What’s Showing at Art Basel OVR:2020

Since Art Basel postponed, and then canceled, its annual Basel edition—along with its Hong Kong fair in March, and forthcoming Miami Beach version in December—the mega-fair has been reinventing itself with digital platforms dubbed Online Viewing Rooms (OVR). The latest series of Art Basel OVR is split into two parts, with the first focused specifically on works made in 2020—for those interested in the art of the pandemic moment. Capped at 100 galleries, each presenting six artworks, Art Basel OVR:2020 is a more viewer-friendly experience than its massive previous digital editions. The only catch is that OVR:2020 has a very limited run, so make time to browse through the presentations before they end on September 27 (12am CET).

Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan

Suki Seokyeong Kang's wheeled sculptural assemblage Tender Meander #20-03 (2018–20) and wall-based Mat 120 x 120 #20-02 (2020), comprising a woven hwamunseok and wood frame, exemplify the artist’s practice of de- and re-constructing elements borrowed from traditional Korean craft and performing arts. The gallery is also showcasing Dansaekhwa painter Ha Chong Hyun, installation artist Haegue Yang, mixed-media artist Kyungah Ham, and landscape painter Kibong Rhee. 

Edouard Malingue, Hong Kong/Shanghai

Edouard Malingue’s presentation spotlights mid-career artists Chou Yu-Cheng, Samson Young, Yuan Yuan, and Yu Ji. Shown IRL at a solo exhibition in Hong Kong in June, Yuan Yuan’s painting In exposed walls (2019–20) portrays a decrepit apartment building in stunning detail, with flashes of pastel purple and green among the dirty, crumbling tiles. 

Experimenter, Kolkata

Titled “Do you know how to start a fire,” Experimenter’s OVR investigates modes of inhabiting and interpreting one’s surroundings through a selection of paintings by Ayesha Sultana, Biraaj Dodiya, and Prabhakar Pachpute and a wall sculpture by Rathin Barman. Pachpute’s painting of a sculptural raised fist amid craggy mountains reflects the artist’s ongoing study of resource exploitation and resistance, while Sultana’s abstract Untitled (2020) turns inward, exuding emotive force through expressive strokes of royal purple.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai

Dubai-based collective Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian are showing new works on paper that capture the sense of alienation and anxiety born of global instability and exacerbated by relentless news coverage. Works such as Where To? Wherever it Chances (2020) appropriate and de-contextualize imagery from mainstream news channels in uncanny and darkly humorous compositions.

Lehmann Maupin, New York/London/Hong Kong/Seoul

Rendering an elongated, biomorphic form in red and yellow acrylic and mother of pearl on a sky-blue wooden panel, Lee Bul’s triptych Perdu XXXIX (2020) furthers the artist’s explorations of hybrid, bioengineered forms. The gallery is also featuring a grid painting by Mandy El-Sayegh as well as other wall-based pieces by Angel Otero, Cecilia Vicuña, Nari Ward, and Billie Zangewa.

neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Named after jazz musician Ornette Coleman’s album Tomorrow is the question, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s solo presentation with neugerriemschneider features an installation composed of a pile of printed t-shirts on a shiny box referencing the Minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd. The t-shirts are being printed and added to the pile, a process that is being livestreamed via the OVR chat function. During the livestream, visitors can also respond to the prompt “If tomorrow is the question, what is the question?”—their suggestions will be written onto a large work comprising newspapers reporting on current events as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolds.

PKM Gallery, Seoul

PKM Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Koo Jeong A’s latest painting series, Seven Stars (2020), depicting distorted negative images of five-pointed stars amid bursts of neon green on a black background. Rendered in phosphorescent pigment and acrylic on canvas, Koo’s paintings interrogate notions of visibility and absence.

SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo

“Energy and Motion” considers the expression of invisible forces as a defining feature of abstraction in the digital era. Mariko Mori’s circular Radiant Being Lenticular (2020) is a stereoscopic view of a 3D computer-generated composition of glowing spheres, shown online concurrently with the artist’s solo exhibition at the Tokyo gallery. The OVR also features Tatsuo Miyajima’s 3.5-meter-high, wall-mounted numeral 9, titled Painting of Change – 000 (2020), as well as a drawing by He Xiangyu and mixed-media works by Kohei Nawa and Reijiro Wada.

Esther Schipper, Berlin

Simon Fujiwara has created new sculptural objects and paper works for Esther Schipper’s OVR, “A Year of Magic,” which provides a humorous and playful response to recent crises and hardships. Pink Panther vs The Pope (2020), for example, is a chandelier composed of Plexiglas panels engraved with the upside-down facade of St. Peter’s Cathedral in the Vatican populated by cut-outs of the cartoon character.

ROH Projects, Jakarta

Following their first collaborative exhibition in 2018, Bandung-born artists Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo and Syagini Ratna Wulan reunite in “IRL/In Real Life,” featuring works developed for ROH Projects’ OVR. From Arin’s Sunny Side Down (2020), a mixed-media painting of a fried egg with actual egg preserved in resin, to Syagini’s resin sculpture of an enlarged china bowl, Lodor (2020), the exhibition investigates the materiality of domestic objects. 

Take Ninagawa, Tokyo 

Take Ninagawa presents “The Dawn of Compact Structure,” comprising six works from Taro Izumi’s new video series, in tandem with the Japanese artist’s solo exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel. For this project, Izumi filmed older footage being played on a monitor, examining the layered temporality of the recorded image. For instance, Compact Structure (Release and Send) (2020) shows half an orange placed over a video of the other half, emphasizing their irreconcilability.

Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei

“Water Streaming Into Inkstone: The Paintings of Su Xiaobai” at Tina Keng Gallery offers bold lacquer-on-wood pieces that mark a shift from the Chinese artist’s typically more subdued palette. To achieve the shinier, brighter surface of works such as Bucolic Green (2020), Su layered multiple coats of lacquer, allowing them to partly dry before “washing” off the topmost layer with oil. 

Various Small Fires, Los Angeles 

In Anna Sew Hoy’s sculpture Memory of Future (2020), a strip of denim suspends a rock from a clay trunk alongside a pair of forgotten keys in a broken cage. Sew Hoy’s scene of destruction joins works by textile artist Diedrick Brackens, painters Jessie Homer French, Judith Linhares, and Calida Rawles, and mixed-media artist Glen Wilson in Various Small Fires’ “Dream State,” which imagines adaptation and survival amid natural and sociopolitical crises. 

Art Basel’s OVR:2020 is online until September 27, 2020.

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