Behlül Kalfa | 17. Juni 2016

Satellite fairs and other exhibition spaces

At the same time, a series of satellite fairs are staged during Art Basel – all aimed at promoting new or young gallery owners and artists. The number of satellite fairs has grown over the years. Scope, Volta and The List are the best-known – and for some years now, they have had their own firm places beside the main fair. The satellite fairs mainly showcase young galleries and up-and-coming artists, or art which does not fit in with the subjects covered by the Art Basel program. We have also visited the solo project at Dreispitz, as well as HeK, Atelier Mondial, Schaulager, Oslo 10 and Der Tank.

VOLTA makes a fresh impression. Although due to the effect of the Markthalle, which reminds of a bee-hive (the noise can entail headache) the size and quality are in a balanced relationship. The location of VOLTA is in Markthalle close to the main train station. Whereas Scope stages in the new location, rather than in a tent or pavilion as it was in recent years, it now takes place in the top three floors of a shopping mall, in Clarahuus, right in the middle of a shopping area and red light district. Not bad! Each floor in the house is quite big, though the galleries and works are too close together and the walls are not high enough, as we were used from other spaces. But the general atmosphere is pretty much satisfying.

VOLTA

Pablo’s Birthday from New York and Copenhagen. The gallery presents abstract minimal works by 3 artists. Frank Gerritz, Michael Rouillard and Henrik Eiben. While Gerritz and Rouillard deal with geometric language, space and light, Eiben’s work deal with color, light, and surfaces. He is cleary influenced by the minimal movement from the 60’s and ask the same question «what makes a painting a painting?»

The Flat – Massimo Carasi from Milano representing the artist Paolo Cavinato. His works begins with space, necessarily includes time, and aims to reach the so-called fifth dimension, that of the spirit and infinity. The artist begins his work in the objective, quantifiable world in order to arrive at something that goes beyond it, a higher level.

Richard Heller Gallery from Los Angeles. Glass sculptures by Dustin Yellin recall in their extreme hermeneutical diversity, both the past where the representation of the human from was art’s most recognizable enterprise and a future where that enterprise is deeply complicated.

Artcourt Gallery from Osaka presents Tsuyoshi Higashijima and Tomoko Takagi two painters linked by the term cell membrane. Higashijima woks in abstract expressions using synthetic resin films and glass fragments on canvas. Takagi creates a brightly colored world of painting with a flowing brush.

Project Artbeat from Tbilisi by Natia Bukia, Natia Chkhartishvili and Salome Vakhania. Representing the art works of the artists Nino Chubinishvili, Lado Pochkhua, Gio Sumbadze.

Zilberman Gallery from Istanbul and recently Berlin. Exhibiting works by Alpin Arda Bağcık. Representing Bağcık’s general artistic practice, the photorealist paintings at the exhibition – based on photographs from defining moments in the history of the 20th century, especially focusing on traumatic moments and events during and after the WW2.

Causey Contemporary from New York. Representing works by Kevin Bourgeois. In his works he pays attention to the sedentary platform of discourse, interpretation, and voyeurism, where we are positioned. Artist Kevin Bourgeois envisions his At Play in the Fields of the Lord installation as a non-functioning but interactive playground which subtly comments on the ways in which we are policed, cataloged and displaced by unseen operatives.

Jarmuschek + Partner from Berlin. The gallery presents works by the Berlin-based artists Sabine Banovic and Petra Lottje. Banovic works deal with large-scale black and white drawings and paperworks, where she creates an abstract space composed of lined and structures, that takes a specific spatial form for the viewer’s eye only in the moment of perceiving. The drawings of Lottje are fine, reduced compositions with a high degree of abstraction.

Galerie Kornfeld Berlin presenting works of Michael John Kelly. His work is characterized by a multitude of different influences and «languages»: his images combine painting, print, photography, drawing and collage. In terms of content, they contain elements from new media and abstract expressionism, graffiti and cartoons, but also from science fiction movies and the world of hip-hop and punk-rock.

Scope

Galerie von Vertes from Zurich respresenting works of Stefan Rüesch, Alex Monopoly, Alexander Calder, Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst and many other pioneers.

