To celebrate our 30th anniversary at Art Basel we’ve conceived our booth presentation in four special sections. Here is a preview of the first three:

THE WALL
three consecutive hangings of General Idea, Etienne Chambaud and Cemile Sahin on our
8-meter feature wall

FOCUS
in-depth presentations of Simon Fujiwara and Karolina Jabłońska / Tomasz Kręcicki

ART BASEL KABINETT
Anri Sala

In the coming days we will unveil more details about the fourth section of our Art Basel presentation, The Booth.

Finally, we want to draw your attention to exhibitions and projects by our artists in Switzerland.

We hope you enjoy our Letter from Basel!

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung vom Brief aus Basel.

We are again situated in our prominent location at the top of the main escalator, where our eight meter long feature wall greets visitors to the first floor. Here we have curated three unique hangings on consecutive days throughout the week.

The Wall will first feature S/HE, an important historical work by General Idea. Next comes a choreographed arrangement of nearly 30 works by Etienne Chambaud from his series Uncreatures. And finally OVER THE LANDSCAPE, six Swiss-themed wall-mounted panels by Cemile Sahin.

General Idea
S/HE, 1976

General Idea’s ten-part S/HE is an important historical work last seen in Switzerland in MAMCO's exhibition General Idea Photographs (1969-1982) in 2017. (Currently the museum is presenting Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea, more about that below.)

Conceived in 1976, S/HE is as topical today as it was then. It consists of ten framed black and white photographs that play on preconceived ideas about gender and its representation, a topic General Idea had already addressed with their iconic 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant.

The two models, one male, one female, both professional fashion models from General Idea’s circle of friends, each illustrate five roles more usually assigned as male or female: Celebrity, Architect, Muse, Olympian, and Empress. The postures or silhouettes were lifted from the relentlessly optimistic 1950s advertising in Fortune Magazine, using them to poke fun at the gendered stereotyping of occupations.

This is made explicit in the mock-marketing text General Idea paired with each image. Using their characteristic arch phrase-craft, each photo is accompanied by a list of probing questions whose lingo springs in equal measure from Polari (the gay and drag sub-cultural coded vernacular of the 1950s) and fashion ad-copy, but is of course entirely General Idea’s cunning creation.

By transposing and cross-pollinating the dubiously gendered images and texts, they produce two sets of muddled role play, in which male and female are interchangeable. Much as a man can be the ideal of supple beauty, so a woman can be the conquering hero.

Currently on view at MAMCO in Geneva is Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea. Organized in cooperation with New York's Drawing Center where the exhibition premiered last fall, it features 250 drawings, and a number of AIDS-related works by General Idea presented in adjacent rooms. Through June 18.

At the Stedelijk the largest-ever survey of General Idea's oeuvre is on view. The exhibition includes large sculptures and installations, paintings, videos and publications, archival material and their signature wallpapers. Through July 14.

But in case you cannot make it to Amsterdam, the exhibition will open at Berlin’s Gropius Bau on September 22, 2023. We will keep you updated!

And, of course, there is the magisterial catalogue published in conjunction with this exhibition.

Etienne Chambaud
Uncreatures

A group of Etienne Chambaud’s enigmatic Uncreatures will populate The Wall during its second hanging.

The historical icons, panel paintings of religious figures represented against a golden background—the symbol of divine light—have been modified and the figures, except for their eyes, covered entirely with gold leaf.

Our presentation of an entire wall filled with these enigmatic works, choreographed, if you will, by the artist will no doubt intensify the sense of animation these quietly powerful works project. Their gaze acts as a spatial marker, emanating from the expanse in a certain direction, but also a temporal one, as if the observer were encountering not just a representation but its spectral presence.

But what one really must see in person is the exquisite play of textures—between the original source, in many cases painted many years ago, and the surface created by the new gilding—and how the light hits these distinct sections.

