And another ART BASEL week has passed and I am currently looking back at all the shows and art works I have seen and am trying to sort out a coherent blogpost. There is a lot going on in Basel during the Art Basel week: Art Basel, Art Unlimited, Design Miami Basel, Liste, VOLTA, photobasel..

Art Basel brought together 290 premier galleries, presenting works ranging from early 20th century Modern art to the most contemporary pieces.While galleries from Europe continued to be strongly represented, the show featured returning and new exhibitors from across the globe, including Asia, Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Let’s start with what I loved at ART UNLIMITED. I absolutely loved the work of Alicia Framis represented by the Galeria Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid, Spain. She was born 1967 in Barcelona, Spain and lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her piece is called LifeDress, 2018 and is a mixed media installation with 9 dresses made out of airbag fabric. I found this information on her website:

The Lifedress, 2018 offers a new way for demonstration against sexual harassment and violence towards women, and consists of dresses made out of airbag fabric from cars: a high tech material made in Japan with a high resistance to impacts and fire. Each dress is made to protect against a different form of (sexual) harassment, and designed to change form when intimidation occurs. The work can be seen as a social comment on gender patterns in our society nowadays. Some forms of sexism and ways of speaking about women are so engrained into our society that we hardly notice them anymore or brush them off as ‘locker room banter’. There are myriad ways in which women try to protect themselves in their everyday lives against sexual harassment and violence and these dresses make us aware of this crude reality. Framis employs elements of technology, activism and performance in this new work. With LifeDress she aims to bring women together and open the debate. Framis discusses a serious issue, but through a surrealistic act. New ways of demonstration for women is a topic Framis has been exploring over the past two decades with works such as Anti_dog, 100 Ways to Wear a Flag and Is My Body Public?. These fashion demonstrations are tools to protest against inequality towards women.

My favorite piece of VOLTA is by Irene Grau, she was represented by Galerie Heike Strelow from Franfurt am Main, Germany. I love the very simple but deep shades of gray and black in her pieces “on what is left”.

Irene Grau’s work speaks about painting and landscape, of process and displacement through rigorous research into the possibilities of monochrome painting and its relation to landscape as both genre and framework, but above all as experimentation; as a way of seeing. All of which is intermixed following the traditions of radical monochrome painting, mural painting, but also the performative processes and the genre of landscape art, which she interprets to a great extent. Often her work develops in series which are the result of a long site-specific research in nature, followed by an extensive work period in her studio where she experiments with different materials and techniques, to be finalized in the exhibition space, where the work is again transferred and transformed in order to create a entity with the specificity of the space. The title of her recent doctoral thesis, The Painter on the Road, perfectly sums up her interest and attitude toward the medium of painting, and Irene Grau’s process could perfectly be described as a conceptual pleinairist, who states that her work is “what remains” of a wider experience, going far beyond the physically traveled landscape or an explored architectural structure. Solely transmitting an experience may well lack of concrete information, yet her work leaves enough hints to the viewer to allow access through process, intervention, and the document thereof, in order to visually and conceptually understand the artist’s modus operandi and artistic questioning and concerns.

At Design Miami Basel I fell in love with so many furniture pieces and it is therefore really really hard for me to only select one. Therefore I will show you all of my favorites. Also I didnt want to spam you with too much information about each designer and or gallery and thats why there is only a caption below each photo. I hope you liked all the pieces that I have showed you in that blog post and am already looking forward to the Art Basel week 2020.

^{Alain Richard Armchairs 159 / Galerie Pascal Cuisinier} 

_{Bijoy Jain dining chair / studio mumbai}  

^{Studio BBPR 1947 / Nilufar gallery}

_{Nanna Ditzel daybed}