ART:LISTE 2019-Solo Presentations

LISTE Art Fair which is one of the world’s most significant fairs, its primary focus is on the artists and strong presentations of their work. This year 38 galleries have decided to give a deeper insight into a single artist’s practice through presentations formatted as solo shows, because the Fair gives importance to curated presentations with selected artists. Some of the artists are:

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: LISTE Art Fair Archive

Nick Bastis presents “Pedraza vs. Lomachenko (Camouflage Edit)”, in this so-called “camouflage edit”, a television broadcast of a recent, major boxing match is treated with machinations common to those used to elude automated copyright detectors, layering primary information and abstractions that play out separately but in parallel: (what is seen) ∥ (what is understood). A strange pseudo-presence emerges between the perceivable and imperceptible.

Julie Béna works on environments that draw inspiration from the world of literature, film, theater and popular culture. Béna studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie at Amsterdam. In 2012-2013, she was part of le Pavillon, the research laboratory of le Palais de Tokyo.

Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan expose strategies of power in social, economic, and political contexts. Their research-based art practice is a new form of realism which may be very effective in the post-truth era we live in. Using different kinds of artistic media, new technologies and science they implement new aesthetic in which an artwork is the visual evidence of crimes committed by institutions of power on individual.

Hayden Dunham investigates the exchange of information between the hard and soft architectures of building and body, creating complex visible and invisible systems, as well as discrete objects, often byproducts of her systems. Using silicon, rubber, metal, glass, paints, and minerals as augmentation devices, Dunham’s works embody ideas of transformation and a process of facilitation, where objects are conditioned and supported through their individual internal transformations. Like her manifestations, processes of transformation are also embedded within her parallel creative processes, where conditioning systems enable her own internal conversions and development of identities and domains.

Ron Ewert  creates paintings, installations, and assemblages that investigate non-linearity, spatial ambiguity, and dislocated semiotic associations.  It is through the play of these formal elements that the artist can ground and make visible his experience of an essentially fragmented contemporary existence.  In his work often employ varying strategies of negation, both physical and conceptual, to arrive at a more unpredictable image/object.

Andrea Fourchy continues this dedication to the downtrodden and broken in her drawings, which take as their subject matter Picasso’s famous Blue Period paintings. After treatment in her studio, the original imagery somehow gets rebooted, as if she had pushed the refresh button. In the process, Picasso’s figures, however lovingly recreated, become Fourchy’s own; and indeed they are, not surprisingly, what they would have more or less been initially–simple acts of sympathetic identification, and hence a bit suspect. The people in Picasso’s paintings are thus once more recognizable as dirt poor, or sexualized, or submissive, as objects of voyeurism rather than as some sort of “branding” meme.

Patrick Goddard creates video, publications, drawing, performance and installation. His politically loaded and narrative based works undermine themselves with a self-defeating black comedy as they chart the artist’s fumbled attempts to create a personal and political integrity.

Penny Goring is a poet, painter, performer, sculptor, collagist and digital bricoleur. While she prefers to delve into one medium at the time, they all mingle incestuously on her online accounts. Her cardinal themes, as she describes them, are ‘death, grief, recovery, addiction, anger, fear, powerlessness, aging’. 1 Much of her output deals with Goring’s turbulent relation-ships. For this artist, making means reworking through past traumas.

Emma Hart makes work that captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. Always in pursuit of real life, real feelings, Hart uses ceramics to create claustrophobic installations that engage the viewer physically and emotionally, or in the form of smaller works which come for the viewer. There are frequent verbal and visual spillages, and Hart’s use of clay is often corporeal, forming approximate body parts that act as substitutes for human action and employment.

Holly Hendry s interested in defining the architecture of spaces by exploring the possibilities, such as surface, colour and density, inherent in a wide range of materials through her installations. The shifting scales and unusual positioning of her often-monumental works encourage visitors to consider sculpture in dialogue with their surroundings, whilst also considering absence as hollow spaces or voids.

Interested in the history of arts and crafts, Klára Hosnedlová gave up her practice of painting to focus on weaving and embroidery and their relationship to domestic space and decoration. Inspired by architect and fellow Moravian Adolf Loos’s (1870-1933) reflection on the need to free architecture of excessive ornamentation, she seeks to create harmonious spaces by using high quality materials and fabrics in her wall paintings and embroidered furniture, clothing, and portraits. Her portraits, which she views as paintings, and for which she herself makes the ceramic frames, are created from details of photographs taken inside the installations using live models.

Nona Inescu’s art practice is interdisciplinary and encompasses photographs, objects, installations and sometimes video works. Informed by theoretical and literary research, her works are centered on the relationship between the human body and the environment and the redefinition of the subject in a post-humanist key. Lately, she has been exploring the human interaction with natural and prehistoric elements.

