Sean Kelly is delighted to return to Art Basel, where we will feature a compelling presentation of works highlighting the gallery’s artists. Our booth, P2, includes a new photograph by Marina Abramović, who has explored the physical and mental limits of her being, withstanding pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Jose Dávila, whose major retrospective exhibition Memory of a Telluric Movement is on view at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, is represented by a new sculpture and painting, which reflect his interest in contrasting themes such as mass and lightness, volume and transparency, and geometric and organic forms. New paintings by Laurent Grasso from his ongoing series, Studies into the Past, which investigate ideas at the intersection of natural phenomena, truth and illusion, science, and history, to explore the influential symbolism of celebrated works of art. Rebecca Horn, currently included in the 59th Venice Biennale and the subject of a solo booth at Art Unlimited, is represented by her body landscape paintings, which are scaled to the artist’s proportions and illustrates the physicality and figurative interaction between Horn and her self-reflective surface. A new Exposed Painting by Callum Innes reveals the process whereby he paints the canvas, and then repeatedly applies turpentine to remove the paint, leaving all but the faintest traces of color.
Our booth also includes a new stamped painting by Idris Khan in which the artist repeatedly stamps text onto heavily gessoed aluminum panels, ultimately eradicating the meaning of the original text to construct an abstract and universal visual language; a work in neon by Joseph Kosuth, the radical pioneer of conceptual and installation art, who initiated appropriation strategies, language-based works, and the use of neon as a medium – considering it a form of ‘public writing’ without fine art associations – in the 1960s; and painting by Janaina Tschäpe, whose paintings are informed by the play of color, shape, and pattern found in the environment. These bold new works illustrate how the formal aspects of her paintings intersect with the natural world, emphasizing the overlap between human nature - emotional turbulence, expression, and freedom - and that of the physical world. Frank Thiel's monumental works are not merely documentation but picture a city reborn after a tumultuous history. The architectural structures in his photographs reflect the emergence of new patterns of urban existence.
One of the most influential artists of his generation, Kehinde Wiley’s paintings present a contemporary interpretation of the history of portraiture. A major new oval painting by Wiley, exemplifies the way in which he engages signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic, and sublime in his representations of black and brown men and women throughout the world. Wu Chi-Tsung’s Cyano-Collage series connects Eastern and Western culture and art to integrate traditional aesthetics within a striking contemporary language. His Cyano-Collages replace the traditional ink and brush used in Chinese shan shui paintings –literally, “mountain-water-pictures”—with experimental photography to reinvigorate the traditional landscape language.
