To the Brewery! A Tour of Liste Basel 2018 in 33 Photographs -ARTnews

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From the stairs of Liste.

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By 11:30 a.m. today in Basel, Switzerland, the street outside the former Warteck brewery, which is currently home to the Liste art fair, was jam-packed with people trading tales of travel and art events of the past weekend in Zurich as they gingerly darted around one another, angling for glasses of wine, big hunks of cheese, and cured meats. Art Basel week had officially begun, and as the fair’s gates opened, everyone made their way up the building’s Escher-like staircases, dodging bursts of rain to see the work brought by Liste’s 79 exhibitors, which tend to be young and venturesome.

Liste is the fair that everyone likes to like—even if it’s hot as hell inside and quite humid; even if it is almost impossible to find some of the galleries in the maze of spaces on one’s first, or even second, try; even if you sometimes literally can’t move for a few minutes because a space is so crowded. It is one of the art world’s genuine proving grounds—a rite of passage for emerging dealers with certain ambitions. The booths are hit or miss. Big, bad, bold ideas die here, or get picked up but are gone by next season. But some will endure. It’s a thrill getting to sift through it all.

Below, a look at some of the highlights at this year’s edition of Liste, which runs through Sunday.

A searing Mira Dancy painting at Chapter NY—German Expressionism cut through with, perhaps, California Funk. The gallery, located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, also has some delectable photographs on view by Willa Nasatir, one featuring a bit of deep-pink octopus.

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Sé gallery, of São Paulo, has a number of tender, charming paintings on the covers of bound books by Dalton Paula, whom some may recall from the just-closed New Museum Triennial in New York, or from the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo.

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Hulking, strong constructions with sound by Los Angeles artist Cooper Jacoby at the Paris gallery High Art, which also has a bewitching light animation of a bird by Londoner Matt Copson.

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A painting by Satoshi Kojima at New York’s Bridget Donahue gallery, which is also showing early works on paper by Lynn Hershman Leeson.

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One of the nice surprises of the fair, for me: a solo outing showcasing the multi-pronged talent of Katsunobu Yaguchi, who’s based in Ibaraki, Japan, by Aoyama/Meguro gallery of Tokyo. There’s video, drawing (hyperrealistic, of a fan), photography, and more, all united by a gimlet-eyed view on daily life—of being in the world. Here, a sculpture of 24 cherries.

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Some rather discomfiting paintings by Gökçen Cabada on offer at the Istanbul gallery Öktem Aykut.

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Demonic—or are they angelic?—heads of gypsum and plaster by Rikard Thambert at the Copenhagen gallery Bianca D’Alessandro. Feels a little like Gino De Dominicis by way of anime.

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Shanghai gallery MadeIn is going deep with Lu Pingyuan, who also resides in the city, showing his cartoon-ish sculptures and wall works, each sporting texts that push comical ridiculousness over into something darker and stranger.

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Here’s the text on that Lu Pingyuan for your perusal.

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Bambo (2017–18), by artist Kris Lemsalu, who splits her time between Tallin, Estonia, and Vienna, showing at Temnikova & Kasela, also of the Estonian capital city. These jaunty legs dancing about a glowing fire are, well, one of the odder things I’ve seen in recent memory. (The hip bones that resemble animal jaw are porcelain.)

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I have been having involuntary flashbacks to seeing this deeply disturbing but not altogether unimpressive Nathanial Mellors sculpture at the booth of Paris’s Galerie Crèvecoeur. Not sure what Paul Thek would think about this riff on this “Technological Reliquary” pieces, but making the bone visible is a really nice touch. I currently have goosebumps.

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Some artists do not make it easy on themselves: this is a hand-carved piece by the New York–based artist Sam Ekwurtzel at New York dealer Simone Subal, who’s also showcasing some quietly stunning paintings by the Toronto-based, Prague-born artist Veronika Pausova that filter bits of figuration—an ear, say—into abstract situations that nod to mid-century graphic design and certain forms of historical Process art.

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Sabot, of Cluj, Romania, went high-concept with its booth, asking its artists to do pieces as if for a shoe store, with each item accompanied by a little tag. Alexandra Zuckerman served up the wallpaper, which shows a sporting young child surrounded by shoes and cherries. Others presenting footwear include Răzvan Botiș, Lucie Fontaine, Nicolás Lamas, and more.

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Clearing—of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Brussels—has served up a kind of rollicking, retro-futuristic kind of pagan ritual scene, with new golden paintings containing photographs of fire by New Yorker Korakrit Arunanondchai alongside the enigmatic figures metal figures of French artist Jean-Marie Appriou, who opened a show with Eva Presnehuber in Zurich on Saturday.

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Easily one of the highlight of the fair: energetic, ingenious, explosively color paintings on paper by the New York legend Vaginal Davis, who has depicted storied figures from queer history—from entertainer Ray Bourbon to singer Gladys Bentley—using everything from coconut oil and nail enamel to eye shadow and hairspray. The gallery responsible is Dan Gunn, of London.

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Paris’s Sultana gallery has installed this soothing-looking canopy, composed of second-hand T-shirts from Mexico City’s Las Torress Market, in its lofty booth. It’s the work of the artist Pia Camil, who’s based in Mexico City.

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Kye Christensen-Knowles showing some meaty new paintings—in a gothed-out fin de siècle–meets–the Renaissance style—with New York gallery Lomex, this one based on a print by the German artist Hans Baldung from 1484/85–1545.

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At Shanghai’s Antenna Space, Li Ming is showing this full-wall video installation, Inspired by transliteration—Chapter Three: Wavelength, 2018. The gallery also has a very nice wall-hung sculptural piece by Guan Xiao on view: reeds of an artificial lamp stuck through a bicycle helmet, which crowns a curving sculpture that sits on a blue car rim.

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Gloriously beautiful conjured through all different kinds of perfect balance: Eva LeWitt pieces of foam, latex, and leather at Oslo’s VI, VII. Please buy me one!

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K.r.m. Mooney at the booth of San Francisco’s Altman Siegel, which is also showing photographs by Sara VanDerBeek and the hard-wrought paintings of Jessica Dickson. A potent trio.

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Tropical shirt patterns meet psychologically piquant images of nude bodies in the new paintings of Eliza Douglas on offer at Los Angeles’s Overduin & Co.

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London’s Project Native Informant has these stop-you-in-your-tracks paintings on board by Harumi Yamaguchi. Dated 1975 and 1977, top to bottom, they’re like great film comedies of the period (and later!) that seem to continue to throw off remarkable energies—critical, emotional, alluring—in the present.

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I’ve been hoping for years that some enterprising young artists would begin riffing on—or even ripping off—Niki de Saint Phalle’s more outlandish moments, and Zsófia Keresztes, who is Budapest-born and -based, has delivered the goods. This fluid—practically undulating—wave of a tiled sculpture is a showstopper, and would be for the colored hair alone. Vienna’s Gianni Manhattan has a whole solo show of her work.

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Sound the alarms: hot off of a stellar show of works on paper in the backroom of Donahue in New York, Jeanette Mundt is doing a one-person presentation with Société of Berlin, lining the booths with a skull, a building mushroom, at least one swimsuit model, undersea creatures, and other, tougher-to-pin-down subjects. Mundt is one of the best painters of the moment—inventive, gamely willing to chop and screw high and low to craft something that feels resonant and new—and this booth sings.

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Inside one of Liste’s many, many rooms.

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Speaking of great painting, Megan Marrin is showing with David Lewis of New York, and her superb showcase features one of her gargantuan corpse flowers alongside new shaped canvases (made of styrofoam!) that pair full-body cages with, in two cases, flowers—beauty and bondage tied together, right where they belong.

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Neue Alte Brücke, of Frankfurt, which has given over to of its walls to a spiderlike work of metal piping by Liz Craft. The PUT YOUR MOUTH . . . WHERE YOUR MIND IS number is by Will Benedict and the corner piece with the mirror is by Craft, too. It’s a handsome, wonderfully out-of-the-ordinary effort.

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Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, who just had an excellent show at Queer Thoughts in New York, has these drawings of LGBTQ protest and celebration—both winsomely sincere and slyly funny—at Truth and Consequences, of Geneva.

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Also at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen splicing together variously Britney Spears and Marlboro cigarettes with architecture. Why not, I suppose!

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Over at Park View/Paul Soto Gallery, the Argentinian artist Victoria Colmegna is showing tile paintings and architectural maquettes for an imagined spa (a project with the architect Pablo Castoldi). They’re all extroverted, fanciful structures, and one—white with large blue feathers in its interior—is a heartbreaker.

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Em Rooney, one of the stars of the current “New Photography” show at the Museum of Modern Art, has sent over a number of new photo constructions for the booth of Bodega gallery, which also just did a great solo show with her in New York. Most are wall hung—photos (of a young girl playing with someone who might be her mother) fashioned together with metal—but there’s a gorgeous table assemblage (“BEEN DARLING,” its metal wiring reads), too, and a portfolio of prints sitting on the dealers’ desk. These works seem to harbor deep memories that perhaps reveal themselves slowly. I’d like to spend some time with them.

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