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Art Basel

Past
Jun 15 – Jun 18, 2023
Basel
 
Art Fair Details:

Art Basel
Booth A8
Jun 13 – 18, 2023

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Above: Jeff Koons, Fox with Bird, 2016-23 © Jeff Koons

Pace Gallery is pleased to detail its presentation for the 2023 edition of Art Basel.

Taking place from 13 to 18 June, Pace’s booth will showcase major works by key 20th century figures including Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, Agnes Martin, and Joan Mitchell alongside some of the most exciting artists working today, such as Latifa Echakhch, Elmgreen & Dragset, Lee Ufan, Paulina Olowska, Arlene Shechet, and Marina Perez Simão.

A central component of Pace’s booth at the fair will be the European debut of Jeff Koons’s provocative Porcelain series. This body of work has been in production for seven years, and Art Basel 2023 marks its first presentation to an international audience. The series comprises large-scale mirrored sculptures based on porcelain figures and the artist’s oeuvre of readymades. Following the first appearance of Fox with Bird (2016-23), the full scope of Koons’s newest series will be unveiled in a major 2024 exhibition at Pace in New York.

Pace will present three large-scale projects as part of Unlimited, with installations by Robert Irwin, Adam Pendleton, and Mika Tajima. Works by these artists will also be featured on the gallery’s booth throughout the fair.

Work by some of the most revered Abstract Expressionist artists will be exhibited, including an expansive three-panel painting by Joan Mitchell; and a 1969 painting by Helen Frankenthaler. Additional highlights include a painting by ground-breaking German artist Josef Albers; a 1965 painting by Sam Gilliam; and a sculptural bust by Jean Dubuffet from his iconic L’Hourloupe series.

Pace’s 2023 Art Basel booth has been specially designed to contain a room for the intimate viewing of works of art. A selection of unique, rarely seen tabletop stabiles, miniature standing mobiles, painting, and work on paper by Alexander Calder will be on view. Previously owned by the artist’s family, these works underscore the breadth of the innovative artist’s pioneering practice.

Alongside works by twentieth century artists, Pace will showcase the gallery’s robust contemporary program. Lee Ufan will present a painting on the booth in parallel to the exhibition, Lee Ufan and Claude Viallat: Encounter held at Pace’s London gallery, curated by the preeminent French curator Alfred Pacquement. Further contemporary highlights include new paintings by Yto Barrada, Loie Hollowell, Lee Kun-Yong, Li Songsong, Paulina Olowska, and Marina Perez Simão, and new sculptural works by Acaye Kerunen, Trevor Paglen, and Arlene Shechet.

In anticipation of their forthcoming solo exhibition Bonne Chance at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a new large-scale sculpture measuring nearly three meters in height by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will figure prominently on the booth. Leading Japanese artist, Yoshitomo Nara will present a suite of works on paper in his idiosyncratic style, while his major solo exhibition All My Little Words is on view at the Albertina Modern in Vienna, Austria.

In Basel, Moroccan-Swiss artist Latifa Echakhch has been selected to present a site-specific, participatory installation on the Messeplatz. The prestigious commission will serve as a space for a series of performances organized by Echakhch, which will include a musical act by Robert Longo. Both Echakhch and Longo will be represented by new works on Pace’s booth.

On Friday 16 June, the Gallery Climate Coalition and Avant Arte will release a limited-edition textile by Marina Perez Simão at the fair and online. All funds raised by the embroidered tapestry will benefit the Gallery Climate Coalition and Client Earth.

 

Featured Works

Jeff Koons

b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania

Jeff Koons, Fox with Bird, 2016-2023, mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, 63.5 cm × 162.7 cm × 69.3 cm (25" × 64-1/16" × 27-5/16")

