Art Basel in Basel 2023: 7 Directors Introduce Their Booths

Founders and directors at Eva Presenhuber, Experimenter, Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, Greene Naftali, Jhaveri Contemporary, mor charpentier, and Thomas Schulte offer an early look at the works they're bringing to this year's fair (15–18 June).

Eva Presenhuber, Founder of Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

For each Art Basel fair, our range of artists and media is as broad as possible. The underlying aim is to make the full diversity of our gallery's programme accessible to Art Basel's international audience.

Two of our highlights this year are the works of Ugo Rondinone and Tschabalala Self.

Both artists currently have important exhibitions in Switzerland: Rondinone at the Museum of Art and History (MAH) in Geneva and Self at the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, as well as in one of our spaces in Zurich. We feel that the works selected for our booth reflect the quality of these exhibitions.

Additional highlights are the large-scale works by Jean-Marie Appriou and Steven Shearer in the Unlimited sector, and Wyatt Kahn in the Parcours sector.

Prateek Raja and Priyanka Raja, Co-founders of Experimenter, Kolkata

Our group exhibition, Off Plane View, brings together works by Adip Dutta, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Ayesha Sultana, Bhasha Chakrabarti, Praneet Soi, Radhika Khimji, Rathin Barman, and Sohrab Hura.

It juxtaposes perspectives and points of view rooted in expanding ways of seeing and experiencing our built and natural environments through elements of landscape, form, architecture, exploration of the body and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships.

We present two new monumental paintings by Praneet Soi, which are assemblages of various personal and historical conflicted landscapes that he has been closely working in for over a decade. The traditional Islamic pattern found in architecture in Soi's field of vision from Kashmir form an active patterned silver background, and is foregrounded with old trees made in silverpoint from his city Amsterdam and other sites that stand as mute witnesses in time.

Also included in the presentation are five new prints from Alexandra Bachzetsis's performance Perfect, which references commercial media and visual art to posit questions about self-presentation while addressing body image, representation, and the male gaze. Bachzetsis is the subject of a survey solo exhibition, Notebook, at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and will stage a series of performances at Kaserne Basel during the week.

Maria Ana Pimenta, International Director at Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo

Our presentation proposes an investigation into matter, traces, and lines through a selection that emphasises our commitment to intergenerational dialogues.

From Antonio Tarsis' collage surfaces to Léon Ferrari's gestural abstractions or Adriana Varejão's and Erika Verzutti's ruptured and eroded planes, the selection expands possibilities on how artists have continually subverted, challenged, and transformed these structural elements of their artworks.

Among the highlights is Jac Leirner's Art Basel work, which affectionately translates Art Basel mementos and souvenirs into a conceptually rigorous piece.

Another is Marina Rheingantz's Madrugada. It demonstrates the sheer materiality of oil paint, with short and expansive brushstrokes that lend a wonderful rhythmic fluency to the composition.

Cory Nomura, Senior Director at Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Jacqueline Humphries' latest painting extends her recent use of laser-cut stencils, featuring marks made from digitally-enlarged splatters sourced from her own previous work and from forensic images of crime scene gore.

With 😪😣😥 JH753, the artist continues her decades-long project of bringing painterly abstraction into the real world, and positioning her chosen medium as a vital, immediate activity in an increasingly mediated culture.

Lubaina Himid's Fish Seller: Safety or Danger is the latest in an ongoing series that will feature street merchants and their wares, which will be presented in her first dedicated New York gallery exhibition at Greene Naftali in May 2024.

Himid's work often depicts working people who are not typically singled out as the subjects of paintings and sculptures. 'I'm trying, often, to paint moments of doing one thing,' she has said of these figures, 'but thinking and feeling another thing that no one else can see.'

Amrita Jhaveri, Co-founder of Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

We are inspired to show Hardeep Pandhal's groundbreaking new works on the art world's largest stage.

His layered research based paintings, drawings, videos and textiles make for an immersive introduction to his exploration of identity and the roots of the Gothic imagination.

This is the first time that Hardeep has worked in painting.

I would like to highlight his spellbinding Spell Concentration paintings and jumper, which combine acrylic, spray, paper collage, and embroidery, a combination of the many ways he approaches his practice.

Teresa Margolles, Viento negro (Ladrillos de sangre) (2018–2019). Courtesy the artist and mor charpentier.

Alex Mor and Philippe Charpentier, Founders of mor charpentier, Paris

We are presenting works linked to history, identity, memory, or ecological concerns mirroring the turbulent times we are living in. Among our selection we could highlight the works of Teresa Margolles and Kader Attia.

More than 6.1 million refugees and migrants have left Venezuela as a result of the political turmoil, socio-economic instability, and ongoing humanitarian crisis. Teresa Margolles is one of the first artists working in the field since the beginning of the crisis. We are presenting a massive installation of 1,500 handmade clay tiles. In this memorial, each tile symbolises an anonymous migrant who has been murdered or who has disappeared. The work fights against oblivion and the normalisation of violent deaths.

Through his practice, which follows in a great tradition of ancestral forms of repair, Kader Attia continues to give form to a notion of reparation as part of a permanent dialogue with past wounds.

For Art Basel we are unveiling his latest sculpture, a work that brings attention to the objects of his own history and memory, creating a sort of personal catharsis.

Nick Schulte, Creative Director at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin

Our selection of works for the fair define a kind of handwriting of the gallery, including the Plaster Surrogates by Allan McCollum, kinetic sculptures by Rebecca Horn, Solarization diptychs by Katharina Sieverding, and drawings by Fred Sandback.

We will also show new sculptures by Alice Aycock and Richard Deacon, as well as recent painterly works by Jonathan Lasker, Angela de la Cruz, and Juan Uslé. Uslé also features in the Unlimited sector, while conceptual artist Julian Irlinger features in Parcours.

A highlight for us this year is the inclusion of a large-scale work by Marina Adams entitled 4 Corners of the Wind IV (2022). Marina opened her first solo show with the gallery at the last Gallery Weekend Berlin.

A second highlight is the work Cloud Painting (170 CMY) by German painter Jonas Weichsel.

While Adams' painterly practice explores the possibilities of form and movement, displaying the structural power of colour, Weichsel's approach to painting is a highly technical and meticulous one, considering painting's position in the digital age. —[O]