Agata Ingarden combines, superimposes, connects and interweaves various types of materials in abstract sculptures that simultaneously evoke concrete forms. The vocabulary associated with her works refers to living organisms, plants, as well as technology. In various sizes, her sculptures hang either on the walls like sensor screens, from the ceiling like metal lianas, at the ends of which caramelised onions trickle down, or lie on the floor as strange vehicles, a combination of sledge and spaceship.

Sebastian Jefford owoks in painting, sculpture, photography and digital platforms and has exhibited work in both Britain, Germany and USA. Amongst other things his work deals with visual perceptions of groups of objects, that in many cases are staged by him

Vikenti Komitski’s artistic work around everyday objects whose context and meaning are analyzed, scrutinized and transferred into a different reality. Komitski changes the nature of objets trouvés as well as of specifically chosen commodity goods that refer to the reality from which they were taken and in which they were originally used. However, Komitski’s use of ready-made principles is not only applied to objects but also to ideas.

Maggie Lee’s multimedia creations (Jenny doll dioramas, confessional zines, and her Video Salad series) suggest an artist who is not only willing, but eager to mine her own biography for material. In “Mommy”, a feature-length film that screened in 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist unpacked her late mother’s colorful life using a range of sources including home videos, found internet footage, and snippets from her own childhood diary. “I feel like I’m a collector and an archivist in a way,” she says. “Collage allows me to organize and layer all my ideas”.

Keto Logua’s sculptures and video works show natural phenomena and nature cultivated by man. The artist conceptually employs found or self-created objects and subjects them to processes of compression and transformation. She has created, amongst other things, a 3D print of the primordial flower, which was scientifically reconstructed last year, and a large-format sculpture from beehive elements.

Joao Loureiro went from painting to conceptual art working on different materials. Envelope, packaging, flags, clothes, … it diverts everyday objects in improbable situations. With a radical gesture, he transforms the object into a work of art. This gives amazing assemblages of objects, heart of our consumer society. Joao transforms our material experiences and changes our perception to allow ideas, sensations, emotions, multisensory images to unfold and create meaning differently. He dismantles forms in favor of new compositions to reach a deep understanding.

Isaac Lythgoe  focuses on the fictional context wherein the work takes shape. The presence of the characters, a time frame, and a location are required for his installations composed of sculptures, neon, fabric, furniture, and other objects to find their meaning. Alongside the narrative imagined by the artist, dreams and the subconscious create temporal and fictional distortions. In this narrative flux, characters borrowed from mythology and pop culture flirt with power, to find themselves trapped as historical landmarks, curled up in a fancy hotel or sitting on top of a CBD skyscraper in a search for eternal youth.

Regina de Miguel  examines the relationship between the space (architecture, domestic interior, place of memory) and personal, cultural or political identity of who inhabits it from different perspectives. Her evolution from cartographies drawn or painted on canvases until her recent multimedia projects dystopian, respond to the same intention to confront the individual with what surrounds her, either the natural environment or what is culturally constructed.

Hana Miletić  is an artist who acts as a critical, interdisciplinary agent in processes and confluences orientated towards the production of hybrid objects and knowledge. Some of her projects deal with strategies for the formation of desire and its visualisation as a psychosocial landscape. In the same vein, she also analyses the speculative, fictional boundary contained within scientific and cultural objects.

Dylan Mira is an artist moving between video and text, recording how language makes bodies within the limits of representation and the thickness of time. Her recent projects have been presented at Performa, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Human Resources. She holds an MFA in New Genres from University of California Los Angeles and a BFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the realm of the two-dimensional art Yoan Mudry’s references taken from comics and cartoons perfectly fit with a new trend that includes, for example, artists as Ella Kruglyanskaya and Oliver Osborne. Nowadays the images of artworks are circulating mostly thanks to the world wide web and this “synthetic” use of the line is definitely a powerful source, possibly an alternative one to the not-iconic art mass production of the last years. Moreover, he is experimenting the multi layers images, in a way that may recall, for instance, the Jeff Koons’ paintings of the last decade.

In his works Aditya Novali began developing games’ ideas and he finally arrived at a concept of “rotatable paintings”. The paintings are made out of pieces of wood, constructed into triangular tubes with three surfaces. These triangular tubes are placed parallel to one another (either horizontally or vertically). Each tube can be turned independently. By turning each triangular tube, the audience can choose the images and combination of images painted on the sides. To cater to the public’s choices, Aditya Novali must take into account every compositional combination, that they must all yield pleasing and meaningful results.

In his recent sculpture and photographic works, Kayode Ojo ruminates on the contemporaneous nature of consumer desire and social performativity. Small-scale polished items, such as surgical instruments and stainless-steel shaving apparatuses, have been fastidiously organized atop several customized shop display cases, such that their mirror-clad surfaces seem to merge with the chrome-plated objects.

