1. Rise and Shine
On Wednesday afternoon, the satisfying smell of yeast was emanating from Galerija Manuš’s booth at the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland. The source? Oh! It was piles of bread dough that the Kosovar artist Kemil Bekteši had deposited on metal panels on the wall and the ground two days earlier. Since then, some of the lumpy, bubbly stuff had fallen onto the floor of the Messe Basel convention center.
“The dough is rising,” Emina Mrduljaš, the co-owner of the Split, Croatia–based gallery, said. “It’s spreading slowly.”
The metaphors write themselves at Liste, the Art Basel satellite for ambitious dealers of untested and unestablished art. This year, 105 galleries are on hand, hoping that the reputations of their artists will rise and spread. Only a lucky few will end up fully baked.
Bekteši—who is based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and who turns 30 next year—suddenly appeared in the booth. “The dough is kind of a symbol of migration, for you when you stick together,” he said. If you buy one of the works, you get the dough recipe. When you install it, you can add more dough.
The artist’s father is a baker, which inspired the project. What does dad think? “He’s loving it,” Bekteši said. “It’s changed our relationship, because he understands more what I do. I’m working with his primary material.”
An installation view of YveYang’s booth at Liste, with paintings by William Feaver on view. Courtesy YveYang
2. Coming of Age
Until 2013, William Feaver would have been prohibited from exhibiting at the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland, which used to forbid exhibitors from showing artists over 40. Even a couple years ago, dealers had to pay extra to show those 40 or older.
Thank goodness those rules are gone. Feaver is 83, and he has a display of sharp, modestly scaled paintings at YveYang Gallery, of New York. They present verdant landscapes in England in thick, brushy oil, edging toward abstraction.
To Brits, Feaver’s name may be familiar. He was the chief art critic for the Observer from 1975 to 1998, and he has written books on giants like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. But he’s only rarely displayed his rough-hewn paintings. After coming across them online, Yang tracked him down and did “a five-hour marathon studio visit” at his home in London, she said.
Tough and strange little paintings, they are spaciously installed, an antidote to some of the more visually cacophonous presentations at Liste. “Initially we did a crazy design for the show, and then after we got here, we thought maybe we should do a very classic one,” Yang said, “because a classic booth can probably stand out.”
CrossLypka’s display with Chris Sharp at Liste. Courtesy Chris Sharp.
3. Everything Everywhere All at Once
Late on Tuesday night in Basel, Switzerland, the actor and sometimes-artist James Franco was at the Basel Social Club; 12 hours later, he was leaving the Liste art fair, backpack slung over his shoulder. If you are a celebrity it is good to be visible as many places as possible. That’s true for art sellers, too.
The Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp is in two locations this week. He is taking part in Art Basel‘s outdoor Parcours program (which is quite good), showing an unforgettable masked sculpture by Ishi Glinsky in a storefront window with the New York gallery P.P.O.W. Meanwhile, he’s in his booth at Liste, where four wall-hung ceramic abstractions are on view by the duo CrossLypka—Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka, who work in Oakland, California.
CrossLypka’s creations may bring to mind ancient relics of unknown origin or fragments of enormous animal skeletons. One very much resembles a spine. They look weathered, and they are potent, with washes of color and bits of sand left over from the production process. “Somebody came in yesterday,” Sharp said, “and they asked, Are those whale bones?” They are not, but they radiate a power and a majesty all their own.
An installation by Ruofan Chen with embedded paintings at Shower’s booth at Liste. Photo by Andrew Russeth.
4. Out of Many, One
A single work—a sloping plywood installation by the Chinese artist Ruofan Chen—fills Shower gallery’s booth at Liste, which runs through Sunday. It’s a dramatic, confident display. At the risk of confusing things: It’s also more than one work. Chen embedded seven paintings into it that depict plywood on organza.
“Our hope is people will have a space that can house this whole thing,” Katie Lee Arsac, who works at the adventurous Seoul gallery, said, “but at the same time we know that that might not be possible, so each work is also available for sale.” Lee Arsac slipped on white gloves and popped out one of the panels, which are quite elegant.
One of Chen’s interests is the unseen labor that goes into art production, and the potential side effects that art workers encounter through exposure to various hazardous materials. Her plywood panel is hung with wires, but it’s also balanced with a small, thin column of sawdust and studio debris. The project is called Counterweight, and she developed it with Shampoo, the production studio behind Shower.
Chen is “showing this delicacy and fragility within the structure,” Lee Arsac said, adding that the paintings “are almost like skins, because they’re permeable.”
The booth of Beau Travail, of Stockholm, at Liste. Photo by Andrew Russeth
5. Good Work
The vast majority of the 98 booths at Liste are solo presentations. For the weary, distracted fairgoer, that is a blessing. It offers the chance to learn about an artist’s work in some depth, to focus. However, it can also be nice to see a boatload of art by different people, so as to understand a gallery’s approach. That’s what the scrappy Stockholm space Beau Travail did this year, installing material by around a dozen artists.
The artist Marie Karlberg, formerly of New York, opened Beau Travail about two-and-a-half years ago, after moving to the Swedish capital. “I was really missing a space where artists would come together,” she said. “And it’s part of my practice. I’m not like an artist that like locks myself in a studio.” It’s named after the 1999 Claire Denis film. “I think it’s perfect for a gallery to have beautiful work as your name,” Karlberg said.
Many of the artists in her booth are also collaboration-minded, like Bernadette Van Huy (of Bernadette Corporation), who’s included a photo of a model wearing an outfit she did with Supreme, and Max Pitegof and Calla Henkel, who run the New Theater Hollywood. Pitegof and Henkel sent over some of the striking black-and-white photos they shoot of all the actors who perform at their place.
The artist Bruno Zhu, who was helping Karlberg man the booth, has on view a series of curiously shaped drawings. Karlberg explained: “It’s called Swiss Average, and it’s just pattern he made based on the size of a Swiss average penis. So, if you stitch it all together, it basically becomes a Swiss average penis.”
Karlberg, for her part, is showing paintings at Basel Social Club of business cards for various notable art dealers and galleries, like Reena Spaulings Fine Art, where she used to work in New York. She has business cards for Beau Travail—tiny ones—but she seems to be taking a low-key approach to the business. “I’m happy when people buy work, but that’s not why I’m doing it, and I think it’s kind of obvious,” she said. “I haven’t had a single figurative painting in the gallery since I started.”