VIP Opening (by invitation only) Monday, June 11th 6pm Free public Vernissage: Tuesday, 12 June, 6pm Public Days Wednesday, June 13 - Sunday, June 17, 2018
Flor Garduño | La Mujer, Mexico, 1987 | Carbon Pigment Print | 50 x 60 cm | Edition of 30
Renato D'Agostin | The Beautiful Cliché, Venezia, 2010 | Silver Gelatine Print | 67.6 x 101.6 cm | Edition of 5
BILDHALLE will highlight the photo basel booth with three artists who are newly representing: Renato D'Agostin (*1983, Italy), Flor Garduño (*1957, Mexico) and Carolle Bénitah (*1965, Morocco). A special focus on works by the Spanish artist duo Albarrán Cabrera and a selection of photographs by legendary Swiss photographers René Burri, Werner Bischof and René Groebli will complete the presentation.
Renato D'Agostin: «For a moment, your breathing halts and the shutter is released. You see how everything is merging in front of the camera, how every line is starting to make sense, every movement is becoming an actor on the stage, from the most simple gesture to the most complex dynamic. This is how I envision a great shot.» Dislocating subjects from their realities, D'Agostin captures his perception of the space that surrounds him, showing the relationship between architecture and people, and thus opening a new portal into the imagination of the viewer. He photographs visual elements that most of us won't even notice and leaves his personal mark on every picture he takes. Mastering every aspect of black and white photography, D'Agostin knows better than anyone how to imbue a classic gelatin silver print with a very contemporary sensibility.
Flor Garduño: «I would argue that the ordinary and the historic, or perhaps the symbolic - since these two realms intersect in my photographs - are a celebration of fertility. I want go express our dignity, beauty, suffering, and resistance. This is the force of the female gender.» Flor Garduño is the most important female contemporary photographer from Mexico. She represents an unique style of descriptive photography infused with mystical archetypes that are characteristic of Mexican Surrealism. Her images create a bridge between worlds - the sacred and the quotidian, the body and the spirit - allowing us glimpses that are, expressed in the words of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, «a moving portrait of eternity.»
Carolle Bénitah: «I reconstruct the mixed memory of my family by inventing and tailoring from found images all of what has disappeared, people as well as places. I choose positive and idealized aspects of an identity in order to illustrate all these fables that tend to be told about ancestors.» In her artistic work, Carolle Bénitah investigates her own biography. Applying gold onto old family photos that she collects at flea markets, she obscures the particular the identity of the depicted person, opening them up for one's own recollections and projections. Her photographs wake the viewer's biographical memory while simultaneously attesting to her own family history.
Photo Basel is Switzerland’s first and only international art fair dedicated to photography based art. Photo Basel brings together galleries from around the world in a unique, authentic setting. For its collectors, visitors or buyers – Photo Basel is an active platform which fosters the dialog between all actors of the photography community and beyond.
The Ravestijn Gallery will bring works by two artists: Alinka Echeverria and Vincent Fournier.
Alinka Echeverría is a Mexican-British artist, working in artist’s film, moving image, photography and installation. She holds a Masters degree in Social Anthropology and Development from the University of Edinburgh (2004), and a post graduate degree in photography from the International Center for Photography in New York (2008). Her work brings a critical approach to questions of visual representation. She was recently selected for FOAM Museum’s talent award with the research project she made during BMW’s Art & Culture Residency at the Nicéphore Niépce Museum in 2015. In 2012 she was voted ‘International Photographer of the Year’ by the Lucie Awards with her work from South Sudan, and in 2011 won the HSBC Prize for Photography with work from Mexico. Her work has been widely exhibited at international venues, including La Maison European de la Photographie in Paris, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Moscow Photobiennale, as well as solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles and The California Museum of Photography. Her work is part of several public and institutional collections including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée Nicéphore Niépce in France, BMW Art & Culture Collection and The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Recent commissions include the Swiss Foundation of Photography and BBC Four, for whom she presented a three part series: The Art That Made Mexico.
Vincent Fournier was born in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) in 1970 and grew up in France on the coast of Brittany. After undergraduate studies in Sociology and a Masters in Visual Arts, he obtained the Diploma of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles in 1997. Fascinated by science and technologies, Fournier explores the future of our societies and the biological changes to come. His photographs are between fantasy and reality, showing us the next innovations to come and what could happen to our civilization.
Tom Benson - someone like you (grey) 3/9 + 4/9 + 5/9, 2017, UV cured ink on paper, 48 x 38 cm, series of 9
In this year’s presentation at photo basel, Galerie Albrecht will focus on two artists who integrate reflections on photography as a medium and on the act of taking photographs into their work:
What happens when a photograph is taken, and what is the relationship between object (that which is photographed) and active subject (the photographer)?
“If seeing precedes words, what precedes seeing?,” asks Olivier Richon. And: Does the motif of a photograph become an object, or is the photographer the object and the motif the active subject that wants to be photographed and casts a spell on the photographer, since, like a fetish, it has magic powers? Oliver Richon takes leave of the notion that a photograph is merely a document of a real object or a real situation, created by the photographer. Even without Photoshop, the photograph is intrinsically subject to manipulation, he suggests, either by the photographer’s subjective gaze or by the manipulative charisma of the motif, which forces a photograph. His photographs stage scenarios that seem familiar and seemingly easy to read, but yet they are difficult to decipher. They are quite mysterious: Allegories? Still lifes? Surreal worlds?
Tom Benson puts the matter slightly differently. How does material influence vision? Does a work’s surface, and the manner in which it is presented, influence our perception? His photographs, printed with UV-proof ink on paper, approach the field of drawing. The haptic quality of the paper, the hair, and the skin, the material of the blouse play an important role. They bring the object closer, make it tactile. The young woman’s gaze is initially pensive and averted, slowly she turns her head towards the beholder, and just before she faces him directly, the series stops.
But the movement has an effect. At first the beholder is a voyeur who penetrates the private sphere of the young woman with his gaze, at the end he is the one who is excluded, her gaze passing him by. The changing gaze, its different presentation, transforms our perception.
Private Days (by invitation only) Tuesday, June 12, 2018 | Wednesday, June 13, 2018 Vernissage (by invitation only) Wednesday, June 13, 2018 Public Days Thursday, June 14 - Sunday, June 17, 2018
Hamiltons presents an exhibition of early, rare work by Irving Penn, one of the most esteemed and influential photographers of the twentieth century. Captured in the late 1930s and early 1940s in New York and the American South, Penn’s photographs of signs are a rare instance of work made outside the studio.
In some of his earliest forays with a camera, Irving Penn took careful notice of handmade signs. In them, he saw personal expressions of a merchant’s hope for more business, a preacher’s longing for a congregation, a myriad of ways in which to catch the eyes of passers-by. The variety and combination of words and symbols might have appealed to the young Penn as a form of commercial ‘portraiture’, each a reflection of its owner-creator.
In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented ‘Irving Penn: Centennial’, an exhibition now travelling internationally. The show includes early works from the 1930s, a series of photographs of storefronts, hanging signs, and shadows in the urban landscape. They reveals Penn’s interest in documenting American reality, beautiful or not – a perspective highlighted in this presentation of a rarely seen group of works.
Preview (by invitation only) Monday, June 11, noon to 5 p.m. Public Opening Reception: Monday, June 11, 5 to 9 p.m. Public Days Tuesday June 12 - Sunday, June 17
Preview (by invitation only) Monday, June 11, 10 am – 2 pm Public Opening Reception: Monday, June 11, 2 – 7 pm Public Days Tuesday June 12 - Saturday, June 16
Preview (by invitation only) Tuesday June 12, 10 am – 4 pm Public Opening Reception: Tuesday June 12, 4 – 7 pm Public Days Wednesday June 13 - Sunday, June 17
