Art Basel 2009

Here follows my list of favourites in this year’s edition of ART / Basel:

1. Il Tempo del Postino, a group show curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, originally comissioned by The Manchester International Festival. Conceived as a time-based and not a space-based exhibition, the show brings a series of installations by different artists to a seated audience, in this case in the Theater Basel.
I specially liked some pieces such as Tino Sehgal’s “untitled” in which the stage curtains were manipulated to create a compelling coreography. In Anri Salas’ “Flutterbyes” a series of interpreters where positioned in different locations amidst the audience singing Madame Butterflyes’ aria “Un Bel di Vedremo”. This unforeseen closeness with the opera singers resulted in one of the most touching and dramatic moments of the evening.
Also breath taking was Tacita Deans’ film piece “Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cages’ composition 4′33″ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007″. It is truly “an elegiac portrait of an aging artist and his deceased partner, articulating the melancholia of passing time” (Lauren Hinkson).
Not less powerfull was Doug Aitkens’ “The handle comes up the hammer goes down” performance piece, in which several cattle mid-western auctioners perform live and at amazing speed a bidding on the audience.
Dominique Gonzalez Foersters’ piece “Sol is going home” provided the most beautifull end to this event as the musicians slowly left one by one until the very last one of them was left alone still playing.

2. Anne-Mie Kerckhoven, “Schatten uit het westen”, 1993 and Mark Manders’ figure installation at Zeno X Gallery /BE

3. Alicja Kwade, Different Condition (State of Aggregation) 2,2009 at Johann König Galerie /DE (image above)

4. Stefan Hirsig, collage / mixed media on plywood and John Bocks’ installation at Galerie Stefan Hirsig /DE

5. Mathew Hale, “Die Münze (DM)” installation at Wentrup Gallery /DE

And my list of favourites at VOLTA / Basel:

1. Chris Gillis, “Inside, Into the frame”, Dagmar De Pooter Gallery/BE (image above)

2. Nadin Maria Rüfenachts’ photographic work, Galerie Kleindienst /DE

3. Herbert Weber, “Der Himmel ist immer oben”, 2006 and the “Normale Fakten” serie, 2008, artrepco galerie /CH

4. Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, The Four Horsemen, 2009, Hi-definition video, Ceri Hand Gallery /UK

5. Dean Baldwin, Minibar Project and Sandy Plotnikoff postcards, Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects / CA

My list of favourites at SCOPE /Basel:

1. Krell 2 go, krellwear.com
Fast chic: you could choose a fabric and with the help of Karelle Levy (founder of Krellwear) customize your own piece on site.

And finally my choices at LISTE /Basel:

1. Lisa Oppenheim, Harris Lieberman Gallery /USA

2. Emilie Pitoiset, “Liebe ist kälter als der Tod”, 2009, Galerie Lucile Corty /FR

3. Jimmy Robert, Galerie Diana Stigter /NL (image above)

Art Basel 2009

“Surprise success: Art Basel dispels credit crunch blues”. “Art Basel’s 40th edition continued to defy the worldwide financial slump”. These were some of the optimistic head titles and reports on Art Basel which could be read on the Art Newspaper throughout the last week.
New Hollywood-star collectors and galleries reacting to the economical crisis by bringing out their best pieces were some of the reasons given for the successful amount of major transactions done during the first days of the fair.

On the one hand, I have heard from some collectors that they bought more than they were expecting to and where even surprised to find such good quality. On the other hand, I hear galleries saying that despite selling something they definitely sold less than last year, which I guess only proves that the real business is being done very few players and that maybe one shouldn’t believe everything one reads in the newpapers…

Fernando & Humberto Campana 1989-2009 @ the Vitra Design Museum

“Antibodies” at the Vitra Design Museum (a Frank Gehry building) is an exhibition devoted to the work of Fernando and Humberto Campana, in which several of their most important design objects can be seen.

