ALL PHOTOS: ANDREW RUSSETH/ARTNEWS
Liste, Basel’s fair for emerging galleries and artists, opened its 20th anniversary edition this morning in the rain, but that did not keep away the crowds, which came to see work from 79 galleries hailing from 31 countries. The quality is high and there are some very welcome surprises, but it can sometimes be tough to see them in the labyrinthine arts center that the fair calls home. Below, a tour of the fair.
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Bland process–based abstraction is in mercifully low supply, but it is here, as with these two Sophie Bueno-Boutelliers, at Freymond-Guth, Zurich.
Thankfully the gallery also has this surprise in its booth, a portrait of the artist Eleanor Antin by Sylvia Sleigh, from 1968. It's a beauty, and one of the oldest works at the fair.
A crowd favorite—sexy cartoon paintings by Jonathan Gardener—paired with a Sara Barker, at Mary Mary, Glasgow.
I think we have all at some point wanted a mohair and silk sweater with an ejaculating penis on it. Jaanus Samma is on the case, at Temnikova & Kasela of Tallinn, Estonia.
Lucie Stahl at Dépendance, Brussels.
I have no clue what Calvin Marcus's endgame is. One moment he's showing goofy green paintings with very vaginal ceramic chickens on them at Clearing in Bushwick, the next minute he's presenting these meticulous little houses, proposing future exhibitions or, perhaps, real-estate offers.
Renaud Jerez at Crèvecoeur, Paris.
Charlie Billingham at Supportico Lopez, Berlin.
A spiral staircase down to Truth and Consequences basement space.
The final destination.
Than Hussein Clark pieces, of silk and ribbon, at VI, VII, Oslo. Mathew, of Berlin and New York, also has Clarks on offer.
More Clarks at VI, VII.
A Zarouhie Abdalian loaf of bread at San Francisco gallery Altman Siegel.
New York dealer David Lewis played the single-artist, single-work gambit, with this irregularly shaped Lucy Dodd.
A Dodd detail.
Débora Bolsoni at São Paulo's Jacqueline Martins.
A welcome breath of fresh air—meaning slightly older art—came from Rome's Monitor gallery, which had a miniature survey on offer of work by New Yorker Duane Zaloudek, including strangely sexual paintings he made with flat planes of color in the 1960s. This is Milarepa, 1968.
Amalia Ulman at Arcadia Missa, London.
More Ulmans. Arcadia also has work from Ann Hirsch and Jesse Darling.
New York's 47 Canal gallery, which is now located at 291 Grand Street, has a two-person show, with the excellent Stewart Uoo and, pictured here, Anicka Yi, who just opened a superb show at Kunsthalle Basel.
Wonderful Whitney Claflins—some wispy and barely there, others effervescent—at the New York gallery Real Fine Arts.
Reto Pulfer created this tent at London's Hollybush Gardens.
Inside, beds and blueberries await you.
Travess Smalley prints on aluminum at Vienna's Galerie Andreas Huber.
Marlie Mul's Cigarette Hedgehog (as my colleague Nate Freeman has noted, there are quite a few cigarette works here), 2015, at Berlin's Croy Nielsen, which also has new wall-hung Nina Beiers that pair Hermès ties and wigs under glass.
It's weird how, even though most people seem to agree that slacker abstraction is hackneyed, it just keeps coming. These Fabio Marco Pirovinos, at London's Ancient & Modern, are at least punchier than most, made with UV ink on canvas.
The Paris outfit High Art has a bounty of insane constructions by Max Hooper Schneider. This one pairs a wedding cake with leeches. Prospective buyers were told that they would need to feed the leeches about once every six months. If they should die, though, no matter: just buy fresh ones and drop them in.
Schneider is also responsible for this very hardcore hanging method for his obsessive abstract drawings.
For his solo show with Aoyama/Meguro, a Tokyo gallery, Hiroaki Morita has punctured water bottles with the tiniest of holes so that their water drips very slowly—drop by drop—into water bottles below.
A single photo cannot convey just how good Sam Pulitzer's solo outing with Mexico City's House of Gaga is. Framed intimate pencil drawings line the walls, filled with eggs, dragons, and symbols of the occult. It's easily one of the best booths at the fair.
Three beauties by Emily Mae Smith at the booth of New York dealer Laurel Gitlen have traces of William Copley, the Chicago Imagists, and advertising posters from some bygone era. No idea what's happening in that painting at right, which appears to include teeth, netting of some sort, an ass, and a dangling fishing line.
At London's Jonathan Viner gallery, Amir Nkravan offers these remarkably corny Op paintings that are located in the same abstract trompe-l'œil dead-end as Ryan Sullivan.
Pure pleasure: Madrid gallery Maisterravalbuena has a trove of the little sculptures that New York artist B. Wurtz makes out of bits of string, wire, the odd slice or block of wood, and items he recycles from the grocery store, like produce netting and plastic bags. They make most other art look ridiculously decadent. Every art fair should be required to show some.
A solo affair by Georgie Nettle at Lars Friedrich of Berlin.
New paintings of Macaulay Culkin by Pentti Monkkonen, who is perhaps best known for his witty depictions of trucks in profile, at Geneva's Truth and Consequences.
Korakrit Arunanondchai and Steve Bishop at London's Carlos/Ishikawa.
Hannah Perry's Smoke Machine, 2015, at Amsterdam dealer Jeanine Hofland's booth. Speakers behind the metallic fabric make it vibrate intensely, giving it an Op and kinetic charge.
At New York's Essex Street gallery, Chadwick Rantanen's telescoping sculptures stretch up...
...and up...
...and up...
...and up to fill the spaces in which they are installed.
At Berlin's Micky Schubert, one of the many sculptures of children on offer at the fair: Benedicte Gyldenstierne Sehested's Untitled (child size figure, red string), 2015.
An untitled new Sergei Tcherepnin at Overduin & Co., of Los Angeles.
Handsome Will Benedicts, both untitled, both 2015, also at Overduin.
At Dubai's Green Art Gallery, the Iranian Nazgol Ansarinia offers a hidden cache of tools—keys, a cell phone—in Metal Chair, 2013.
At Rome's Frutta gallery, Stephen Felton's big artistic idea seems to be to make cleaner, slightly decorative versions of Joe Bradley's "Schmagoo" paintings.
Jesse Wine has a trove of ceramics at London's Limoncello gallery.