Currently at view in Venice at the Punta della Dogana as part of the collection presentation Icônes, the intense atmosphere Etienne Chambaud’s Uncreatures exude is also described in the essay by Alexandra Bordes in exhibition’s beautifully designed catalogue: "metamorphized by this irreparable caesura, the icons become elusive enigmas, their presence stronger and more disturbing."

Cemile Sahin
OVER THE LANDSCAPE

Our third solo presentation on our feature wall will consist of Cemile Sahin's OVER THE LANDSCAPE, six Swiss-themed panels that the artist created in dialogue with an A.I. program.

For this project, Sahin used video simulations employed by the Swiss military for training exercises as points of reference to simulate their aesthetic.

The images are paired with text passages from the Rütli oath, as it was dramatized in Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell. Sahin's work considers the Rütli oath critically in the context of Switzerland’s prominent role in the trade of military and drone technology.

Among the images are police officers in riot gear in vaguely ominous scenarios, an outstretched hand pointing across a coastline, an expanse of water, and two idyllic scenes that appear characteristic of the Swiss countryside: a flower-filled meadow alongside a mountain lake and an alpine terrain with cows.

Sahin developed the imagery in conjunction with her solo exhibition The Rifle in the Closet currently on view at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden.

And watch out for the new ArtReview with Cemile Sahin on the cover!

Akin to an intimately-scaled exhibition, two of the booth’s large perimeter walls are dedicated to two special stand-alone presentations.

One premieres Simon Fujiwara’s Guernica cycle, including Who vs who vs Who?, a monumental painting drawing on Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, as well as related studies. For the second Focus, we will present works by Karolina Jabłońska and Tomasz Kręcicki in three consecutive pairings chosen by the artists.

Simon Fujiwara
Who vs Who vs Who?, 2023

Prominent on our perimeter wall, we are presenting Who vs Who vs Who?, a monumental new painting by Simon Fujiwara from his body of work featuring Who the Bær. Drawing on Pablo Picasso’s famous anti-war manifesto-painting Guernica from 1937, Fujiwara has produced the largest and boldest works in the series to date.

Executed in acrylic, charcoal, pastel and gold leaf on canvas, Fujiwara's large-scale work is a contemporary response to Picasso’s original. Depicting the specific bombing of Guernica, a town in Spain during the civil war, the original painting has since risen to the status of icon, symbolizing a call for peace and a cry against all war.

In Fujiwara’s reimagining of the work, we see multiple likenesses of his cartoon character Who the Baer presented in a complex graphic composition that echoes the radical ‘cartoon style’ in Picasso’s original work. Rooting the narrative firmly in the ‘now’, Who the Baer appears in various guises bearing identity and gender signifiers, glaring constantly into their smartphones as they chaotically interact with their various ‘selves’.

The entire scene is ‘witnessed’ by a hysterically buzzing drone, an all-seeing eye that replaces Picasso’s light-bulb motif; where journalism was once believed to shine a light onto the truth, in Fujiwara’s painting it is a highly subjective truth and the battle appears to be with the self.

Beyond the surface reading of the piece, Fujiwara’s work enters into a deep material dialogue with Picasso’s original. Drawn to the anecdote that Picasso used ground glass powder in his paint pigment in order to make the painting glow and almost dazzle the viewer, Fujiwara used gold paint and gold leaf as a grounding to his work to evoke a similar effect. By highlighting this, Fujiwara seems to be suggesting that then as now, images – even those of tragedy – exist within an economy of attention, where horror and chaos is entangled with pleasure and entertainment and looking is far from a neutral act.

In conjunction with his large-scale painting Who vs Who vs Who?, Fujiwara produced a number of studies, highlighting and transforming key motifs from Pablo Picasso’s iconic work. Several studies were executed in pastel, acrylic and charcoal on canvas. Others are akin to cartoon strips that give an insight to Fujiwara's development of the narrative elements in the large-scale composition.

