
Installation view, Stan Douglas, Onomatopoeia, 1985–1986, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Stan Douglas, Onomatopoeia, 1985–1986, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
At Art Basel Unlimited, David Zwirner will be presenting works by five gallery artists: Stan Douglas (U11), Juan Muñoz (U66), Wolfgang Tillmans (U47), Andra Ursuţa (U51), and Jordan Wolfson (U14).
At Art Basel Parcours, which highlights artist interventions in the Basel city center and which takes place concurrently with the 2022 fair, Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts will be on view at the UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt. Open to the public and co-presented with Carlos/Ishikawa, Kurimanzutto, and Taka Ishii.
Presented alongside Art Basel.
Image: Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
At Art Basel Unlimited, David Zwirner will be presenting works by five gallery artists: Stan Douglas (U11), Juan Muñoz (U66), Wolfgang Tillmans (U47), Andra Ursuţa (U51), and Jordan Wolfson (U14).
At Art Basel Parcours, which highlights artist interventions in the Basel city center and which takes place concurrently with the 2022 fair, Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts will be on view at the UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt. Open to the public and co-presented with Carlos/Ishikawa, Kurimanzutto, and Taka Ishii.
Presented alongside Art Basel.
Image: Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Douglas’s seminal early installation Onomatopoeia consists of a fragment of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor (Op. 111) as rendered by a player piano in a ragtime rhythm, accompanied by looped black-and-white photographs of austere automatic looms from a nineteenth-century textile mill projected onto a screen suspended above. Both the player piano and the loom employ the same basic technology—a series of punched rolls determining both the notes played and the weave pattern of the textile.
The cinematic work, which evokes the early Industrial Age, recalls the accompaniment to silent movies by a piano. The absent interpreter, replaced by the player piano, echoes the missing weaver in the mill, establishing a human absence that is almost tangible, and the pairing of the piano and the loom keeps the audience in a state of anticipation as the structure of the piece moves in and out of synchronization.
Onomatopoeia is one of Douglas’s most important early works and helped form the foundation of his career. Although it has not been seen publicly in nearly two decades, this significant work was included in a number of important early shows, including the installation’s debut at Douglas’s 1986 solo exhibition at Western Front, Vancouver. Another edition of this work is in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Stan Douglas is representing Canada at this year's Venice Biennale. The installation Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848, curated by Reid Shier, presents a series of works across two venues in Venice. More information can be found here.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, Onomatopoeia, 1985–1986, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Stan Douglas, Onomatopoeia, 1985–1986, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Juan Muñoz, Three Chinese, 1999, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Juan Muñoz, Three Chinese, 1999, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
The present work consists of a group of three smiling figures, each looking in a different direction. The source material for these figures was an Art Nouveau ceramic bust that Muñoz found at a flea market, of a figure with Asian features who appeared to be laughing, which he then replicated numerous times, constructing various situations ranging from individual figures to large groups.
Throughout his oeuvre, Muñoz was interested in drawing from and questioning art history to make a new kind of sculptural situation that problematizes and destabilizes that history, putting viewers into a place of uncertainty, instability, or questioning. The repeated use of the same figure, as in this work, underscores a tension between individual subjectivity and the anonymity of the group—a theme that the artist consistently explored.
Installation view, Juan Muñoz, Three Chinese, 1999, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Juan Muñoz, Three Chinese, 1999, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Co-presented with Galerie Buchholz, the present seven-part work belongs to Tillmans’s “Concorde” project (1997), which includes a grid of fifty-six related photographs and an artist book. These images, which make up the final pages of the Concorde publication, are the only large-scale prints to have been made from this series. This work was first exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler as part of Tillmans’s 2017 exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of the project.
