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.

Branding Art

Despite the stark formal contrast between the works by the Danish trio known as Superflex (Bjornstjerne Reuter Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nelson, who also have a sculptural installation in Art Unlimited) and the Swedish artist Miriam Backstrom, art dealer Nils Staerk, whose 10-year-old Copenhagen gallery showed in the 2004 Art Statements, found a persuasive correlation between their subject matter. Superflex’s Rebranding Denmark (€38,000, edition of 3) is a neon-LED sign of the burning of the Danish flag in the wake of the 2006 “Muhammad Cartoon Crisis” that sparked boycotts from Islamic communities. Wallpaper magazine co-founder Tyler Brule considered the event “an image worth millions to the brand Denmark.”

Backstrom’s video and photographs also address the issue of branding—in this case, that of artists, and her own personal identity, in particular. In a conceptual conceit, she invited an art student at Stockholm’s Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts and Design) to create an entire exhibition for a Swedish gallery, while Backstrom would take credit for it. The show was titled “Kira Carpelan by Miriam Backstrom.”

Backstrom produced a series of portraits and a video (€48,000, edition of 5) of Carpelan during the yearlong period of producing the show. The work interrogates the effects of this manipulative scenario on the emerging artist.

Staerk summarizes the point of juxtaposition between the two works in his Art Premiere show as follows: “What does a brand mean? What influence does that have?”

It’s a fitting question for this flashpoint in the increasing commercialization of art.