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.

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.

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.

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. 

Lovers V is an important work from a series of about 30 Lovers that Nancy Spero painted in the early 1960s, in Paris, where she was living with her partner Leon Golub. Lovers V is of particular interest because Spero started the work in Paris and finished it in New York City, which makes the work one of her last paintings before she rejected oil-on-canvas for being, as she called it, ‘too heroic’.

With a dark palette the recalls cave paintings, or the erotic wall-paintings of Pompeii, Lovers V depicts two figures intimately intertwined. For the image of the interconnected lovers, Spero was inspired by both Etruscan sarcophagi and ‘The Lovers’ card in the Tarot deck. In 1965, nearing the end of the series, Spero wrote: ‘For many years I have returned to a double image which has assumed diverse forms – in a series of “le couple” or “the lovers” – existentially expressed through the inspiration of Tarot cards. This theme embodies a rapport, a contact of two beings in a ritual or sensual sense.’ Soon after she finished the Lovers series, Spero devoted herself to working on paper for the rest of her life.

A gallery devoted to the work of Nancy Spero and Leon Golub is on display at Tate Modern from May 2022 for approximately one year.