Jeff Koons’s vast oeuvre is characterized by transfigurations: his sculptures overwhelmingly appear to be one thing—an inflatable toy or a mound of colorful Play-Doh—and turn out to be made up of something entirely other. Based on a four-and-a-half-inch porcelain figurine, Fox with Bird (2016–23) epitomizes the artist’s career-spanning interest in material; enlarged and rendered in mirror-polished stainless steel with transparent color coating, the present work subverts material expectations. Fox with Bird belongs to Koons’s ongoing Porcelain series, which transforms porcelain figurines into technologically advanced works of art. The fox motif evokes associations across the art historical and literary canons, including 19th century French painter Gustave Courbet’s quartet of paintings narrating a fox hunt; Koons previously re-created one of the four, Dead Fox in the Snow (1860), in his seminal Gazing Ball series. In the present work, Koons incorporates the sheen of his earlier reflective stainless-steel sculptures and through refined transparent color-lacquering techniques reinvents polychromed sculpture. Koons believes that the Porcelain series encompasses the main interests of his works from over the last five decades. In addition to his dialogue with Courbet, Koons’s continuous engagement with the fox motif in Fox with Bird evokes ceramics of the 17th and 18th centuries, Flemish Rococo painter Peter Paul Rubens’ hunting scenes, and his ongoing interest in the readymade. In the lineage of his earlier Banality series (1988–89), Koons’s Porcelain works bridge distinctions between high and low art and accomplish stunning material illusions.

Lee Ufan, From Line (81021), 1981, glue and stone pigment on canvas, 89-3/8" x 71-1/2" (227 cm x 181.7 cm)

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Lee Ufan’s From Line (1981) belongs to his seminal series of the same name, begun in the early 1970s and extending from his training in traditional brushwork, a discipline that focuses on the rendering of points and lines. Early works from the From Line series are characterized by cascading vertical lines of paint, wherein Lee loaded his brush with pigment and repeatedly pulled it downward from the upper edge of the canvas to its lower edge. Lee abandoned this methodical style in 1978 in favor of an unrestricted, dynamic brush stroke that appears in the later works from this series, including the present work, which continued through 1984. Groupings of marks leave areas of empty ground, and these blank spaces disrupt the regularity of lines found in earlier works of the series. Limiting his palette to a single hue, typically burnt orange to evoke earth or cobalt blue to evoke sky, as in the present work, the artist combined ground mineral pigment with animal-skin glue, resulting in a powdery crystalline mixture commonly used in traditional Japanese painting known as nihonga. By mixing his own pigment and using brushes with artificial hair conventionally used for ink painting, Lee found that he could augment the level of friction between the brush and paint particles, slowing the process of application and absorption. Through this method, Lee’s compositions enact a liminal space, as the artist describes, “Something endlessly appearing as it endlessly disappears. Something receding endlessly as it endlessly approaches."

Alexander Calder, Gingerbread Man, 1971, Sheet metal and paint, 19-7/8" × 14" × 22" (50.5 cm × 35.6 cm × 55.9 cm)

Alexander Calder

b. 1898, Lawnton, Pennsylvania
d. 1976, New York, New York

Joan Mitchell

b. 1925, Chicago, Illinois
d. 1992, Vétheuil, France

Joan Mitchell, Girolata Triptych, 1963, Oil on canvas, 195.3 cm × 324.2 cm (76-7/8" × 10' 7-5/8")
Helen Frankenthaler, Lozenge, 1969, Acrylic on canvas, 261.6 cm × 237.5 cm (8' 7" × 93-1/2")

Helen Frankenthaler

b. 1928, New York, New York
d. 2011, Darien, Connecticut

Elmgreen & Dragset, The Guardian, 2023, bronze, steel, lacquer, 114-3/16" × 41-5/16" × 33-1/2" (290 cm × 104.9 cm × 85.1 cm)

Elmgreen & Dragset

Michael Elmgreen | b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark
Ingar Dragset | b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway

Paulina Olowska, Futura Travel, 2023, Oil on canvas, 220 cm × 160 cm (86-5/8" × 63")

Paulina Olowska

b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland

Arlene Shechet, Uncle, 2022, Glazed ceramic, painted and dyed hardwood, and steel, 28" × 18" × 24" (71.1 cm × 45.7 cm × 61 cm)

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York, New York

Uncle (2022), a new work by the multidisciplinary sculptor Arlene Shechet, exemplifies the artist’s intense interest in madcap abstractions and unexpected material combinations. The small-scale sculpture incorporates glazed ceramic, painted and dyed hardwood, and steel, creating distinct and idiosyncratic components, lively textural interactions and contrasts, and organic forms. Uncle is an amalgam of textures, featuring sleek and smooth steel, rough hardwood, and course ceramic. Vivid hues of orange, pink, yellow, blue, and green populate these textures in surprising combinations. The present sculpture aligns with Shechet’s ongoing explorations of materiality within her practice. Like much of the artist’s work, Uncle reveals itself to viewers as they navigate it from all sides, taking in its varied niches, crevices, and angles. Seen from different perspectives, the work shapeshifts and transforms before viewers’ eyes.