Karolina Jabłońska and Tomasz Kręcicki

Karolina Jabłońska and Tomasz Kręcicki, who exhibited in our Berlin gallery this Spring, have conceived three specific pairings of their paintings that highlight the mutual influences but also the difference in the practices of these two young artists.

Two of the new works by Jabłońska draw on the experience of an eclipse but leave open other interpretations. In one, her characteristic alter ego looks out at the spectator through a dark square in her hand. The title of the work, Eclipse, gives a manifest meaning to the scene. But a darkening sky may refer to either actual or metaphoric conditions.

Yet the brightness of light can have a double meaning too, as the painting The sun hits me suggest, in an echo of Slowdive's song title.

Dressed in a dark raincoat with its collar turned up to protect against the pelting rain, the female figure featured in Raincoat is again the artist's familiar alter ego. The entire composition is full of thick transparent rain drops punctuating the composition and transporting the viewer into an imaginary landscape of pitter-pattering deluge.

Kręcicki's new works show the range of his subject matter: Grotesquely enlarged fingers and teeth have an ominous connotation in Teeth but also evoke the artist’s continued exploration of the abstract in figuration.

Breakdown is characteristic of the surrealist unreality of his depictions of common activities and everyday objects, as in this image which pictures a washing machine which apparently is springing a leak.

The collaged elements of Suit, hair and floss, poke fun at the futility of controlling our appearance. The removal of detritus from our clothes, and Kręcicki's apparent transfer onto canvas, highlights the often silly embarrassment provoked by small lapses.

We are delighted to participate in the first Kabinett section in Basel with a solo presentation by Anri Sala. On view will be a selection of Anri Sala’s series Untitled (Maps/Species), (2018–2023).

Each work pairs a vintage etching with a drawing in which Sala reworkw maps of countries and geopolitical territories so that they correspond with the depiction of the biological species in the accompanying print.

To Sala, the frame of the source images is more than a pictorial motif. Rather, the constraint exerted by the drawn boundaries into which the animals were placed aligns with the Enlightenment impulse for classification and ordering that went hand in hand with colonizing efforts. The analogous constriction enacted by Sala unveils this dynamic in a poetic gesture of enforced formal correspondence. At the same time, the congruence remains speculative, leaving viewers to discover the wider significance.

Installed on a colored wall, its specific green, verdigris, further emphasizes the effects of human mastery: The enigmatic color, originally containing toxic qualities, was long impossible to artificially control, until it was captured through lengthy chemical processes.

Since first exhibiting a work from the series in Naoshima in 2016, as part of his Benesse Art Site exhibition, Untitled (Maps/Species) have featured in several of his latest presentations, notably at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2021 and, in 2022, at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

Out of the Box – 20 Years Schaulager
With David Claerbout, Thomas Demand, Rodney Graham and Anri Sala
Schaulager
Ruchfeldstrasse 19
4142 Münchenstein, Basel
June 10 – November 19, 2023
Opening June 9, 7.30pm
www.schaulager.org

The title Out of the Box echoes a basic principle that Schaulager has pursued since first opening its doors in 2003: liberating works of art from a life in storage crates and making them accessible to both schools and universities for research and conservation. The title also refers to the growing number of complex installations, so-called time-based media works, that have been acquired by the collection and will be presented throughout the exhibition in projection boxes of their own.

Ugo Rondinone
when the sun goes down and the moon comes up
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Genève (MAH)
Rue Charles-Galland 2
1206 Geneva
Through June 18, 2023
www.institutions.ville-geneve.ch

Ugo Rondinone's exhibition when the sun goes down and the moon comes up is on view at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva through June 18th. For the third annual Open Invitation, the artist has taken over the museum’s building and collection to create a web of unexpected connections and echoes. Staging his own work in conversation with Ferdinand Hodler and Félix Vallotton in particular, all while responding to the museum’s architecture, he presents a journey through appearances and takes us to the other side of the looking glass.

Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream
With Gabriel Kuri and Anicka Yi
Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève
Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10
1205 Geneva
Through June 11, 2023
www.centre.ch

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève proudly presents the group exhibition Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream (Chrysalide : le rêve du papillon), devoted to the transformations that occur within us as well as outside of us. Life itself is subject to constant change, to a constant state of ephemeral, unstable flux. Its incessant reconfigurations began long before the emergence of humans and will continue long into the future.

Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea
MAMCO, Geneva
Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain
10, Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers
1205 Geneva
Through June 18, 2023
www.mamco.ch

From their earliest projects like staging The 1970 Miss General Idea Pageant to their late activist initiatives around the AIDS crisis, General Idea explored multimedia, conceptual, and performance work as a tool for engaging with common culture and its repressions.

Less well-known are the group’s drawings, the vast majority of which have never been seen. The 250 drawings on view were all produced by Jorge Zontal, who made them as a habitual practice during the group’s brainstorming meetings; however, given General Idea’s mandate for co-authorship (and as demonstrated by the “GI” signature affixed by Zontal shortly before his death) as well as the circumstances under which they were executed, they are considered to be collaborative.

THE MIND’S EYE. Images of Nature from Claude Monet to Otobong Nkanga
With Pierre Huyghe
Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101
4125 Riehen/Basel
June 10 – August 27, 2023
www.fondationbeyeler.ch

The new collection display, which will be on view at the Fondation Beyeler this summer, focuses on artists’ engagement with nature – from Impressionism to the current day. THE MIND’S EYE. Images of Nature from Claude Monet to Otobong Nkanga brings together more than 40 works. In parallel, the Fondation Beyeler will show works by Robert Ryman from the Daros Collection.

The title THE MIND’S EYE refers to the eponymous sculpture by Pierre Huyghe, which will go on view at the museum for the first time, and is used here to describe artists’ ability to conjure up images such as those featured in the exhibition. In the past 100 years, our views and notions of nature have changed beyond all measure.

Archival Ramblings
With Ceal Floyer
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1
3005 Bern
Through July 9, 2023
www.kunsthalle-bern.ch

It isn't very photogenic, but Ceal Floyer's audio work 'Til I Get It Right, presented at dOCUMENTA (13) is a special treat to be encountered in the exhibition Archival Ramblings at the Kunsthalle Bern. The exhibition centers on questions about the archive, the preservation of ephemera, art works and related materials. It begins from open questions, from discontinuities and question marks that can also be read as starting points.

Un Lac Inconnu
With Angela Bulloch and Philippe Parreno
Bally Foundation
Villa Heleneum
Via Cortivo 26
6976 Lugano - Switzerland
Through September 24, 2023
www.ballyfoundation.ch

Un Lac Inconnu, an Unknown Lake, borrows its title from the words of Marcel Proust when he tries to describe, in his book Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained), the meticulous exploration of the human soul and what underlies it: the unconscious. The exhibition is an invitation to the evocative power of the surrounding nature, to its ability to inspire imagination and create persistent images, to penetrate dormant and deep waters, maternal or troubled, to transform the boundaries between exterior and interior into thin membranes, to walk in our intimate gardens, our immersed landscapes.

Shared Landscapes – Seven Plays Between Fields And Forests
Including the premiere of Ari Benjamin Meyers' new work UNLESS, 2023.

Artistic tour outdoors, organized by Vidy-Lausanne Theater, Lausanne
Through June 18, 2023
Meeting point: sports center of Mauvernay
Meeting time: 12-12.45pm
The tour takes 7 hours and involves considerable walking distances
More information
Tickets via www.vidy.ch

Shared Landscapes, conceived by Caroline Barneaud / Stefan Kaegi is an artistic getaway, discovering seven newly created open-air pieces—including the premiere of Ari Benjamin Meyers' UNLESS, 2023—through the course of a 7-hour day in the landscapes surrounding the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne.