Art | 45 | Basel | Art Galleries

Team is pleased to announce our participation in Art | 45 | Basel | Art Galleries. We will be located in Hall 2.1, Booth P15. Our presentation will include works by Robert Janitz, Ryan McGinley, Tabor Robak, Daniel Turner, Gert & Uwe Tobias and Pieter Vermeersch.

Robert Janitz will offer a group of reverse portraits, paintings that depict not the faces of their subjects, but rather the backs of their heads. By turning the subject away from the viewer, the artist  directs our attention to the fact of the painting itself.

Ryan McGinley has contributed two new images from his Night Sky body of work. These images, unlike the bulk of McGinley’s work, are without human subjects.  The resultant images are both fragmentary meditations on the romantic sublime and representations of the ways in which nature feels both familiar and foreign.

By Tabor Robak, we will show Analphabetic Aquarium, a new take on his previous Free-to-Play works. Robak has programmed a self-playing “match-three” video game – similar to such commercial products as Candy Crush or Bejeweled – using an unlikely vocabulary of sampled commercial icons.  In this version, the action of the game takes place behind a digitally rendered fish tank.

Accompanying his appearance at Art Unlimited, we will show one sculpture by Daniel Turner from the same body of work. The works take the form of institutional countertops, pristinely painted in an aggressively benign shade of yellow. Turner’s act of isolation and presentation of familiar forms allows his faux-functional objects to enact a kind of psychological violence on the viewer.

Gert & Uwe Tobias contribute two large scale woodblock prints. The artists’ visual vocabulary is entrenched in both modernism and folkloric forms, pairing geometric shapes with ambiguous animal and plant forms in ways that simultaneously echo and confront familiar art-historical traditions.

Pieter Vermeersch, who had his New York debut at the gallery’s Grand Street space in April, has created large scale photorealistic paintings of planes – skies or walls, for example. Teetering on the edge of representation and abstraction, these works examine the litany of conceptual tensions presented by post-minimalist painting.