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Huma Bhabha
B. 1962Huma Bhabha’s materials and forms draw largely from the urban residue and historical overlay of the two cities that she has occupied over the course of her life: Karachi and New York. Using found materials and the detritus of everyday life, she creates haunting human figures that hover between abstraction and figuration, monumentality and entropy that address themes of colonialism, war, displacement, and memories of place. With a signature formal vocabulary, Bhabha embraces a postmodern hybridity that spans centuries, geography, art-historical traditions, and cultural associations. Her work includes references to ancient Greek kouroi, Gandhara Buddhas, African sculpture, and ancient Egyptian reliquary. Alongside historical references, Bhabha’s work remains insistently modern, looking to Giacometti, Picasso and Rodin for inspiration as she advances the projects of later artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her enlisted references overlap and multiply; once reconfigured they become an avenue to explore place, memory, war, and the pervasive histories of colonialism.
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Judy Chicago
B. 1939Judy Chicago is recognized worldwide as a pioneering feminist artist, author, and educator. In the first decade of her career (1965-1973), she created a significant body of Minimalist art imbued with themes of gender, sexuality, and the body through a reduced formal vocabulary of geometric shapes and color. Created in 1965 and repainted by the artist in 2002, Trinity is one of the earliest, unique examples of monumental sculpture from her Minimalist period, as well as the only existing, original example of canvas-stretched wooden sculptures produced in her early career. Simultaneously, in 1965 and 1967 Chicago created a series of unique and editioned gameboard sculptures. Through these small-scale sculptures, Chicago explored the transformative properties of surface, finish, and color. Multicolored Rearrangeable Game Board, 1965-1966 exists in two unique hand carved, sanded, and painted versions. Aluminum Rearrangeable Game Board, 1965—made of sandblasted aluminum—also exists in two unique versions. 1 Set Gerowitz Rare Wood Blocks, produced in 1967 in an edition of 6, consists of teak wood building blocks in a silkscreened canvas bag. The surname Gerowitz refers to Chicago’s legal name before her name change in 1970. In reducing minimalist sculpture to the scale of a child’s plaything, the blocks function as a proto-feminist critique of Minimalism as a male dominated “boys and their toys” clique. When asked about this period in her life Chicago explains, “Everything I know about color and surface comes out of my work in the 1960’s.”
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Niki de Saint Phalle
b. 1930- d. 2002Niki de Saint Phalle is known for her fantastical sculptures and immersive outdoor installations. By the mid-1960s, began a new series collectively titled Nanas, the title being drawn from a slightly rude French slang for women. Presented anew by Saint Phalle, the term was reapplied to important figurative sculptures, culminating in both large and small-scale works. Mini Nana Maison, 1966 is one of several hand-painted works titled Nana Maisons (Nana Houses). The works were often installed alongside maquettes and models for buildings. Saint Phalle went on to realize the Nanas as monumental functional sculpture such as HON, 1966 for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm—a six-ton, 89-foot-long polyester female figure which housed a milk bar and cinema. Through such works, she introduced the female form as architecture. The Ice Skaters, (Les Patineurs), 1974 is made of painted polyester—a material Saint Phalle used for her monumental Nanas—and a metal base by Jean Tinguely, longtime collaborator and Saint Phalle’s second husband. The work is one of a unique edition of 8, all embellished in different colors. As an important artist of the feminist movement and the development of early conceptual art, Saint Phalle’s pieces continue to stand out as playful, highly expressive, and visually bold.
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Lisa Brice
B. 1969Lisa Brice challenges the misogyny of historical figuration typically painted and looked upon by white men, taking back ownership over how women are portrayed. Working within the parameters of art history, she echoes iconic compositions by artists such as Degas, Manet and Picasso, but instead lends her subjects agency and self-possession. Her interiors draw on the artist’s personal experience and photo archive from living and working between South Africa, London and Trinidad over the past 20 years.
Repudiating the gaze of the viewer, formal devices such as mirrors, smoke and metal grilles veil her subjects. Brice’s paintings often play with the dimensions and format of doorways and emphasize the immediacy of our encounter with her muses as we address them face-to-face. The artist is interested in such threshold spaces where transitional states of being come into play; interior and exterior, public and private, artist and model. Her use of vermillion and cobalt blue in many of the works obscures the naturalistic skin tones of the body to further discourage an easy ‘read’ of the female form.
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Elizabeth Neel
B. 1975Elizabeth Neel works primarily in painting in an exploration of the hypnotic and complex nuances of abstraction, chaos in existence with order, and the individual in relation to the landscape. Her paintings are acts of accumulating fluid, working through a process of action and response. Neel’s expressionistic techniques include pouring, brushing, printing, rolling, folding, and dragging acrylic paint onto un-stretched raw canvas, embracing both the deliberate and the unpredictable qualities of paint. Once stretched, the paintings envelope the viewer in a mystic experience wherein new and different discoveries of shape and form are uncovered upon each viewing. The mirrored shapes often seen in her work are achieved by folding wet canvas, creating images that resemble those found in Rorschach tests — whereby a patient of psychoanalysis is shown abstract patterns and asked to identify what he or she can see. Much like the Rorschach, for Neel, there is not a singular truth behind each work, but a multitude of collective interpretations through gestural mark making. As the granddaughter of American portrait painter, Alice Neeland sister of filmmaker Andrew Neel, Elizabeth Neel’s practice is informed by her life in rural and urban spaces, the knowledge of film, the use of paint to conjure narrative and elicit figuration even in abstraction, as well as nods to art historic sources. Neel’s works are emphatically of this moment, as she collects an expanding index of anonymous images culled from the internet that reflect real world subject matter used as source material for her paintings — from animal x-rays to architecture, flora, and art historic references.
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Ruby Neri
B. 1970Ruby Neri draws upon 20th century West Coast traditions as well as a global catalogue of art historical and anthropological modes. She depicts the human body as a porous instrument of pleasure, terror, and everything in between. This places her within a lineage of recent Los Angeles-based artists that includes Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, while her penchant for hand-driven craft connects her to the Bay Area Figurative and Funk movements. The ceramic vessels that have dominated her production recently evoke both earthy tactility and psychological intimacy. Neri’s use of sprayed glazes links her ceramics to the street art she produced in the late 1990s as a member of what would become the San Francisco-based Mission School, connecting a contemporary urban art form with the archaic power of pre-historical wall-painting and object-making. Neri deftly combines elements of figuration, abstraction, graffiti, and folk art through clay, plaster, and paint to create complex, expressive sculptures.
Art Basel 2020 featuring Huma Bhabha, Judy Chicago, Niki de Saint Phalle, Lisa Brice, JUN 17 - JUN 26, 2020
