Art Basel Hong Kong 2022:
Advisory Selections

Alex Prager at Lehmann Maupin

It was a visit to an exhibition of work by William Eggleston at The Getty that launched the beginning of Alex Prager's career as an artist.

Having received no formal art education, Prager was inspired by Eggleston's saturated frames of American vernacular to cultivate her own uncanny scenes with hyperreal details.

Spanning references from Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and street photography, Prager's recent exhibition of photographs in London brought together dramatic scenes of individuals in freefall, reflecting the 'emotional upheaval that we have all been through'.

Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner

With references spanning oil master paintings to 1970s soft porn, New York-based Lisa Yuskavage has become synonymous for her paintings of semi-clad women in acid-bright landscapes.

At once beguiling, yet equally disturbing and otherworldly, her Surrealist scenes have featured at exhibitions and auctions alike.

Yuskavage's market has been on the rise. This month, her 2009 oil painting Studio sold for USD 1,380,000 at Phillips 21st Century New York sale.

Guan Xiao at Antenna Space

Beijing-based Guan Xiao started her career as an artist at the Communication University of China in 2006. She has since established a practice encompassing sculpture, video, and installation.

For her solo presentation with Antenna Space at Art Basel Hong Kong, Xiao presents a selection of sculptures that almost resemble strange organisms, and are both playful and futuristic.

With a practice rooted in transnational culture and our technology-fuelled present, Xiao's autobiographical subject matter and futuristic totems place her at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art.

Xiao has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2019); k11 Art Foundation, Shanghai (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2016), among others.

Ewa Juszkiewicz at Gagosian

Ewa Juszkiewicz has seen her career skyrocket in the past few years. Since Gagosian announced their representation of the Polish-born artist in 2020, Juszkiewicz has had a solo exhibition at their New York space, alongside two sell-out shows at Almine Rech in London in 2020 and Paris in 2021.

Exploring female representation in art history, Juszkiewicz is heralded for her sophisticated treatment of oil paint, while powerfully deconstructing classical portraiture.

Juszkiewicz's work was brought under the hammer in Asia for the first time last November. Appropriation, depicting a marble bust of a woman wearing a crown of green foliage, sold for just under HKD $2M at Phillips—over triple its high estimate.

Jenna Gribbon at MASSIMODECARLO

Brooklyn-based Jenna Gribbon's close-up frames of figures at unusual angles have a sense of physicality to them, where overlapping limbs and the curves of bodies create undulating landscapes.

The inclusion of Me photographing at M looking at you (2022) in MASSIMODECARLO's presentation follows the gallery's solo show of Gribbon's paintings earlier this year.

'A common misunderstanding is that my work is about intimacy, which it's not. It's just as much about a sort of constructed intimacy or consuming what we think of as other people's intimate moments, which maybe aren't intimate at all', Gribbon explained to Ocula Advisory.

Pierre Huyghe at Hauser & Wirth

Pierre Huyghe is renowned for creating landscapes that reflect the complexity of life, embracing the decay of environments such as a disused ice rink at Skulptur Projekte 2017, or his takeover of a composting facility in a park for documenta 13.

The artist's 'Mind's Eye' series, which were recently presented at Luma Arles, are consolidations of Huyghe's complex landscapes, transforming mental images extracted using a deep neural network in a laboratory into objects.

On 12 June, a site-specific work by the Nasher Prize-winning artist will be unveiled at Kistefos, a sculpture park in Jevnaker, Norway.

Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth

Louise Bourgeois' chimerical 'Topiary' sculptures combine human forms with other elements.

Her incorporation of plant forms, as in the case of this work, points to themes of growth and regeneration and the ability to heal from emotional damage. In sculptures such as these, the body is a landscape that can morph and change through time.

A prolific artist who worked across all kinds of media to capture different emotional and psychological dimensions, Louise Bourgeois' work is held in major private and public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate in London.

A critically lauded exhibition of the artist's textile works recently closed at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Lenz Geerk at MASSIMODECARLO

Painted this year, The Framer continues Lenz Geerk's psychologically charged series of paintings, which seek to draw out hidden emotions.

In this pared down image, we are presented with the side profile of The Framer, who stands beside a wall bedecked with frames.

Light appears to be pouring in from the right-hand side of painting, forming a shadow behind the figure, while foregrounding Geerk's characteristically muted colour palette. Next month, the Basel-born, Düsseldorf-based artist will have a solo show at the Los Angeles-based gallery Roberts Projects.