In the early 1960s, after a successful career as a commercial artist, Andy Warhol decided to devote himself to the fine arts. Even so, consumerism and the media-oriented nature of mass production continued to be the main thrust of his work. The exhibition highlights the artist’s seminal years from 1961 to 1964. It was then that Warhol made the transition, step by step, from an individual visual idiom to mediatized, collective visual material and, along with it, to mechanized production. In consequence, he called into question the very foundations of artistic categories in the age of modernism.

The exhibition is the first ever to explicitly address this transitional period in Warhol’s œuvre, demonstrated, for example, by the fact that in 1962 Warhol painted more than one variation on the same picture. One version may show traces of the gestural and expressive painting process while another – though still painted by hand – already shows the diagrammatic reduction and coolness of his later work. In selected groups of work, viewers can study his approach to silkscreening on a monochromatic ground. Paintings or drawings of Campbell´s Soup Cans and Dollar Bills are especially indicative of the scope of his work from the gestural beginnings to repetitive series of prints. The exhibition culminates in the famous Star series of Elvis and Liz, a gallery of Death & Disaster and the first Flowers series of 1964. Some 70 paintings and drawings will be on view, including major works from the holdings of the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Kupferstichkabinett.

The sculptures, gouaches, embroideries, photographs and installations by Enrico David (*1966 in Ancona, lives and works in London) feature a broad spectrum of cultural reference systems. Among others, these include Arte Povera, assemblage, set design and graphic art motifs from the 1920s and 30s, as well as numerous literary sources and elements from craft tradition. The works are characterised by enigmatic representations of the body, which are distorted or broken down into fragments, expressing the impossibility of a bodily unity. Different elements coalesce into a remnant—a head, limb, or indeterminate swelling.

The current exhibition circles around just a few elements. At the beginning and end are two photographs that, if considered as two halves, can only unravel with some difficulty. The first shows two small boys occupied with a piano. The facial expression of one of them seems discontented, his gesture forced. It is the artist himself, who at the age of three posed as a model for toy instrument advertisements. The second photograph, a strangely ingratiating portrait of a man, stands in stark contrast to the corporeal children pictures. The grotesque display of masculinity, with the unambiguous function of seduction, is repeated with a slightly altered facial expression in another photograph. They come from a mail-order catalogue for sex implements and stand for a certain artificially exaggerated type that can be exchanged at whim.

These two pictures provide the overlay for two larger-than-life balancing figures in wood, wire and paper, whose form is borrowed from a toy design by Koloman Moser for the Wiener Werkstätte from the 1910s. The knobby egg shapes—torso, head and arms merge into a single form—stand on two thin wooden bowlegs and runners. They comprise the center of the exhibition, surrounded by freestanding partition walls, on which the man’s faces appear again as large-format mounted pictures. The motifs in the publication that accompanies the exhibition are treated the same way, allowing the pages of the book to be read in parallel to the three-dimensional installation in space.

A second installation presents itself as a kind of diorama, a playhouse that exploits the effect of trompe-l’oeil. We are spectators at a scene based on the Surrealist photo collage vielle femme et enfant (ca. 1935) by Dora Maar. The original picture shows a panelled room, the floor covered with mud, and a boy rubbing up against a woman. David reconstructs the space in its main features, but combines these with very personal materials, based on the bedroom that his father designed for him in the 1970s. The figures in the background have been exchanged for depictions of a wooden doll and the artist himself.

Enrico David moved to London in the late 1980s, where he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art. Last year, a comprehensive individual exhibition was presented at the ICA London. Along with the exhibition How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy? a museum brochure is to be published with texts by Manfred Hermes and Darian Leader (German / English).

Generous support for the exhibition and its accompanying publication has been provided by the “Fonds für künstlerische Aktivitäten im Museum für Gegenwartskunst der Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung und der Chistoph Merian Stiftung.”

next exhibition:
Little Theatre of Gestures, May 16 – August 15, 2009

Hannah Villiger described herself as a sculptor throughout her life, and until the late ’70s she produced 3-dimensional works. In 1980, she began to concentrate almost exclusively on the medium of photography. She repeatedly photographed herself, her Polaroid camera sometimes very close, groping along her naked body, and sometimes only as far away as her outstretched arm would allow. This generated fragmentary image details of single body parts or parts folded into each other, which were turned, reflected, enlarged many times, and mounted on aluminum sheets as color photographs. Overexposure, blurring of focus, and extreme light/dark or color contrast often gave rise to a high degree of abstraction, as did the act of turning individual photographs and arranging them side by side or in a multi-part block. Motifs of unusual pictorial perspectives come abruptly into contact, which in their interplay possess a weightlessness consistent with the idea of an image of the self. Photographs of her entire body or face are consciously avoided, so that freed from any concrete narrative contexts or imposed societal constraints, an atmosphere can be created between intimate observation and objective documentation.

In the exhibition, nearly all the photographic holdings of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, the Kunstkredit Basel, and the Kunstverein Basel are shown, as well as several works from her estate.