Jean Dubuffet, Buste aux envols, 1972, epoxy painted with polyurethane, 43-1/2 x 27 x 27-1/2" (110.5 x 68.6 x 69.9 cms)

Jean Dubuffet

b. 1901, Le Havre, France
d. 1985, Paris

Latifa Echakhch, The All, 2023, Acrylic and concrete on canvas, 200.2 cm × 150.2 cm × 2.6 cm (78-13/16" × 59-1/8" × 1")

Latifa Echakhch

b. 1974, El Khnansa, Morocco
Lives and Works in Martigny and Vevey, Switzerland

Based in Switzerland, Moroccan-born artist Latifa Echakhch’s multifaceted practice of painting, installation, sculpture, and sound is informed by how everyday objects and imagery can be transfigured into signifiers of identity, history, and mythology. Describing her work as “a question of power and postures,” Echakhch states she has “no other goals but questioning the world around me.” The present work is from a new series titled The All, where Echakhch depicts the sky—a recurring theme throughout her practice—focusing on imagery from the universe itself and unknown galaxies to ancient stars. Here an aurora of pigment emerges amid a metallic grey background made of concrete—a visual contrast transforming the composition into a dynamic abstraction. Works from this series are drawn from images transmitted by NASA’s recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (currently orbiting the sun over one million miles away from Earth at the second Lagrange point), the largest optical telescope in space. The first image from this telescope was released in July 2022.

Sam Gilliam, Coronet, 1965, acrylic on canvas, 70-11/16" × 48-15/16" × 1-1/2" (179.5 cm × 124.3 cm × 3.8 cm) framed, 72-1/4" x 50-3/16" x 2-1/4" (183.5 cm x 127.5 cm x 5.7 cm)

Sam Gilliam

b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi
d. 2022, Washington, D.C.

Loie Hollowell, Overview Effect, 2023, oil paint, acrylic medium, and high-density foam on linen over panel, 72" × 54" × 3" (182.9 cm × 137.2 cm × 7.6 cm)

Loie Hollowell

b. 1983, Woodland, California
Lives in New York, NY

Acaye Kerunen, Nyakawanga (The Focus of my Gaze), 2023, hand dyed and woven palm leaves, hand yarned barkcloth, raffia, 230 cm × 136 cm (90-9/16" × 53-9/16") Artwork can be installed either horizontally or vertically

Acaye Kerunen

b. Kampala, Uganda

Robert Longo

b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York

Robert Longo, Untitled (Robert E. Lee Monument Graffiti for George Floyd; Richmond, Virginia, 2020), 2022, charcoal on mounted paper, 70" × 87-1/2" × 5/8" (177.8 cm × 222.3 cm × 1.6 cm), artwork 76" × 93-5/8" × 3-5/8" (193 cm × 237.8 cm × 9.2 cm), frame

Untitled (Robert E. Lee Monument Graffiti for George Floyd; Richmond, Virginia, 2020), (2022) belongs to the final installment of Robert Longo’s Destroyer Cycle. The present work comes from a series of works on paper examining notions of American power, violence, and mythmaking pulled from the “image storm” of society’s “culture of impatience.” Centered on themes of protest, freedom, and entropy, this masterful charcoal drawing reflects on the turbulence of social and political upheaval, while simultaneously proposing an earnest hopefulness for the future. Drawing inspiration from media photography and footage from 2020, Longo renders a poignant still of a country in crisis. The present work is an eerie and profound piece depicting an image of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia preceding its removal after months of protests. The monument was erected in 1890 and was one of the largest remaining Confederate statues in the United States.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1962, Oil, ink, and nails on canvas mounted on wood, 9-3/4" × 9-3/4" × 1" (24.8 cm × 24.8 cm × 2.5 cm)

Agnes Martin

b. 1912, Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada
d. 2004, Taos, New Mexico

Louise Nevelson, Moon Zag X, 1979, wood painted black, 50" × 49" × 12-1/2" (127 cm × 124.5 cm × 31.8 cm)

Louise Nevelson

b. 1899, Kiev
d. 1988, New York

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (WE ARE NOT), 2023, silkscreen on canvas, 96" × 120" (243.8 cm × 304.8 cm)

Adam Pendleton

b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia