Art Basel 2022: Hall 2.0 Booth C8

Polly Apfelbaum developed a new body of ceramic work for her recent exhibition For the Love of Una Hale, at Arcadia University, Pennsylvania. Exploring contemporary ideas surrounding craft, gender and identity, Apfelbaum’s new work melds painting, ceramics and installation.  It examines the formative impact of Pennsylvania German art on Apfelbaum's hybrid sensibility, informed by the artist’s engagement with art history, applied arts and popular culture. ‘The goal is to interpret the personal as political’, says Apfelbaum, citing her long history of working with materials associated with craft and everyday life – such as fabric and rugs. These works have become a means for Apfelbaum to reflect on the inception of her artistic sensibility and its investigation of the materiality of colour. Abstract Quilt of 100 Colors, 2022, shows the influence of both the vernacular art of rural Pennsylvania and modernist abstraction that was key to the post-war cultural life of New York City. 

Polly Apfelbaum’s two-person show with Josef Herzog at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland runs until 19 June. Her solo exhibition Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea at Magazin III, Jaffa, Israel runs until 15 July.

$45,000

The moon may through is a new work from a series of chalk drawings made by the artist whilst residing in Los Angeles. Offered several original Victorian-era school slates, Dean was attracted to their patina and scuffed beauty, and began using spray chalk, gouache and white charcoal pencil to work on these cloud images. Their titles are taken from the book A Complete Concordance to Shakespeare.

A solo exhibition Tacita Dean runs at MUDAM, Luxembourg from 9 July–29 Jan 2023.

€95,000

Callum Innes is known for luminous abstractions that push at the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Composed of opaque sections juxtaposed with thin, translucent washes that appear almost permeable, his paintings invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. 

Innes generally works in series, allowing his methods to build upon each other and evolve gradually while he works on several paintings at the same time. Untitled Lamp Black / Alizarin Crimson (2022), appears at first to be only two colours, but a closer look reveals a range of complex hues and shades. Innes started by painting the entire canvas black before applying repeated washes of turpentine to remove paint from part of the surface, leaving all but the faintest vestigial traces of pigment. The remaining black part of the canvas is then painted with another colour, resulting in a luminous, shifting surface that evokes different registers of time.

£100,000

John Riddy’s practice is rooted in encounters with place. Returning time and again to specific locations, the artist is interested in the transformation that occurs when the familiar world is described as a photograph on paper.

Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works taken from a single viewpoint on the Norfolk Coast Path looking towards Blakeney Point, not only a place visited by Riddy for over 30 years but a common walking path and an everyday experience for thousands of people. The horizon, which carefully divides the composition in two, indicates a shingle ridge that protects the marsh from the North Sea, disrupted by a single building silhouetted against the white-grey sky. 

While Blakeney (1), 2021 offers a new subject matter for Riddy, the series adopts earlier formal and thematic tropes. The half-and-half division between land and sky, for example, echoes the composition of the New York (Black Star) series (2016). Indeed, both bodies of work also capture a single viewpoint in meticulous detail as it changes over a period of time ­– for Black Star, a series of pictures over 24 hours; for Blakeney, the series was made over two years. Each resulting photograph is attached to a specific moment, tracing the effects of time, weather and shifting light, describing those temporal changes in silence and stillness.

Also evident in Blakeney (1), 2021 is Riddy’s preoccupation with the history of art and photography. The influence of Gustave Le Gray, whose nineteenth-century photographs of Palermo inspired Riddy to take a series of the same city between 2012–16, may be found in the division of land and sky, while references to landscape painters such as John Constable, Antoine Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich link the series to Riddy’s early training as a painter.

Blakeney (1), 2021 is the first in a new series of works by John Riddy that will be exhibited as a solo presentation at Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square in November 2022. 

£12,000

Dayanita Singh’s practice focusses on the ways viewers engage with photography. Driven by a determination to liberate the image from the wall, Singh has been developing her ‘photo-architectural’ structures for two decades. Underpinned by a lifelong interest in the archive, these teak ‘mobile museums’ enable the artist to choreograph a bodily encounter with her photographs, constructing everchanging spaces for conversation.

Most recently the structures have developed into large wall-mounted panels where the images can be endlessly rearranged. Described by Singh as ‘contact sheets’, the form gained particular importance for the artist while examining her archive of forty years of analogue contact sheets during the Covid-19 lockdowns. This new form of photo-architecture was first realised as the work Let’s See (2021), part of the ongoing touring retrospective exhibition Dancing with my Camera.

For Let’s Talk (2022) Singh has created a contact sheet of chairs, objects that have always been highly evocative for the artist. During a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2002, Singh photographed the collection’s chairs, resulting in an exhibition and limited-edition publication. Here Singh brings together chairs from many different moments and places. Charged with the history of their users, the chairs become portraits, complete with their own personalities and gender, whilst also remaining signs of conversation from the past and future.

Dayanita Singh: Dancing with my Camera is at Gropius Bau, Berlin until 7 August 2022, when it will tour to Villa Stuck Munich, MUDAM Luxemburg, and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Porto. Singh is the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Award which will be accompanied by a solo exhibition at the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg 15 October 2022–20 January 2023.

£85,000

The landscape orientation of Slow Horizon is rare but not unknown for the artist. Although abstract, many of the artist’s paintings allude to landscape, both the pastoral hills of his native northern Spain and the busy grids of his adopted New York City. The blue foreground of the painting might evoke waves, while the forceful horizon, in bars of black, green and red, could mark a shoreline. The rusty-brown upper section of the painting features a series of cadenced marks typical of the artist: Uslé pushes the pigment slowly across the canvas, with a pace that echoes the homeostatic rhythms of the body, such as our heartbeat or our breath.

€75,000