Composed of deformed guardrails, the six-meter-high sculpture is part of the Berlin-based artist‘s eponymous group of work, Vertical Highways, developed for both indoor and outdoor spaces.
For several years, Bettina Pousttchi had used, in her sculptures, objects that structure the physical experience of the urban space, such as crowd barriers and street bollards. In order to liberate these everyday objects from their regulatory function, Pousttchi uses different techniques such as bending or pressing and alters their coloring. By detaching these objects from their initial context of meaning, she is able to transform them into signs of change, fluid structures and dissolving boundaries.
Jason Martin's work oscillates between lush colour painting and expressive representation. Complex methods of applying paint serve the artist as a means by which to ruminate on the rhetoric of painting. In the work El Capitàn III, 2023, Jason Martin uses velvet as a painting surface for the first time. The contrast between the soft materiality of the velvet and the three-dimensional body of colour produces a dialectic of movement and stillness, which is so characteristic of painting and which permeates Jason Martin’s entire oeuvre.
The entire volume of this work is permeated by innumerable close-lying and in some cases interlaced, sphere-like forms. They open up a surprising insight into the sculpture‘s internal depths. Resembling foam and yet conveying solidity, the work evokes organic forms, the innermost part of which generates the exterior.
12K & 24K gold leaf, spraypaint, acrylic paint and paint markers on six wood panels
152,4 x 274,3 cm 6-part, 60 x 108 in
Gajin Fujita masterfully plays with the codes of American popular culture and interweaves them with pictorial elements of the diverse ethnic cultures in a globalised world. Logos of multinational companies are fused with motifs reminescent of the woodcuts and ukiyo-e paintings of the Edo period. Gajin Fujita also emphasises the tension between tradition and the present by using gold leaf for the background, as was used for precious paintings from the Orient to the Occident.
Wolfgang Laib’s quiet, meditative work makes him one of the most fascinating artists of our time. His works, the Towers of Silence made of beeswax, were first exhibited in the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre in the Rucellai Chapel, San Pancrazio, Florence, Italy in 2019. Archetypes of temples, tombs and human habitats underlie the form of the works executed in sensual beeswax. The sublime as a transcendent state of exception in the face of an increasingly complex world can be experienced in all of Laib’s works
2023 Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany
2019 Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre, Rucellai Chapel, San Pancrazio, Florence, Italy
Clare Woods uses the genre of the still-life to deliver an ambiguous experience: her subjects entice with familiarity but subvert it aesthetically through the idiosyncratic method of pictorial conception and controlled gestural painting. Seemingly familiar things, such as a bouquet of flowers, take on a presence in Clare Woods’ work that is characterised more by a psychological and emotional state than by matters of taste.
The group of work Hedges, inspired by Tony Cragg's childhood memories of landscapes with hedges in his English home region, comprises filigree leaf- and blade-like forms. The organic configurations rouse associations with a hedge or tumbleweed. The red-brown, matt shimmering patina of the steel contributes to these natural associations. However, looking more closely, it becomes clear that the forms, in their buoyancy and arrangement, are artificial – they are man-made. Like a mobile, the formations seem to float in a perfectly balanced state, as if their shape could alter at any given moment.
Buchmann Galerie is delighted to present outstanding works by Tony Cragg, Wolfgang Laib, Jason Martin, Wilhelm Mundt, Clare Woods, Gajin Fujita, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Bettina Pousttchi at this year’s ART BASEL.
At Art Basel Unlimited we will present the new 6-meter- / 20-ft-high sculpture 'Vertical Highways' by Bettina Pousttchi. Made from guardrails, this work is part of the artist’s eponymous series, developed for indoor and outdoor spaces. A monumental sculpture similar to the one for Art Basel Unlimited is permanently installed in front of the Berlin Central Station.
For further information and images, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery.
Art|Basel 2024
Buchmann Galerie
Booth F18 Hall 2.0.
