. Plaza context in each photograph. Once again, Bonillas searches for, composes, and links each photograph with a situation that recomposes the image of his grandfather as a possible fictional character that comes and goes in front of us.

For the Marginalia series (2019), Iñaki Bonillas decided to work with photography books, because they seem to him to be spaces in which images can freely unfold. It is enough to look for the same photograph printed in two or three books to understand that in reality we know nothing about it, because, in its multiple unfoldings, sometimes it is sepia, sometimes black and white, sometimes yellow. The framing changes as much as the size, the contrast and even the quality, depending on the printing method.

For Art Basel we will show an ensemble of new works. Three drawings,  Pliegues (2023), Winter Room (2023) and Inner Structure (2023) and the sculpture Night Shift (2023). These works are the result of long processes, manual and mental, through which the artist reflects her main interests on formality, on the visible, on time, on organic bodies, on decadence and wear and tear.

The will to see beyond the immediate surrounding visible world conducts Patricia Dauder’s work. The artist attempts to capture what is extremely difficult to retain: time, a fleeting moment, an ephemeral trajectory, something with no form, a remote place. To that end, she uses a variety of media, from sculptures, objects and drawings to films. Drawing could be considered as central in her artistic development. But for years sculpture, moving image and pictorial works on various supports play a decisive role and are necessary to understand her work.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s work uncovers the surprising in the familiar. As an attentive observer of reality, the artist bases his work on the presentation of objects and spaces which accommodate tenuous transformations. His objects, sculptures and photographs are the result of his very subjective contemplation of the urban and architectural fabric of our daily environment.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s selected work for Art Basel is a new piece. Over the past year and a half, Dedobbeleer has been traveling to the island of Murano, home since the Middle Ages to the artisans and creators of renowned Venetian glassmaking techniques, to visit workshops where spare, broken, and unwanted pieces of glass are stored. Selecting disjointed materials, from different time periods and styles, the artist has assembled this lamp-sculpture. In Disastrously Misplaced Optimism, Dedobbeleer composes, and juxtaposes unconnected parts in unexpected ways. The work sits between the utilitarian and the sculptural, allowing the artist to pursue his questioning of both artistic and design production, as well as the history of display.

Blithely borrowing her sources of inspiration from the history of art, cinema, poetry, popular and vernacular arts, comics and children’s books, Ana Jotta builds an idiosyncratic world whose modus operandi consists of dodging the rules.

Finissage is a photographic image in which we see a woman, the artist herself, who covers her face while holding in her hands a piece of paper with a text in Portuguese that could be translated as such: “I move just enough so that no one thinks I am dead before my time.” Suggestive, ironic and somewhat disturbing sentence that has its origin in a found text that Ana included in her so-called “footnotes”. These are things of the most diverse nature – which the artist comes across in her day-to-day life and whose qualities – formal, symbolic, conceptual, or other – somehow capture her interest in a special way. Finissage will be complemented by a series of recent, classic and small format works by Ana Jotta, all laid out on a table.

Ana Jotta is currently having her third solo show at ProjecteSD, Never Never Land, on view until June 21, 2023.

Jochen Lempert’s black-and-white analog photography captures the traces of natural phenomena in every sense, in any place, in any situation. Animals, humans, tree leaves, landscapes or cityscapes, dragonflies, bees, clouds, grains of sand, swarms of flying insects, the sky, the sea, birds, the moon, flowers, water, the sun, are just only a few of the motives that one can find in Lempert’s repertoire. The artist’s deep knowledge of natural science (his background in biology remains central to his identity), his sensitivity and his acute eye, together with his awareness for art and culture intersect so organically that it is impossible to restrict the contents of his work to one idea.

Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican’s multi-media artistic practice has been concerned with signification, representation and knowledge systems. Mullican investigates how signifying processes function and how objects become charged with meaning. This non-verbal language system of signs and pictograms is the common thread throughout his work, which ranges in media across painting, sculpture, drawing and photography, to film, neon, stained glass works, rubbings, installation and also performance.

Matt Mullican begun the Stick Figure drawings when he was still a student at Cal Arts in the class called Post-Studio Art. He did not have a studio and invented an imaginary one and a character in it whose name was Glen. This was the departing idea to create hundreds of drawings of a “stick figure” in different positions, with a short, simple sentence as a caption, statements such as: “His heart”, “Trying to amaze me”, “His trapezius (raises his shoulder)”, etc. The representation of a fictional character reduced to the minimum graphic expression that, together with the texts that describe his emotions, his physicality, his daily reality, seems to come alive in front of us. As we examine the drawings, one after the other, our feeling of empathy grows. Graphic signs that trigger our minds to project a real feeling as information accumulates.

“To be immersed in colour. That is the experience proposed by Pieter Vermeersch”, points out French curator François Piron (1). And it is, indeed, an experience of complete immersion what the Flemish painter’s work offers. Either through mural paintings but also in his works on canvas, or other surfaces, Vermeersch manages to elicit a powerful relationship between the work and the viewer.

Vermeersch is best known for his “colour-graded” paintings which are the result of blending a large number of colours in such a perfectly uniform and smooth finish that the separation from one colour to the next, can no longer be perceived, it disappears. The melding of the multiple tonalities creates a blurred effect in a sort of infinitude.

Colour fading into light and then into space. Matter becoming image. Vermeersch’s work and his exhibitions translate into a unique physical experience that cannot be encoded in any discourse.