We are very glad to be able to present Hannah Villiger, one of the most significant Swiss women artists, who died much too early in 1997 at the age of only 45. She studied at the School of Design in Luzern and settled in Basel in 1977, where she gained critical attention with spectacular exhibitions such as Neid (Kunsthalle Basel, 1985) and Skulptural (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 1988/89). She secured international recognition for her contribution to the São Paolo Biennale of 1994 (together with Pipilotti Rist). In the years following her death, institutions including the Kunsthalle Basel, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the NGBK in Berlin, and last year the Musée d’art modern et contemporain in Geneva dedicated comprehensive presentations to her singular body of work.

next exhibition:
Enrico David, 16 January – 3 May, 2009

The three artists Ayşe Erkmen (born, 1949), Ceal Floyer (born, 1968) and David Lamelas (born, 1964) are united by an artistic approach that follow a reduced grammar of form. Their individual handling of time and space, their preoccupations with limits and possibilities for the creation of alternative communications and cognitive processes has been the motive of this group exhibition. The exhibition title Above – the – Fold* refers to an artistic strategy, for the creation of works, in which the surface structures, on the one hand, follow the semantics of the exhibition space and transform it, and on the other, refer beyond their own form to contexts, which often only become legible in the works’ subtexts.

Lamelas numbers amongst the pioneers of conceptual art and had already created significant works by the end of the 1960s establishing the hybrid character of the exhibition location. The use of a variety of media is characteristic of his way of working and incorporates sculpture, performance, photography and film. David Lamelas’ work Dos Espacios Modificados (two modified spaces) is to be reconstructed for the first time for this exhibition (after more than 40 years since its inception). It can be regarded similarly both as starting and turning point in Lamelas’s unique oeuvre. His contribution representing Argentina in the 1967 São-Paulo Biennial conceived as a critique of the tradition of an installation institution won Lamelas international recognition. It addressed Oskar Niemeyer’s spiral- formed spatial conception of the exhibition hall and thus the cultural and societal significance of a building that was one of the first modernist constructions of the post-war period. Corner Piece (1966) and Límite de una proyección I (Limit of a projection, 1966) are also architectonic interventions in which the architecture itself or the limits of the medium are made the subject of the work.

Ceal Floyer’s works, which are composed of light projections, videos, audio pieces, paper works and sculptures stimulate certain associations evoked by incongruities between object and denotation. The formal constructions are simple and reduced to a bare few elements. Frequently the same materials are used in her installations so it is much more the case that the technical apparatus itself is determining as constructor of the word game and the work itself. A renowned work by Floyer, Door (1995) created from an arrangement of light, electricity cable, door and projector simply throws a strip of light from along the crack at the bottom of a door. It corresponds to the notion of light shining from a neighbouring room. The ambiguity in the game of deception is also borne in the title. The word “Door” itself does not evoke something like “light” – what one sees is a door upon which light is beamed. In turn a video projection, newly developed for the exhibition situation, titled Viewpoint takes up a situation from everyday life, by scrutinizing the “taken for grantedness” of its own visual perception.

Ayşe Erkmen’s works are often the result of intensive examinations with specific locations and are conceived exclusively for the length of an exhibition. In her installations and architectonic interventions she concentrates on the divergent legibility of their societal and historically implied architectures and surroundings. For this concrete situation she has created some new works which respond to existing structures of the museum building in varying designs. One Half Each describes in a few words everything that the work deals with: three carpets, which were made in Istanbul – her hometown – trace the particularly eye-catching ground plan lines of the three floors of the new building in half scale. On the top floor, laid over one another, woven in luminescent colour, they reproduce the abstract two-dimensional image of the floors crossed beforehand. The temporary nature of her works is expressly legible here – only with great difficulty could the works be adapted for other spaces. The respective dependence of the objects on the context of their origins and location of their presentations, become the explicit subject.

An accompanying magazine is to appear for the exhibition. It is simultaneously the opener for a substantial publication titled Above – The – Fold, published by Hatje Cantz publishers (German/English) in July, 2008, featuring texts by Nikola Dietrich, Kassandra Nakas, Jacob Lillemose and Jan Verwoert.

*In newspaper jargon this means the “lead” or “front-page story”.

The work of Israeli painter and draftsman Avner Ben-Gal (b. 1966) shows barren land-scapes with burning houses and isolated figures. The implied narratives have nothing in common with the propagandistic images of the mass media which confront us from the Near East day after day. Instead they create a reality that interprets recent history within the framework of their own poetic and fantastical universe. At the same time, the grim undertones of these often mythologically or allegorically charged pictures engage in subtle reflection on the artist’s painterly means. Hence, the dreamlike scenarios literally escape observation, being obscured and sometimes even invisible under a monochrome veil of colour.

Because of his biography, Avner Ben-Gal’s work has often been brought into connection with current affairs in specific places, and interpreted as an apocalyptic vision. For the artist, history is not captured as an iconic distillation; instead, an atmospheric and emotional quality is set into the picture, as it emerges from the specific practice of painting. Underlying his pictures is the repressed and the already seen, which only in the process of painting can be unearthed and elaborated. New, never before seen images are not found in this way, but the entire complexity of visual representation makes itself visible.

Avner Ben-Gal has been represented in international solo and group exhibitions. The selection on view in this solo exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel will include some of his most recent paintings
and drawings.

On the occasion of the exhibition there will be a catalogue published at Hatje Cantz with a contribution by Philipp Kaiser and a conversation between Yael Bergstein and Avner Ben-Gal; 152 pages, CHF 42.–.

Fokus: Olafur Eliasson
18 January – 13 July 2008
Recent acquisitions from the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel