ARTNEWS
On Wednesday night at the Grand Hotel Trois Rois in Basel, Switzerland, Gavin Brown was sitting with the collector Richard Chang, the artist Dustin Yellin, and Nelson Mandela’s son, Kweku Mandela. At a certain point, the conversation turned toward Brown’s booth in the fair, which was once again at its usual perch, on the second floor right by the escalators. I told him that I really liked the works by Brian Belott.
“I know, right?” Brown responded. “He’s fantastic, we’ve just started working with him.”
Belott is now on the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise artist roster, despite a long-time affiliation with so-called Donut District pioneers 247365 in Brooklyn. When that gallery released a roster last March, Belott was the first on the list (OK, it was alphabetical) and he remains on 247356’s website. But the prominent placement of a Belott work in the middle of the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Art Basel booth—a big table covered chockablock with his signature stone calculators, stone remote controls, and other stone doohickeys—could mean he’s transitioning to a new gallery. He also has work in “All Summer and a Day,” the group show open on the weekends at Unclebrother, the Thai restaurant in Hancock, New York, that’s owned and operated by Brown and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
What’s more, he’s curating the summer show at Brown’s third-floor space on Grand Street in Chinatown, which will feature work by cohorts such as Darren Bader, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Josh Kline, Ajay Kurian, and Katherine Bernhardt. It opens June 30.
On Thursday afternoon at Art Basel, a friend was inquiring about the Belott work, which is untitled and dated 2014–16.
The big display of stone calculators and other stone devices is priced at $65,000, and as of Friday it had yet to find a buyer. Perhaps Belott’s appearance Saturday on the Artists’ Artists panel, a talk in the Conversations sector hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, will help sell the work.