In advance of Art Basel Hong Kong, we invite you to preview highlights of our presentation featuring works by:
Kader Attia, Heidi Bucher, Billy Childish, Mandy El-Sayegh, Tom Friedman, Gilbert & George, Nicholas Hlobo, Chantal Joffe, Lee Bul, Liu Wei, Marilyn Minter, Tammy Nguyen, OSGEMEOS, Lari Pittman, Robin Rhode, Do Ho Suh, Sung Neung Kyung, and Nari Ward
A selection of new and historically significant works are included here and connect to institutional exhibitions around the world. Spanning painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the works demonstrate our commitment to a diverse and global program.
In advance of the opening of Heidi Bucher’s retrospective exhibition Spaces are shells, are skins at Art Sonje in Seoul on March 28, our Art Basel Hong Kong presentation will include historic works by the late pioneering artist.
Bucher is best known for her innovative use of latex to cast large-scale architectural features, including entire buildings. Throughout her life, she maintained an ideologically important yet often overlooked practice, in most part due to her gender and unconventional choice of materials. She is now recognized as a pioneer in the multimedia arts space, evidenced in her work Gloria (1975), which is made from latex, textile, and mother of pearl pigment.
Gloria, pictured below, depicts a dressing gown with an apparatus of a mop in front of a mattress, embalmed in latex and mother of pearl. Interested in combining textile with architecture, the artist began embalming textiles in latex in the 1970s as an act of preservation.
Sung Neung Kyung is an influential Korean artist known for his involvement in the avant-garde movement Space and Time during the 1970s. Sung works across non-traditional mediums, including performance, photography, and archival practices, to intentionally distance himself from the mainstream and maintain his own form of conceptualism. His practice seeks to challenge and dismantle the assumed authority of artists, ideas, and other canonical systems through a resistance to traditional discourse. His practice is intrinsically process-oriented and deals in ephemera, frequently involving one-off events or performances; his work is often archived as photographs or contact prints and exhibited as a variety of photo installations.
Debuting at the fair is a new, large-scale painting by Tammy Nguyen, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery opens March 23 in Seoul. After joining our program in 2022, the artist received critical acclaim for the suite of works she debuted at the Berlin Biennial.
In The Gape (2023), Nguyen reimagines the Lusail Stadium in Qatar, where the 2022 World Cup took place. Nguyen’s composition suggests the stadium as more than a structure, reanimating it as both a spaceship and a dragon to explore the other-wordly nature of the architecture and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Portions of the work are also rendered with glow-in-the-dark paint.
The artist has long experimented with intentionally confusing her subjects by overlapping seemingly disparate entities. In her forthcoming Seoul exhibition A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno, Nguyen draws a parallel between Dante’s Inferno and the Cold War-era Space Race in order to explore areas of moral ambiguity and ethical confusion. This August, Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition will open at the ICA/Boston.
A new painting by Chinese artist Liu Wei will debut at the fair. Here, the artist uses computer software to generate complex patterns of vertical and horizontal lines in bright, acidic color palettes that call to mind apocalyptic cityscapes and urban sprawl, audio visualizers and frequency charts, and graphs and data sets. Whatever the viewer might see in the painting, the artist assigns no specific meaning to the colored striations, calling into question the idea that there is only one way to understand the world.
Part of his ongoing exploration of the copper panel as a medium, the works in Nari Ward’s Peace Walk series draw inspiration from city sidewalks and explore the street as a pictorial surface. With his series title, Ward references non-violent protest marches, often known as “peace walks,” and recovers city streets as sites of resistance and stages for transformation.
As he made these works, the artist was also particularly struck by the countless sidewalk memorials erected during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. From these memorials, Ward culled found objects, such as candles, bottles, and stuffed animals, and was always careful to replace the objects he took with newly purchased substitutes. He placed these found objects on top of the copper panels to create distinct, ghostly outlines, and the resulting surfaces reveal these objects’ haunting traces.
Duty Colossus, a specially-commissioned, monumental work by Ward, is currently featured in the Sharjah Biennial, on view through June 11, 2023.
