ART BASEL IN BASEL 2025

As Erika Balsom has written, John Smith’s ”The Girl Chewing Gum offers a playful yettrenchant exploration of the role that language – and particularly voiceover – plays in theproduction of filmic meaning and asserts the absolute impossibility of immediacy andneutrality. But despite its anti-illusionist criticality, the film remains deeply engaged withnarrative and humour, two terms not often associated with British avant-garde cinema of the1970s.”

Rana Begum’s new Louvre series explores how different materials interact with light andconsiders texture, density, reflection and transparency. There is a familiarity to thesecompositions, observed throughout our urban landscapes in ventilation panels, façades andblinds. By focusing on materiality, Begum brings this notion to the foreground, exploring howlight is filtered, dispersed, fragmented, and absorbed.

Lisa Milroy’s new series of sky paintings celebrate the colour blue and were all made in hernew studio at Lydd-on-Sea, UK. For Milroy, still life has been more of a mindset than atradition locked solely into the depiction of things. This mindset is defined by the term ‘stilllife’ itself, which holds within it the duality of contemplation (still) and performance or action(life). The paintings create fresh possibilities for her exploration of stillness and movement,and expanding the parameters of still life.

An ode to process and fleeting beauty, Dawn Ng assiduously builds blocks of frozen pigmentwith the skill of a chemist, a painter and a sculptor creating a topographical medley ofpigments, watercolours, dyes. A study into the articulation of temporality, they arephotographed from multiple angles as they decay. Ng turns to the most ephemeral materialavailable to her in her native Singapore - ice - and from there has devised an emotive languageof creation, destruction, trace and remembrance.

Francis Upritchard’s distinctive figurative sculptures are made using balata, a natural rubbermanipulated into shape while submerged in water. Made for her recent show at KunsthallCharlottenborg, ‘Any Noise Annoys an Oyster’, the works weave together subtle referencesand connections to mythology, antiquity and the natural world.

Florian Meisenberg covers semi-wet canvases with layers of pulverised marble. The marblesparkles slightly, adding an irregular iridescence to his preferred palette of secondary colourssuch as olive, ochre and dull rose. His subjects are often folkloric, allusions to a generalised,mythological past populated with archetypes and symbols. The presence of marble suggeststhe monumentality of history, pulverised.

Tapestry plays a central role in Goshka Macuga’s practice. A new series of soft sculpturesappropriate historical tapestries by incorporating them into soft sculptural forms. These worksappropriate and transform existing textiles, offering a tactile and conceptual reweaving oftraditional narratives and hierarchies.

Grace Ndiritu’s films use West African textiles in a sensual and, at times, unnerving physicalperformance. Ndiritu wraps, conceals and reveals her body, creating and controlling tensionswithin the fabric to provoke different emotional responses. These four films werecommissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London.