Reusing unexpected materials in a new way, I was specially attracted to these two chairs on display:

Swiss Art Awards 2009

Sébastien Mettraux (images above) was one of the privileged artists to receive an award. However, after visiting the Swiss Art Awards 2009 exhibition I realized that the works which actually caught my eye hadn’t, in the most cases, been contemplated with any kind of award – which only serves to prove my lack of taste!;-)

It seemed to me that the most interesting works definitely belonged to Ariane Andereggen, Emanuel Geisser, Kathrin Sonntag, Yves Mettler and Monica Jäger. In addition to these, I also enjoyed Clare Goodwins’ neo-constructivism painting, Seline Baumgartners’ monumental trailer wrapped in white fabric, Maya Bringolfs’ coloured PU-foam monumental object with a couch and a table pilled up and Uriel Orlows’ installation “These Great Times”, which included a free hand-out newspaper with printed photos of political historical leaders done with a magic marker.

Visual and performance artist Ariane Andereggen created a multimedia wall installation containing video, collage, drawings and writing, everything assembled in an apparent anarchic manner. Using linguistic and visual-appropriation strategies and actions, Andereggens’ work investigates into different concepts such as body, archive, spectacle and memory in a punk/ absurdish style. Born in 1969, she first studied acting at the Hochschule der Künste in Bern and later graduated in Media Art (2000) at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe.

“Satellite, Now Here Nowhere” is an installation comprising a video projection, two mirrors, tripods, a disco ball motor and nylon thread by Berlin-based Emanuel Geisser. The video projection shows an inhospitable landscape, whose footage originates from an expedition to the K2 in the 1950s. The rotating mirror mounted on the engine casts its shadow on the mountains on the screen and then on the surrounding walls of the installation room as it moves around. In the point where it meets the second standing mirror tripod, the word NORTH is reflected onto the opposite wall for a short moment.

1981-born Berlin-based artist Kathrin Sonntag presented a booklet and a series of 81 slides in which arrangements of objects and tools belonging to the studio of the artist could be seen. These works seem to revolve around the question of how we can perceive worldly things around us differently just upon observation. In some moments, this re-staging brings about surreal perspectives, in which hazard and weird dominate.

Winner of a public art contest in Aarburg in 2006, Swiss-born and Berlin-based artist Yves Mettler seems interested in reflecting about memory and public space through his built architectural models in which an audio memory is included. His submission to the Swiss Art Awards follows this principle once more. It consisted of a group of architectural models done in cardboard with speakers and an audio recording.

In reference to…

The first two images document painting works by 2003 deceased artist Jack Goldstein. The image on the right is the work of Jonathan Monk titled “Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field Painted in the Style of Jack Goldstein circa 1986″, 2006.

Cornelia Renz

One problem with the research on dreams is that one cannot observe a dream directly. To learn how or what a sleeper dreams, he has to be awaken from his sleep and questioned about it. Cornelia Renz’ large dimension acrylic paintings may just be giving us an insight into that question of the representability of dreams.

In her works, Renz has been addressing those very subjects which Surrealism and cinema are also obsessed with, namely the unconscious, the pleasure principle, the expressive power of the symbol and of dreams, castration, anxiety, and the death drive. All this Renz conjures up in her depiction of fantastic worlds, fairy-tales, and masquerades―and not without humour. In these prolific worlds nothing is as it seems, the general order of things has been suspended and the conventional social and moral principles are disturbingly broken. Her images give us an odd feeling, making us think how castrating the structures of our real world actually are. Thus, Cornelia Renz’ fantastic worlds seem to hold a promise of liberation. By linking the grotesque and the divine, death and humor, violence and eroticism she shows the mechanisms of desire in action.
It all seems to move around dreams and the unconscious, puberty, identity, gender roles, subliminal violence and power games. Renz’ young women actively negotiate and consciously manipulate power to their advantage if they get a chance to. However, to interpret Renz’ works as transgression per se would be to fail the real subject matter of her work, namely how the joy of life and the mystery of death coexist altogether.

In Cornelia Renz’ compositions line and colour are the supreme elements. Each composition is made of thousands of lines. Her figures no longer hold to the ground. All former rules, like perspective and logical shadowing, have been abolished. Instead, these have been replaced by vectors of directions. The composition is commanded mostly by ideas of top and bottom or left and right in some cases.
In many of her works Cornelia Renz adopts an aerial viewpoint in order to give us the feeling that we are optically and aerially moving around the work. This is enhanced in two ways. First of all through the transparency of the acrylic glass she uses for her pieces and secondly due to the fact that in many of her compositions a moral debate or some kind of struggle between top and bottom is taking place. Once linear perspective and traditional notions of space are abolished, things like the distinction between figure and ground, superposition, dramatic colour contrast and flatness become extremely important for the kind of work being done here.
Cornelia Renz is exploring an essential set of conventions―line, figure, scale―which not only directly derives from the technique she employs but represents a conscious positioning within the tradition of painting. Her rejection of Renaissance Italian perspective in favour of older modes of representation which takes us as far as the Middle Ages, results in a graphic immediacy which at first glance might not seem so natural and spontaneous but instead brings forth a certain quality of the gesture. Her choice means the replacement of the visual for the tactile, the abandonment of the optics for the haptics.

Based on the principle of the collage, Cornelia Renz shamelessly samples and mixes references which range from pop culture to historical engraving, mythology, and comics re-interpreting them in a very personal way. Each painting offers itself for decodification. There is a very particular Renz’ iconography which includes, among others, Lolitas, horses, nurses and skeletons. Childhood and puberty for instance represent interesting moments for the artist because the first is almost pre-societal, and the latter is a brief moment just before the loss of innocence. Both escape, even if briefly, society’s control and customization.

Cornelia Renz’ specific interest in these moments of ”out of control“―the same way a dream represents a moment which escapes control, and the same way an image is as deceitful as a dream―influences intrinsically the way things are represented. In most compositions there is a horror vacui which could be said to derive directly from the wish to tell a story. Since Renz’ stories are full of tension and include unpredictable elements which could suddenly intervene and change the sequence of events at any time, her scenes are often organized in a spiral manner. This can be seen in such works as ”Skyrider“, ”Subrosa“, ”Wendy“, and ”Forever”.

In Renz’ images different tension points and situations compete for our attention. Sometimes the image is organized as a kind of poster or a medieval illumination, with space being organized by the use of banners or medallions as in ”Love“, ”Forever“, and ”Love Rules”.
Cornelia Renz seems to be thinking in terms of physicality, for her paintings are very dense considering imagery, tactility, and terms of representation but deceitfully fragile through her choice of material. The material mainly used by Cornelia Renz ―acrylic glass―has the specific and remarkable quality of transparency. This condition necessarily brings forth issues like the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral, the metaphor of the mirror and self-reflection. Not lacking in paradox it also holds the painting in a contradictory situation in which opposite poles meet: between being a massive, extremely heavy object, and at the same time possessing an evanescent body, from solid object to vaporous air.

Since the articulation between materiality, representation and imagery is extremely sophisticated and loaded, Cornelia Renz’ paintings with their physical properties, their gesture’s authenticity and literary density show great emotional power. More important than to ask what they are about, is the understanding of how these different vectors engage in a psychic and energetic build-up, and which construct a universe of their own.

Cornelia Renz’ rich imagery represents thus a second order of reality, which in a way gives us a blink into reality itself, for it is full of painful, dark and strange things, which we must deal with all the time. Here pure horror is always represented in an aesthetic way, contributing for a sense of estrangement as we are left alone with what to do with the image. These paintings might just as well represent a liberating break or a catharsis with all things strange in our daily lives. Liliana Rodrigues

Born in 1966 in Kaufbeuren/Bavaria (DE), Cornelia Renz studied at the Academy of Visual Arts at Leipzig (“Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst“). Currently living and working in Berlin, she has been awarded with the “Marion Ermer Prize” (2001) and the “Förderpreis Bildende Kunst” of the Schering Foundation (2005). Recent shows have included a solo presentation at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt (2007), Goff + Rosenthal in New York in 2006 and the group exhibition XV. Rohkunstbau “Drei Farben – Rot” at Villa Kellermann in Berlin in 2008. Cornelia Renz is represented in many private and public collections in Germany, the United Kingdom, the USA, Brazil and Japan.

William

William

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