A significant early series within Tillmans’s oeuvre, the “Concorde” works encompass a deliberate engagement with photographic notions of cropping, framing, and serialized processes. The artist explains, “In the spring of 1997, for a few weeks, I became a planespotter. It was a fascinating thing, standing under the flypass near the perimeter fence of Heathrow, or in Richmond or Clapham, watching the very distant dot in the sky as it approached, and trying to make out: is it Concorde? Or just an ordinary plane? I had a particular problem with the McDonnell-Douglas MD80s: from afar, they look similarly back-heavy. But it was beautiful to spend hours looking up in the sky—I’ve loved the sky since childhood—waiting for it to happen, and then it would happen, and then you just had to go for it.”
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde L449-19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 1997, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Andra Ursuţa, Vandal Lust, 2011/2022, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Andra Ursuţa, Vandal Lust, 2011/2022, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Andra Ursuţa's Vandal Lust, 2011/2022, references The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985), a room-sized installation by the Soviet-born artist Ilya Kabakov that imagined his fantasy of escape from the communal Moscow apartment where he once resided. Ursuţa’s work comprises a trebuchet and a sculpture depicting the artist as a fallen figure—dressed in a red cardigan and headscarf—covered in the crushed debris created after an attempt to hurl herself out of the space. As noted by the artist, the work “was more about knowing you will fail but going for it anyway.” Here, Ursuţa taps into the “failure to launch” trope explored by the likes of Yves Klein and Bas Jan Ader and also questions the possibility of an individual’s ability to truly be free, particularly those living under oppressive governments in locations that have accumulated decades or centuries of collective historical trauma.
Andra Ursuţa also has work on view in the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Installation view, Andra Ursuţa, Vandal Lust, 2011/2022, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Andra Ursuţa, Vandal Lust, 2011/2022, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Jordan Wolfson, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, 2019–2020, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Jordan Wolfson, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, 2019–2020, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Co-presented with Sadie Coles HQ, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS continues Wolfson’s probing investigation of technology and mass imagery and how they relate to American culture and contemporary life. The work is composed of twenty HYPERVSN 3D holographic displays made of spinning fans that have micro LEDs embedded in their blades. The LEDs are programmed to rapidly illuminate while spinning so as to create the illusion of holographic imagery floating in space.
The programmed imagery includes animated characters and symbols such as a cartoon heart, a breakdancing Star of David, a puppy being tortured, and an imprisoned cat. Breaking up the visual display are animated words reading “ARTISTS,” “FRIENDS,” “RACISTS” that descend intermittently. At times Wolfson’s animations overlay photographs and video clips, some of which appear as relatively innocuous—like scenes from Sesame Street—while others depict charged subjects, such as police cars and 9/11 firefighters. The visual sequence plays out like a choreographed dance, with imagery at times synchronized—with multiple fans featuring the same projection—and at other times syncopated and incongruous.
At once enigmatic, comical, and disquieting, the work highlights how symbols, characters, and language have achieved a life of their own in today’s advanced image economy, existing like specters that reach beyond the confines of the media and the systems in which they circulate.
This work was presented by both Sadie Coles in London and David Zwirner at its Paris gallery in February 2020.
Installation view, Jordan Wolfson, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, 2019–2020, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
Installation view, Jordan Wolfson, ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, 2019–2020, Art Basel Unlimited, 2022
At Art Basel Parcours, which highlights artist interventions in the Basel city center and which takes place concurrently with the 2022 fair, Oscar Murillo’s Social Cataracts will be on view at the UBS Geschäftsstelle - Basel Aeschenvorstadt. Open to the public and co-presented with Carlos/Ishikawa, Kurimanzutto, and Taka Ishii, Social Cataracts is made up of two installations that touch on community, labor, and collectivity.
The first installation, Mesmerizing beauty, 2022, consists of fifty vacant white plastic chairs, attached to which are wooden batons that appear to support placards typically used in political demonstrations but that in fact are works on paper and canvas based on drawings the artist has made during flights, traveling across continents. The second installation, Arepas y Tamales, 2022, features one hundred wearable sculptures. More information can be found here.