BASEL, Switzerland—We have been watching, and mostly applauding, the progress of Alexis Hubshman’s SCOPE operation from the very beginning here at ARTINFO, but—and you read it here first—this Basel manifestation is SCOPE’s best fair yet.

After the mild disappointment of its last showing in New York—let’s face it, a tent, no matter how well it’s heated, doesn’t work terribly well in Manhattan in February—SCOPE has entered into a five-year contract with local entrepreneur (and gallerist) Marc de Puechredon to stage SCOPE in the 27,000-square-foot former industrial building, E-Halle. At this early stage, it looks like an inspired partnership.

SCOPE’s politics are pretty much impeccable. They’ve just gotten 501c3 status, and via the SCOPE Foundation they “help emerging artists through, grants, awards, and acquisitions.” Their mission, Hubshman says, “is to broaden the art world by presenting cutting-edge contemporary art and emerging culture.” In my opinion this is the reason that SCOPE has always been fun. With the attention it devotes to cinema, video, installation art, and performance, it is certainly a lot more entertaining than the main Art Basel fair, where more money may change hands, but it does so in an atmosphere that seems to put the business before the art.

The SCOPE fun starts as soon as you exit Art Basel to find your way there. There’s a shuttle bus, I am told, but much more bracing is the five-minute ride in the back of one of SCOPE’s free pedal rickshaws that takes you the length of the Mattenstrasse. As you approach, you see a big black inflatable structure that looks as though it belongs at a street fair. It turns out to be The Cube, a giant television set on which Berlin artist/gallerists Artists Anonymous are presenting their randomly mutating video piece Kammerspiel.

The E-Halle also turns out to be a delightfully funky space. De Puechredon and his pals have installed there a slightly rough-edged bar and a restaurant. They were still painting walls on the midnight before the opening, and the whole enterprise has a wonderful improvised character to it. This morning there were even a couple of dogs wandering around. The space’s architecture is hardly ideal (it has heat-generating windows running across its roof every few feet), but no doubt this won’t be such a problem next year when “some weird Swiss green law” is negotiated and they’ll be allowed to install air-conditioning. For now, we just have to sweat it out.

Satisfied Sellers

Temperature notwithstanding, I have rarely encountered such a satisfied group of gallerists. And this despite the fact that, as a number of them told me, yesterday was very quiet while most people went to the main fair.

Gallerist Mike Weiss, who described himself as “very, very happy,” reported that he had sold 11 out of the 16 Yigal Ozeri paintings (for between $20,000 and $24,000 each) that made up his one-artist booth. By the time you are reading this, I suspect the others will have gone as well.

Equally happy was gallerist Katherine Mulherin from Toronto. She’d sold eight of ten of the elaborately worked Oscar Camilo de Las Flores drawings that she was showing (for between $3,000 and $5,500). Also going well were Eric Doeringer’s infamous copies of Warhol, Basquiat, Peyton, and others. These works gave Mulherin a moment of embarrassment yesterday, when the Japanese visitor who was showing staring at them turned out not only to have the same name as artist Yoshitomo Nara but to actually be him. “The proportions are all wrong,” he huffed.

Regis Krampf of New York’s Krampf Gallery told me that he’d sold all of Ma Jun’s wonderful sculptures—in which contemporary objects are recast as traditional painted Chinese ceramics—for $10,000 each “within the first hour on Monday.”

Yossi Milo from New York has done well with Loretta Lux (then again, “Loretta always does well,” Milo said). Her Dorothea (2006) had sold three of the four remaining from an edition of 7, at €25,000 each, to collectors from England, Japan, and Switzerland.

New York’s Stux Gallery had a gorgeous booth devoted to Lydia Venieri and Ruud van Empel. Van Empel’s huge World #25 (2007) was already reserved for a German client for $55,000, but Stefan Stux seemed almost as pleased to point out that the local bazkulturmagazin had used a half-page image of the same picture in their preview of the fair.

Typically A-typical

Stux’s attitude is not unusual here. These gallerists do not derive pleasure simply from commercial success. All of them want their artists to do well and their clients to be happy, but my experience is that the sort of dealers who share the SCOPE ethos tend to have a closer relationship with their artists than their more established colleagues over at Art Basel. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but SCOPE gallerists and their artists tend to be earlier in their careers, their prices tend to be lower, and their attitudes tend to be more experimental and relaxed.  

For example, New York’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery has just about filled its booth with groundbreaking motion-based work, including some entrancing LED pieces by Jim Campbell.

Galleria Barbara Mahler from Lugano has one of the most entertainingly garish, brightly colored, and downright tasteless booths I’ve ever seen, with wonderful work by Piero Gilardi, Nausicaa Berbenni, and Ivana Falconi, who—echoing a theme in Venice—have made dozens of kitschy, decorated clay skulls, which are selling well at 2,500 Swiss Francs each.

Rody Douzoglou, of Bethesda, Md.’s Douz & Mille, was literally trembling with excitement as she talked about Tomas Rivas’ delightfully witty paper works based upon the forms of classical architecture. Rivas is a classic SCOPE artist, a former winner of a SCOPE Foundation emerging-artist award, and, Douzoglou told me, “Every time I show him, ARTINFO writes about him!” I’m pleased to keep the pattern going.

This Whole Thing Is a Performance

And then there is plenty of excellent work at SCOPE, which even ordinary folks might imagine taking home with them. Some of the most remarkable work is at the booth belonging to New York’s Magnan Emrich Contemporary and has been made by Fabian Pena Diaz from what he describes as “fragments of cockroach wings and antennas.” (Ew!) He hunts the roaches in graveyards and dumpsters in his native Cuba and reconfigures them into delicate little images of butterflies, crowns of thorns, or human body parts, on canvas, glass, stones, or lightboxes. His Reconstrucciones (2007) are $2,500 each, and they are my best investment tip for you.

“We’re just a young gallery doing crazy things,” is how Marc de Puechredon summed things up for me. His gallery has a huge, slightly separate space to one end of the E-Halle, which I guess is the benefit of being SCOPE’s landlord. He showed me performance stills by Marlene Haring, including a kitchen full of cooked pasta and a wonderful image called Because Every Hair is Different, which they’d blown up to billboard size in an edition of 10 ($3,600 each). “She’s our goddess,” he told me, pointing up at it. “This whole event is a performance.”