Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: A Passion To A Principle
November 18, 2016–February 12, 2017
Opening: November 17, 2016
In her first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977 in London; lives and works in London) fills our majestic, skylit upstairs galleries with all new paintings—lush and vibrant reflections on perception, painting, and the figure. At once traditional in her approach to form, line, and color, and decidedly contemporary in her self-reflexivity about her medium, the British-Ghanaian writer, poet, and painter represents a bold and beautiful cast of black figures culled from the haze of memory, projection, and fiction. The goal is not formal perfection, or exactitude with regard to any real person, but another sort of precision, one that aims, as she says, to “make people intelligible through paint.”
The exhibition is generously supported by Peter Handschin and Jackson Tang, with additional support from the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation.
Regionale 17: Beyond the Real
November 26, 2016–January 8, 2017
Opening: November 26, 2016
Beyond the Real is Kunsthalle Basel’s contribution to the annual Regionale exhibition, offering a panorama of recent production by artists from or now based in Basel and the tri-national region. For this 17th edition, we feature seven young artists who work in various media: Othmar Farré (b. 1985 in Brig, Switzerland; lives and works in Basel), Gregory Hari (b. 1993 in Richterswil, Switzerland; lives and works in Basel), Danae Hoffmann (b. 1994 in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Germany; lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany), Camille Holtz (b. 1989 in Obernai, France; lives and works in Marseilles, France), Maude Léonard-Contant (b. 1979 in Joliette, Canada; lives and works in Basel), Dominic Michel (b. 1987 in Klingnau, Switzerland; lives and works in Basel), and Deirdre O’Leary (b. 1989 in Fribourg, Switzerland; lives and works in Basel). Through their works, they negotiate “the real” in diverse ways—documenting it, attempting to replicate it, or oneirically charging it so as to create works best described as surreal.
Sadie Benning: Shared Eye
February 10–April 30, 2017
Opening: February 9, 2017
Shared Eye is the first institutional solo show in Europe for Sadie Benning (b. 1973 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA; lives and works in New York). The American artist is perhaps best known for her precocious video work, begun at age 15, which won her awards and visibility throughout the 1990s on the experimental film circuit. She is less known for the painterly and photographic practice she has forged in the years since, and which this exhibition aims to highlight in what will be the artist’s largest show to date. Bringing together a body of new work that is somewhere between sculpture, painting, and photography, each piece is built up from colored resin, mounted digital snapshots, found photographs, objects, shelf-like protrusions, and painted elements that reflect on American politics, lived experience, and the poetry of the everyday.
Shared Eye is a collaboration with the Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA.
Maria Loboda
February 24–May 14, 2017
Opening: February 23, 2017
Maria Loboda (b. 1979 in Krakow, Poland; lives and works in Berlin and Paris) has made a specialty of digging into obscure histories—and inventing them too. The Polish artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, featuring recent and newly commissioned works, will continue her particular site-responsive practice. Her charged installations, which sit at the intersection of intrigue, fiction, the esoteric, and archaeological research, nearly always depart from a seemingly unimportant or overlooked historical detail that the artist renders central, fantastical, and always unforgettable. In doing so, Loboda transforms her findings into sculptural and photographic works that unravel the way we understand history, place, and the almost talismanic power of objects.
Ungestalt
May 19–August 20, 2017
Opening: May 18, 2017
Ungestalt, a somewhat untranslatable term—not exactly “formless” or “amorphous”—describes something that struggles against delineation, against clear definition, indeed against the wholeness suggested by “gestalt.” Maybe something that both is a form and undoes that form comes closest. Taken as the starting point for a group show, Ungestalt aims to rethink materiality at the moment of its ostensible eclipse, bringing together an ensemble of works by artists of different generations, each of whom has responded to their moment with works that—no matter the medium—court aesthetic and conceptual volatility.
Yan Xing
June 2–August 20, 2017
Opening: June 1, 2017
For his first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, Yan Xing (b. 1986 in Chongqing, China; lives and works in Beijing and Los Angeles) will present a newly commissioned installation that acts as a fictive exhibition by a fictive curator whose fantasy life is the libidinal undercurrent to the project. Like nearly all of Yan Xing’s sculpture, video, photography, performance, and prolific writing, this project is informed by a mix of art historical research, autobiographical narratives, aesthetic critique, and sheer confabulation. Fact and speculation, the public and private spheres, the art object and display structures touch and blur in an art that choreographs “history” and the viewer equally.
For further information and image requests, please contact press [at] kunsthallebasel.ch.
