Artists Pair Off at Art Premiere

Art Premiere is one of several special sectors at Art Basel designed to admit younger or emerging galleries that are not established enough to meet the five-years-in-business and proven program requirements of the main gallery section. It is often a steppingstone to full participation.

To make these sectors interesting from a curatorial standpoint, Art Basel often sets certain requirements. Art Statements, for instance, comprises single-artist shows, while Art Premiere, now in its second edition, offers juxtapositions between two artists.

This year’s exhibition was organized according to this intriguing curatorial proposition: “works by artists representing different cultural backgrounds, different generations, or different artistic approaches … set off against each other.” The responses from the 16 participating galleries—up from 12 last time—were quite diverse, with some correlations between paired artists more readily apparent than others.

Elective Affinities

The letter of intent submitted by New York artists Sean Paul and Cheyney Thompson directly confronted the rules of engagement, acknowledging that the show’s stipulations “may or may not be at odds with the individual practices the artists intend to accommodate and/or organize.” However, they did find that they “shared certain affinities for” such random items as the Aerogel NASA uses to collect space dust, the designer cooking pans at the MoMA gift shop, and “recent transformations of the symbolic economy being promoted in certain sectors of the New York real estate market.”

In their installation, the designer pots and pans are arrayed in a vitrine. Meanwhile, a video features footage of the UBS Exchange in New Jersey, the massive public housing project Stuyvesant Town in New York, and an interview with Sara Fitzmaurice of Fitz & Co., the U.S. publicist for Art Basel.

Gil Presti, director of the London-based Sutton Lane gallery, which participated in the 2005 Art Statements, insisted that the work is “not a critique for them; they just wanted to describe what the fair was without any negativity.”

“Both [artists] investigate modes of distribution, context, and location,” he said.

Paul and Thompson found the collaboration so rewarding that they plan to extend it into a duo show at the gallery’s Paris branch. Meanwhile, an American collector has purchased their entire Basel installation, including the unique assemblage and the editioned video and photographs.

Bridging the Generation Gap

Thomas Bayrle and Philippe Decrauzat successfully coordinated the individual works they showed together at Galerie Francesca Pia, which just moved to Zurich after 17 years in Bern. The 70-year-old Bayrle—a German Pop artist (and influential professor at the experimental Staedelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt) who made a comeback at Gavin Brown Enterprise in New York last year—reproduced three motifs from the brightly colored wallpaper he created in the 1970s that featured Barbie-and-Ken-like figures undressing (€9,000 per set, or €15,000 for an installation combining motifs like those in the booth).

Decrauzat, an emerging neo-Op artist already in the Jumex Collection, sold out of his black-and-white canvases inspired by the 1960s cult film Peeping Tom and the book Hollywood Babylon (€4,000-€18,000).

The generation gap between Rio artists Arthur Omar, 50, and Abraham Palatnik, an 80-year-old innovator of kinetic sculpture and geometric abstraction, also enriched their dialogue at Galeria Nara Roesler, a newcomer to Art Basel after 30 years in Sao Paolo. Omar took frames from Palatnik’s files and digitally multiplied their kaleidoscopic effect, then organized the repeated images in rows, much like the veteran’s progression of wood panels and paperboard slices that create an optical illusion of movement. A number of Omar’s photographic works sold for $18,000 apiece, but Daniel Roesler pledged to maintain the curatorial integrity of the installation by not parting with any until the fair ends.