Gabriel Pericàs  is interested in developing an ironic view of modernity and its many forms through manipulating design processes. Referencing the work of Duchamp, Richter and Baldessari, Pericàs writes texts that are staged into performances, in which certain of his already existing art pieces are actors. The artist is interested in situating the viewer in a space that is built between narration and formalism employing a variety of digressions and slips to question methods of communication.

Josefine Reisch’s works seduce the viewer with haunted textures of the already seen. Working through traditional mediums such as tromp l’oeil painting, portraiture and textile, she creates moments of recognition. Reisch questions the value and validity of European cultural heritage as she reassembles historical moments and figures into jumbled compositions, much like a musical medley. Engaging in a feminist reading of historiography her work triggers new readings and uncertainty within this déjà-vu.

Dealing with an exhaustive use of language as a productive force, Liv Schulman’s work addresses the different ecologies of meaning that appear when this resource gets aggravated, through the instrumental use of a body. The constant use of writing unravels, revolving around an invisible gravitational center. The commonplace of a cynical figure, a detective, a blocked writer, a balloons factory worker becomes embodied by interchangeable actors. This figure informs a discourse-production tool, invocating a mass of stories that merge with each other and document a tragic idea of a paranoid concussion. A mass of connections dresses the portrait of a disillusioned world based on the alienation of bodies, the devaluation of identities, and the complexities of desire for meaning.

Heji Shin‘s photography raises, from a variety of perspectives and with great audacity, the question of intimacy. At the center of intimacy sits always trust, something that is today called into question on all sorts of levels (think of fake news, misuse of data, skepticism towards experts, etc.). Yet intimacy is the fulcrum between our body and the public sphere, capable, at turns, to protect or expose us. Currently undergoing a reevaluation in the context of social media, it is a momentous subject of crucial importance. It has become a global battleground and a site of profound upheavals and confusion

Aviva Silverman is an artist working in sculpture, performance, photography, and theater. She is broadly concerned with the technologies and artifacts of moral and political surveillance, the aural and spatial materiality of borders, and the embodiments and custodians of narrative and belief. Silverman’s sculptures often take the form of intricate dioramas and tableaux, some suggesting votive shrines common to historically Catholic regions.

Teppei Soutome  has acclaimed for his thesis exhibition at Tokyo Zokei University in 2004, where he showed his kinetic sculpture “Chicken Race”. Since then, he has been actively making work and showing in Tokyo. His recent works include photographs as well sculptural works made of candies. He has also started working in painting, creating a uniquely colored, fantastical world.

Yukihiro Taguchi has garnered much attention in recent years for his unique performative installations, which combine elements of drawing, performance, animation and installation. His’s humorous and quick-paced artworks are made using the oldest form of animation, stop motion, and while they appear to be the result of chance, they have in fact been carefully planned and are closely controlled. just as the word “animation” has its origins in the latin word “anima,” meaning spirit or soul.

Xiaoyi Chen’s  practice is tied to a natural, oriental aesthetic, influenced by Western abstract art and oriental philosophy. Photography is a personal tool for Chen, used to question broad concepts that migrate from the personal to the philosophical realm. Her recent work focuses on the combination of photography and printmaking, a combination of techniques used to explore beneath the surface of things by simplifying and abstracting; an approach aimed at reviving spiritual awareness and intuition before entering the symbolic nature of what we view.

Trevor Yeung  graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. Yeung’s practice uses botanic ecology, horticulture, photography and installations as metaphors that reference the emancipation of everyday aspirations towards human relationships. Yeung draws inspiration from intimate and personal experiences, culminating in works that range from image-based works to large-scale installations. Obsessed with structures and systems, he creates different scales of systems which allow him to exert control upon living beings, including plants, animals, as well as spectators.

Miao Ying’s work highlights the attempts to discuss mainstream technology and contemporary consciousness and it’s impact on our daily lives, along with the new modes of politics, aesthetics and consciousness created during the representation of reality through technology. She deliberately applies a thread of humor to her works and address her Stockholm Syndrome relationship with censorship and self-censorship in the Chinese Internet (The Great Fire Wall).

Info: Director: Joanna Kamm, LISTE Art Fair, Burgweg 15, Basel, Preview: (by invitation only) Mon (10/6/19) 11:00-18:00, Public Opening: Mon (10/6/19) 18:00-21:00, Tue-Sat (11-15/6/19) 13:00-21:00, Sun (16/6/19) 13:00-18:00, Admission: Single entry CHF 20, Reduced entry CHF 10 (Students / seniors / AHV), Free admission for kids up to 16 years (if accompanied by an adult), After 20:00 Single entry CHF 6, Free admission (Students / AHV), www.liste.ch