In The Gallery from Copenhagen presents Jacob Gils. An artist who was a fashion photographer before now deals with photographs, analogue and digital in origin, which embody a strong awareness of perfect technique and composition.

VICTOR LOPE Arte Comtemporàaneo from Barcelona presenting the sculptures of Mario Dilitz. The main subject in the creative work of the sculptor Dilitz is to give expression to the human form, to convey and translate the language it speaks.

JanKossen Contemporary from New York and Basel representing works from Suh Jeong Min, Dieter Balzer, Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Dieter Kränzlein, Park Byoung Hoon, Michael Burges and Jürg Jansen.

Aureus Contemporary presenting works of Rober Pokorny. With a strong sensibility and awareness to intuition and exactness, Pokorny’s work shares a common visual alignment with a very long tradition of Chinese Painting and the Calligraphic Arts.

Boulderton Contemporary Art from Florida presenting works of Antoine Gaussin. His Seascapes series is mainly influenced by his past travels and poetic dimension of open space. He excels at expressing a feeling of visual solitude punctuated by small points of reference.

the solo project

Anna Marra Contemporanea from Roma is presenting works of Fabrizio Corneli with his work Hermes Ludovisi. The shadow art of Italian artist Fabrizio Corneli is the result of carefully calculated projections of light. Using mathematics to produce each visually compelling and mind-boggling piece of work, Corneli gives life to his seemingly simple, geometric wall extensions with light.

The Chemistry Gallery presenting works of Alzbeta Josefy.

Settantasette Gallery from Milano presenting works of Bernardo Siciliano and Jeva Petersone. Siciliano is a painter best known for his depictions of urban landscapes and nude figures.

Zahorian Gallery from Bratislava showing works of Stefan Papco and Raphael Denis. A 2006 graduate from the École nationale supérieure des Arts-Décoratifs, Raphaël Denis invents processes from which he develops series. This conceptual dimension comes to life in works associating impertinence and solemnity. Art history in the larger sense of an aesthetic and formal history, but also in the sense of the history of its milieu, with its mechanisms and its agents, becomes the object of an interrogation that aims at revealing its complexity and subterfuges.

HeK

With «Preabsence», HeK presents the first solo exhibition of the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in Switzerland. The show focuses on works dealing with the complex interrelationship between presence and absence, motifs usually understood as mutually exclusive or opposites, but here presented as echoes of each other within the tangible traces that data, memory and visitor interaction leave behind.

Cameras, tracking systems and biometric techniques have now transformed the public space into a metered matrix where every activity can be registered, stored and analyzed. Lozano-Hemmer makes use of this technology, but instead of tracking for pre-emptive control he uses it for connecting disparate planes of experience. By creating platforms for participation and self-representation he offers critical, playful and poetic installations that seek complicity and that by definition are out of control, ambiguous and indeterminate.

Schaulager

Exhibition Zita – Щapa. A Chamber Piece by Katharina Fritsch and Alexej Koschkarow. The skilled dramaturgy that extends through these three rooms with just seven works generates a subtly foreboding atmosphere, and what initially looks like a domestic scenario soon reveals its true colors as a highly explosive ambience. The works of art take the parts of protagonists in this chamber piece. Fritsch’s faceless figures with immaculate surfaces meet powerful sculptures by Koschkarow that are loaded with pathos formulas and historical references. The interactions and the interplay of the protagonists raise topics such as displacement, isolation, violence, the misuse of power, and death: issues that have always preoccupied humankind but that have taken on a shocking new relevance in our own time. The names in the two-word title inspired this joint project; besides evoking historical references – Zita of Bourbon-Parma was the last Empress of Austria, the Щapa (Shchara in English) is a river in Belarus – they also have personal associations with memories and experiences for Katharina Fritsch and Alexej Koschkarow.

Oslo 10

The experimental project room representing art works of local and international artists such as Alfred Boman, Elin Gonzalez, Aaron Ritschard, Dorota Gaweda, Egle Kulbokaite, Anna Uddenberg and Matthias Wyss.

Der Tank

In the glass cube, which is accessible by a door in the back side two installations from the artist Mathilde Rosier are being showed. The first constists of an «altar» of drawings of figures upside down, and the second is a large-scale video prejection in which a series of dancers perform the grace of a universe where the boy moves at ease with its feet hanging from the ceiling.