Art Basel: Galleries

Modern Work

The big boys of the show, those whose pieces are worth tens of millions of dollars are generally in the galleries that have modern work. The quantity of Andy Warhol pieces at this show is staggering. His Brillo boxes, Prints, Painted Prints, you name it. Everyone wants one for their collection. I don't know whether there is a saturation of his work because he had a prolific career, if it was actually his place in art history or some other market value scheme that I'm not privy to, but Warhol madness is in the collecting crowd this year. I could never collect art simply as an investment. I don't like Warhol's work and would never desire to own it especially with an $80 million dollar price tag. According to my tour guide there was a Francis Bacon Painting worth $60 million and a Picasso worth $30 at Galerie Krugier & Cie from Geneva. Among the artists who sold pieces for over $2 million were Mark Rothko, Maurizio Cattelan, Anish Kapoor, and Bridget Riley. The Gagosian sold $45 million of art within the first fifteen minutes of the fair’s opening. Other big numbers include three Picasso’s offered by Geneva based Galerie Krugier & Cie, worth a total of $52 million. Works by younger artists with emerging reputations were also in high demand. Picasso's granddaughter, Marina, manages his estate and had many pieces by her grandfather up for sale. There were paintings, drawings and watercolor/ink on paper as well as palettes that he used in lovely plexiglas displays. But the piece I watched come off the wall was in Gagosian. This gallery has no labels for their art. You should just know who the artists are. In a smaller room within the gallery there are lowered lights and armed military guards along with a few key Picasso paintings. One of which was being taken off the wall by a white gloved man who was followed closely by a smiling, slightly frumpy, navy sport coated gentleman.

In this article in the Huffington Post among other reports there is a sense that the art market is back on track as people are investing in art over sagging stocks. Also there was record attendance at Art Basel this year- some 65,000 people attending.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/18/art-basel-sales-suggest-a_n_879588.html

What did I see in the Modern Area? Literally everything and anything worth collecting. Any name that a person's read about from Modern Art history was represented at this show. Some of the common names like Lichtenstein, Calder, DuBuffet (who I'll talk about later), Miro, Leger, Magritte, Tanguay, DeChirico, and Chagall. The galleries featuring Modern artists often had a mix of Contemporary as well. Gagosian had a John Currin. The Landau Fine Art Gallery of Montreal who featured one of my personal favorites of the show had a large and impressive collection of Modern artists.

The Galleria Dello Scudo had an Alberto Burri piece from 1966 that was called Combustinone BL7, made of plastic, acrylic, vinyl and combustion on cellotex. It reminded me of Cai Guo Qiang's work on a small scale (due to the combustibles).

It's always amusing to see the death of painting in Ad Reinhardt's 1960 piece juxtaposed with a ton of work that is created viably for the next 50 years after it.

Art Galleries-Contemporary

This is what I was really interested in. If you want to know what was in the Modern collections just open a history book. The contemporary art that I saw was a mixture of the super- popular and well known living artists (like Kara Walker, Richard Serra, Roni Horn, Ida Applebroog, Mark Bradford, Matthew Ritchie and so on. Just watch the PBS series Art:21 and you'll find their work in the Contemporary Galleries. It's interesting how many of these artists do large scale work, yet have pieces for sale that are accessible to smaller collectors. A lovely collage of Kara Walker's silhouettes is available to someone who loves her installations but doesn't have a 1000 square foot white walled space in which to display them. Love Richard Serra's enormous steel monoliths but you live in a New York walk up? Never fear, his oil crayon on paper drawings are everywhere so you can have your own oil ringed black textured piece of Serra for the collection.

Some examples of work that I thought was interesting are:

Guillermo Kuitca's mixed media on mattresses. Mostly because it was the first thing that I saw upon walking into the galleries and it features detailed maps of the rural area I grew up in and the 200 person village in North Dakota that my Grandmother lived in until she passed away. It's bizarre to go to Basel, Switzerland and see something made by an Argentine artist that is so painfully familiar the moment you walk in. To me it is a moment of global townieism.

In the same gallery, Hauser & Wirth, there was a Marlene Dumas watercolor that I though was a beautiful use of the material and a Ron Mueck sculpture called Youth that is a 25 inch tall startling representation of a boy lifting his shirt to reveal a bleeding wound.

A piece that was hand embroidered beads on canvas, on board was by the artist Farhad Moshiri called Spooked. It looks like a mis-registered Lichtenstein painting.

Fiona Rae's Sizzling Happy Family is an oil, acrylic and gouache on canvas that is 60x50 inches and features interesting layers, drips and paint that has been cut into shapes and letters and applied to the canvas.

David Hockney is continuously re-inventing himself. In his recent work he uses the computer and digital painting as his medium. His inkjet printed drawing of Margaret Hockney has an Alice Neel feeling to it.

Alex Brown's Supermix from 2004 is a flat paint-by-numbers looking piece that is like an Alex Katz painting that hit a bad digital moment and is breaking up.



Giuseppe Penone's 9 panel piece Spine d'Acacia is constructed from white silk and acacia thorns.

Clare Woods use oil and enamel on aluminum for her sprawling abstraction called Monster Field at the New Art Centre.

Glen Ligon's Figure 79 is made from acrylic silkscreen with coal dust.

Mark Bradford had a piece entitled Horrible Shark that is 102x144 inches made of mixed media like posters and paint.

Haegue Yang's Trustworthy Wave is an understated landscape piece is a collage of security pattern envelopes.

No collection would be complete without a Damien Hirst. Since Charles Saatchi owns most of his work, you'll have to settle for a dot painting made of household gloss on canvas.


Matthew Ritchie, (my parallel life BF) painted Home is the Hunter which was on view at New York's Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Alongside Ritchie's painting was a work by Elliot Hundley, who I had the pleasure of meeting last summer in Chicago. His work represents a really interesting departure from 2D work. A lot of artists are doing this sort of obsessive, accumulated collage of materials that are wall hanging but not 2D. Many of his works (which he calls kites) are 3D. I didn't see any freestanding pieces in Basel.

Tadashi Kawamata's Siteplan, Paris (2) is constructed from plywood, balsa, cardboard and acrylic.

My personal favorite of the gallery show was a piece by Kwang-Young Chun called Aggregation II-JA003 Blue and Red which was mixed media with Korean Mulberry Paper. I looked at a book of his work in the gallery after I stood staring at this wall hanging piece and was blown away.

I saw a number of beautiful plaster sculptures that were of interest because of their simplicity and elegance. One is a sculpture in Thomas Ammann's Zurich gallery. It is plaster poured into a blow-up animal mold.

Others include a honeycomb-like wall hanging piece by Maria Bartuszova.

Liza Lou’s piece called The Damned at L+M Arts is a large (think Michaelangelo’s David scale) shows a dazzling representation of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from eden a la Masaccio. In queue with Renaissance work it is completed with gold beads.

Matt Wedel’s Flowertrees remind me of a ceramic version of Hen and Chicks (for those gardeners out there reading this).

John Beech’s pieces are a nice way to own the artist’s work with a kind $6,500 price tag. They are plexi constructed boxes that contain the studio rags and peeled paint from his cans.

Roger Hiorns created this sculpture by crystallizing a BMW car engine in copper sulfate. He has also done a cow brain, and even an entire apartment that was abandoned. I wish I could have tromped through that glittering castle!

http://shapeandcolour.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/roger-hiorns-seizure/

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work falls under the category of Situationist. Unique to the venue of a collector’s event, his work is based on an idea and an event. The temporal nature of the work is less conducive to the traditional collector. As he says, “it is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people”. The people were really fascinated, drawing a crowd. The work consisted of the gallery space walls open to drawing. He provided a bunch of charcoal and photos from the recent uprising in Egypt. While visitors were welcomed to participate he was busy making Massaman curry for the crowd. Tentative collectors swilled beer and ate curry while watching the process unfold. I joined in on the drawing. A very friendly group of Thai art students who were there to start the development of the work handed me materials. It was the first time at Art Basel that I felt at home. Eating curry with dirty fingers.