Gilbert & George have worked together as a single artistic entity for over 50 years. On April 1, The Gilbert & George Centre will open in the heart of London’s East End where they have lived and worked for decades. The Centre will serve as a permanent home for the artistic legacy of Gilbert & George.
At Art Basel Hong Kong, we will present two new works from Gilbert & George’s latest series, THE CORPSING PICTURES. The series will make its debut in the United States in an exhibition at our New York gallery this summer, opening in June.
OSGEMEOS, translated as “the twins” in Portuguese, is a collaborative art duo made up of twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo. Their signature long-limbed, yellow figures are recognized around the world and appear in numerous public murals across the globe.
In their native Brazil, OSGEMEOS’ traveling museum exhibition Nossos Segredos (Our Secrets) is currently on view at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte through May 22.
Mandy El-Sayegh’s upcoming New York exhibition will feature one of her signature transformations of the white cube space. She will take over our 24th street location with an immersive installation of unstretched paintings, newspaper, and collage, overlayed with a series of her acclaimed Net-Grid paintings. Performance is also an integral part of Mandy’s exhibition, and she will stage a performance in collaboration with dancer Chandenie Gobardhan.
Tom Friedman is a conceptual artist known for his meticulously fabricated work, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installation. Friedman investigates the concepts of perception, logic, and plausibility with a strong attention to detail. Since the early 1990s, Friedman has utilized an array of sophisticated processes to achieve a seemingly mass-produced appearance. His highly conceptual work engages both maximalist and minimalist aesthetics, as well as recalling those of Pop Art, and his practice is deeply engaged with the history of sculpture.
Lee Bul is recognized as one of the most radical and internationally regarded figures in contemporary Korean art. Her Perdu series of mixed media paintings blends biomorphic and cybertronic forms, vividly yet delicately rendered in acrylic paint and mother of pearl.
In a 2022 interview, Lee Bul told The New York Times: “My works are complex structures. When I make them, I consciously and unconsciously employ different emotions. The end results are fairly beautiful-looking but are not necessarily just beautiful. There are always three, four or more conflicting elements within them.”
A new painting by New York-based artist Marilyn Minter, whose work offers nuanced representations of women and the treatment of the female body in popular media, will debut at the fair. Through her subversion of conventional and mainstream imagery around beauty and glamour, works like Quarantine (2020–21) expose the double standards that influence feminine identities and challenge the historic portrayal of women in media. Looking ahead, Minter will open a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul in November.
Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and ropes), a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman creates complex compositions that mediate the tension between color, text, and imagery; landscape and decoration; and chaos and order with remarkable dexterity and often on a large scale, and the artist has an innate ability to create compositions in which each element within a painting is given equal space and significance.
The Museo Jumex in Mexico City recently presented Lo Que Se Ve, Se Pregunta, a major solo exhibition of Pittman’s work.
Kader Attia grew up in Algeria and the suburbs of Paris. Drawing from his experience of living within two disparate cultures, he has developed a dynamic practice that examines the intricacies of social, historical, and cultural differences across the globe. Attia’s installations and sculptures offer a poetic yet pointed reading of the relationships between Western and non-Western cultures. In 2022, he curated the 12th Berlin Biennale, making Attia the first artist to curate the exhibition since 2012.
Attia is currently featured in the Sharjah Biennial, on view through June 11, 2023.
Best known for his weaving and stitching of metaphorically charged materials, such as colorful ribbon, leather, wood, and copper, Nicholas Hlobo creates composite objects that are intricate and seductively tactile. The results are highly evocative, and the artist combines anthropomorphic imagery and cultural symbols and traditions to create amalgamated forms that feel at once familiar, alien, and ancient.
Hlobo’s practice engages themes of self-discovery and explores the intersections of his race, gender, and cultural and sexual identity within the context of his South African heritage.
London-based artist Chantal Joffe is known for her evocative portraits of herself and of the people she is closest to, including her immediate family, her friends, and her extended family members. By creating tension between the scale of her compositions and the proposed intimacy of their subject matter—like in Ishbel on Pink (2018), an emotive and expressionist portrait of a woman against a blush backdrop—Joffe prioritizes the human identities and relationships that undergird her compositions over any kind of painterly realism.