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AsArt Baselexpands its global footprint, having added Hong Kong to its lineup last month, the world’s premier art fair will be livening up its 2013 offerings at the European flagship event June 13–16. “It’s by far the most radical shift within the placement of the fair since I’ve come to Basel,” says director Marc Spiegler. “A lot of people will be surprised.”
As in real estate, location is everything. The number of exhibitors in Hall 2, the main sector, remains roughly the same at 232. However, two notable departures this year set off a Monopoly board shuffle that allowed some to advance their placement. Hauser & Wirth and Helly Nahmad Gallery will take over the former booths of Zurich’s Galerie Bruno Bischofberger and Geneva’s Galerie Jan Krugier on the ground floor. Also moving downstairs are White Cube and Metro Pictures; 303 Gallery and Sadie Coles HQ assume the vacated spots upstairs.
Perhaps the most notable alteration this year will be the opening of Herzog & de Meuron’s27,000-square-foot addition, which means the installation-focused Unlimited (formerly Art Unlimited) will get the full run of the original Hall 1. That venue will host 79 large-scale projects, a whopping 30 percent increase from last year. “We have a lot of artists from Asia, but also from South America, which is certainly an important trend,” says curator Gianni Jetzer. Alison Jacques Gallery, of London, is presenting the late Brazilian Constructivist Lygia Clark's aluminum structure Fantastic Architecture, conceived in 1963 but never before produced. Under the aegis of Gladstone Gallery, Huang Yong Ping is re-creating Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, 2012, while South Indian artist L.N. Tallur, shown at the fair by Nature Morte and Chemould Prescott Road, makes his Basel debut with the inverted-roof installation Veni, Vidi, Vici (about $235,000) made of tiles manufactured in South India by missionaries from Basel.
Many artists are seizing the opportunity to go big. Chen Zhen's Purification Room, 2010, a domestic interior entirely crusted in dried earth, comes courtesy of Galleria Continua, with a price tag approaching $1 million. New York’s Marlborough Chelsea is also taking an architectural tack with ArtichokeUnderground, a lofted, 1,200-square-foot version of Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s interactive sculptural environments. The piece will be constructed in three days on-site using six modular rooms and can be had for about $700,000. Gallery director Max Levai praised Unlimited’s expansion, saying there is “real value” to encouraging collecting with such ambition. “I think the art world is in a phase where people are not just turning out objects,” Spiegler says.
The fair director also notes a preponderance of historical work that is inspiring current artists or sparking institutional reconsideration. Yvon Lambert of Paris, is showing works by the Conceptualist and Minimalist innovators Carl Andre, Niele Toroni, and Douglas Gordon, along with younger talents like Nick van Woert and Carlos Amorales. With the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective touching down at the Centre Pompidou, Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art, of New York, is mounting a solo booth of significant Lichtenstein paintings and sculptures. Los Angeles’s Cherry and Martin is bringing Surrealism on TV, a 1986 slide show by the photo-appropriationist Robert Heinecken. Meanwhile, London’s Timothy Taylor Gallery is presenting a suite of SusanHiller’s work, including ashes from 1960s drawings that she later burned and Enquiries/ Inquiries, her pivotal 1973 piece using photos and neon that subverts images from American encyclopedias. Says Spiegler, “It’s a moment where people are looking back as much as they’re trying to define what the future will hold.”
Olivier Belot, director at Lambert, says that despite the changes, Basel still reigns. “It’s the most serious and institutional fair, welcoming collectors but also museum directors and curators from all over the world,” he says. “It’s important to select only the best pieces of each artist.”
To preview images from Art Basel in Basel 2013, click on the slideshow.
