Art Basel

Booth A11 | Basel, Switzerland | June 12-18, 2023

  • For the 2023 edition of Art Basel, James Cohan will present a selection of new and important work by Firelei Báez, Simon Evans™, Federico Herrero, Yun-Fei Ji, Jesse Mockrin, Christopher Myers, Jordan Nassar, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Eamon Ore-Giron, Katie Paterson, Naudline Pierre, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Elias Sime, and Fred Tomaselli. The fair is open to the public from June 15th through the 18th, with VIP Preview days from the 12th through the 14th.

     

    In advance of the fair, preview a selection of works in our Viewing Room.

  • Firelei Báez
  • The following painting by Firelei Báez, titled A taxonomy for tenderness (Carte figurative et approximative représentant pour l'année 1858 les émigrants du globe), 2023, explodes across a 19th-century map by Charles Joseph Minard. In this document, Minard outlines patterns of global emigration in the year 1858, highlighting an interesting demographic period after the abolition of slavery in Britain and France creating a dearth of workers in European colonies.
  • The two feathered forms, which the artist imagines as representations of the sun and moon – forces that create and respond to the turning of the globe – also recall the famed mantles of the Tupinambá people, the indigenous population of modern day Brazil. For the Tupinambás, birds were sacred creatures endowed with divine forces. By wearing a feather mantle, a shaman could mediate between the living and the dead. The intricately plumed avian-human hybrids occupy this kind of liminal space within the world of the painting, seemingly hovering over the map of the globe, surrounded by glowing specks of paint that echo the map’s highly stratifying key. 

  • Jesse Mockrin
  • Jesse Mockrin’s latest body of work explores historical representations of women with mirrors, ranging from scenes of the toilette to...
    Jesse Mockrin’s latest body of work explores historical representations of women with mirrors, ranging from scenes of the toilette to biblical and mythological narratives of reflection.  For centuries, images of women have largely been painted by male artists who often depict women’s beauty and nudity in the service of revealing an innate feminine vanity, greed, or wantonness. Mockrin asks whose narcissism and gratification is truly on display.

  • Jordan Nassar

  • Nassar depicts mountainscapes throughout his newest works, all within the framework of tatreez, traditional Palestinian embroidery. By rendering landscapes within patterns, he creates layers of perspective that recede or bring forward imagined vistas. In these embroideries, he pieces together panels of dense pattern as if they were tiles in a mosaic. He fits them together to create compositions that vibrate with color. The resulting checkerboard-like works were created with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron.

  • Naudline Pierre

  • Naudline Pierre’s paintings draw from fantasy and iconography to conjure alternate worlds. The artist's winged figures are enveloped in vast, horizonless landscapes, where they come together in acts of intimacy and salvation: they reach longingly outward toward each other, congregate, and embrace, emoting protection and care.

  • Katie Paterson

  • Katie Paterson is known for her multi-disciplinary and conceptually-driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology and cosmology. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change.

  • The artwork depicts every extinct flowering plant, brought together in an embroidery, reflective of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose...

    The artwork depicts every extinct flowering plant, brought together in an embroidery, reflective of the Arts and Crafts movement, whose core characteristics were the importance of nature as inspiration, and the value of simplicity, utility and beauty. Evergreen represents a reverence for nature, and mourning for all that is, or soon to be, lost.

  • Yinka Shonibare CBE
  • Over the past decades, Yinka Shonibare CBE has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a sharp political commentary of the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Shonibare uses wry citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities.
  • The initial idea for Refugee Astronaut, born in 2015, stemmed from the concept of space as a possible place of refuge for the human race. The work is a warning, imagining what could happen if we don’t do something about rising water levels and the displacement of people. The Refugee Astronaut is the reverse of the colonial instinct of the astronaut, it is a nomadic astronaut trying to find somewhere that is still habitable.

  • Fred Tomaselli
  • Since the 1990s, Tomaselli has been known for meticulously crafted paintings, works on paper, and prints that integrate a variety of components, such as organic matter from his garden, collaged elements from printed sources, and hand-painted embellishments. Mesmerizing, richly detailed patterns explode dynamically across the compositions, creating tension with the stasis of the medium. Rooted in a consideration of escapism, unreality, and altered perception, Tomaselli’s maximalist works are oversaturated with conceptual and formal information that generates expansive layers of meaning.

    Tomaselli gathered leaves from his garden—including oak, hemp, sage, datura, rose, grape, and chrysanthemum—to create a chimeric floral base layer. Filigree vines and tissues connect the leaves, resulting in a “spliced” plant that bursts into bloom—a portrait of hybridity, and of nature gone berserk.

  • Tuan Andrew Nguyen

  • In this series of hanging mobiles, which belong to the same body of work as the recent film The Unburied Sound of a Troubled Horizon, 2022, Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the ways in which material contains memory and holds potential for transformation, reincarnation, and healing.

  • This kinetic artwork made from UXO metal moves with the flow of air and vibrations of sound in the gallery...
    This kinetic artwork made from UXO metal moves with the flow of air and vibrations of sound in the gallery space, creating a naturally shifting play of abstract spatial relationships, and suggesting a state of perpetual change. Nguyen worked with a sound healer who tuned the work to #F5 at 685 Hz so that as it self-activates, it vibrates at a precisely calibrated healing frequency. 

  • Eamon Ore-Giron

  • In his series of works entitled Infinite Regress (2015–ongoing), Eamon Ore-Giron’s totemic visual language is subject to an ongoing process of reformulation. In philosophy, infinite regress is a sequence of reasoning which never ends, a paradox of limitless regeneration that disproves the concept of fixed knowledge—in connecting one element to another, a third one is generated and so on, endlessly. Ore-Giron's highly-pigmented, evocative forms recall religious iconography, sacred landscapes, and celestial bodies in cyclical passages of time. With simple geometric shapes that shift in and out of graphic fields of gold, the works in this series are each a variation on the one that came before, suggesting a trajectory of future iterations. Their chromatic planes play on spatial recession and optical perception as they trace an infinite path forward.

  • Yun-Fei Ji

  • For more than two decades, Yun-Fei Ji has employed the flattened space of classical Chinese painting to tell contemporary stories that, while geographically specific, speak to collective human experiences. In these new works, Ji shifts from his established medium of ink and watercolor on paper to create vibrant paintings on canvas that possess a quietly evocative intensity. 

  • Selected Works