The inaugural edition of Basel Online features new and significant works available exclusively online.
Launching to coincide with Art Basel, Basel Online functions as a parallel fair presentation, offering collectors access to works of the same caliber as those that the gallery will present in its physical booth.
The Online Viewing Room includes twenty works from David Zwirner gallery artists and estates, many of which have never been on public view and come directly from the artists’ studios. This singular selection highlights the gallery’s recent exhibition program across its locations in New York, London, and Hong Kong.
Basel Online premieres new works from such critically acclaimed artists as Harold Ancart, Carol Bove, Chris Ofili, Josh Smith, Jordan Wolfson, and
Lisa Yuskavage. These contemporary artworks are shown alongside notable historical works, such as a delicate tied-wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa, a Dan Flavin sculpture dedicated to Cy Twombly, and a wall-mounted box by Donald Judd.
Also included in this digital-only presentation are a number of artists whose works are exhibited at Art Basel and Unlimited, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kerry James Marshall, and Luc Tuymans, whose retrospective La Pelle runs through January 2020 at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
To view additional works that will be on view at Art Basel, and for information about the gallery’s presentation at Unlimited, visit our fair page.
For questions about Basel Online and other works, email inquiries@davidzwirner.com.
Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is known for a distinctive style of painting that demonstrates the power of images to simultaneously communicate and withhold. The present work from 1998 relates to a larger painting on canvas, Lungs, executed the same year, which was first presented at David Zwirner, New York as part of the artist's solo exhibition entitled Security.
—Luc Tuymans, cited in Daniel Birnbaum, “A Thousand Words: Luc Tuymans Talks about his ’Security’ Series,” Artforum (October 1998)
Harold Ancart (b. 1980) is a Belgian-born, New York-based artist who works in various media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. In his paintings, Ancart often depicts subjects that naturally invite contemplation, such as the horizon, clouds, flowers, mountains, or flames.
The present paintings are part of a group of works by Ancart that depict matchsticks against a diffuse, painterly backdrop. In the past, the artist has painted flames and stark images of fire, but unlike these earlier subjects, Ancart was drawn to the matchstick not for its grandeur, but because it is commonplace.
—Harold Ancart, in conversation with the gallery (March 2019)
With a career spanning over four decades, Isa Genzken (b. 1948) has incessantly probed the shifting boundaries between art, design, architecture, media, technology, and the individual. The present work relates to a group of wall-mounted flat works that expand upon the artist's 2002 series Soziale Fassaden (Social Façades). These works are made by layering various industrially produced, commercially available materials and incorporate a diverse range of found and traditional media, mining such wide-ranging points of reference as the façades of corporate towers, disposable packaging, construction barriers, modern interior design, and nightclub aesthetics, among others.
—Randy Kennedy, in The New York Times (November 2013)
Through its formal acuity, the work of Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) reveals and questions the social constructs of beauty, taste, and power. As the artist has written in the foreword to the book Kerry James Marshall, "I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what Art is returned as a critical issue."
The present work is a study for Marshall’s painting The Academy (2012). The drawing depicts the central figure in the painting, a nude, black, afroed man who raises his right fist, a symbol of the Black Power movement and a gesture of solidarity with all oppressed peoples. The inscription at the bottom of the work references Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the African American sprinters at the 1968 Olympics who famously gave the black power salute during their medal ceremony.
—Kerry James Marshall, in The Financial Times (October 2018)
Donald Judd (1928–1994) eschewed the classical ideals of representational sculpture to create a rigorous visual vocabulary that sought clear and definite objects as its primary mode of articulation. The unaffected, straightforward quality of his work demonstrates Judd’s strong interest in color, form, material, and space, and established him as one of the most significant American artists of the postwar period.
The present work is a wall-mounted box, a form that Judd would return to in various proportions, materials, and configurations over the course of his career. Executed in anodized aluminum, with a red acrylic sheet, and a turquoise anodized divider, it explores the primary preoccupations of the artist's body of work, including the relationships between surface and volume and interior and exterior space.
Yayoi Kusama’s (b. 1929) work transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century: Pop art and Minimalism. Her highly influential career spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures, which allude at once to microscopic and macroscopic universes.
—Yayoi Kusama, in Yayoi Kusama (Victoria Miro, 2016)
While pumpkin shapes have appeared in Kusama's work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, this organic form gained a central importance in her oeuvre from the late 1980s onwards. Its prominence was cemented by one of the artist's first open-air sculptures, titled Pumpkin (1994), which she created as a large-scale public commission for the Benesse Art Site on Naoshima Island in Japan, where it is positioned at the end of a pier stretching into the ocean.
Dan Flavin (1933–1996) produced a singularly consistent and prodigious body of work that utilized commercially available fluorescent lamps to create installations (or ”situations,“ as he preferred to call them) of light and color. Through these light constructions, Flavin established and redefined space. This is one of three works that he dedicated to the artist Cy Twombly.
— Dan Flavin, as quoted in ”’… in daylight or cool white.‘ an autobiographical sketch,“ first published in Artforum (December 1965); reprinted in Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961–1996, 2004
—Michael Govan, “Irony and Light,” in Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights 1961–1996, 2004
American sculptor, educator, and arts activist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is known for her extensive body of wire sculptures that challenge conventional notions of material and form. The present work is an example of Asawa’s tied-wire sculptures, a series begun in 1962, which—like many of the artist’s constructions—explore organic forms and processes.
“Asawa felt that her explorations of form, especially through wire, seemed ‘to express the time in which I live […] with a material and method indicative of a technology which has so recently made this possible.’”
—Ann Reynolds, “Ruth Asawa's Shadow Play,” Frieze Magazine (May 2018)
—Daniell Cornell, “The Art of Space: Ruth Asawa’s Sculptural Installations,” in The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, 2006
After having been gifted a desert plant whose branches split exponentially as they grew, Asawa quickly became frustrated by her attempts to replicate its structure in two dimensions. Instead, she utilized industrial wire as a means of sculpting it and, in doing so, studying its shape.
Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston (b. 1939) has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning.
The present photograph belongs to The Democratic Forest, one of Eggleston’s most ambitious projects and a prime example of his uniquely recognizable aesthetic. Likened to an epic journey or an enduring narrative, it comprises a careful selection of works from over ten thousand negatives he took in the mid-1980s across the southern and eastern parts of America and in several European countries.
Chris Ofili (b. 1968) creates intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that deftly merge abstraction and figuration. The present drawing is from a group of works that explore figures and themes from Homer’s Odyssey. It features Odysseus, the central figure of the epic, and Calypso, traditionally cast as a deceptive femme fatale who attempts to keep Odysseus on the island of Ogygia. Ofili depicts the two mythical figures kissing, visually evoking the couple’s passion through strong graphic lines mixed with incidents of bright color across a background of gold leaf.
—Will Heinrich, in The New York Times (May 2019)
Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) has long challenged conventional understanding of figurative painting. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. Her small-scale paintings play a remarkably dynamic and protean role within her overall practice. These works act as sites for experimenting with color, form, and characters as well as with a variety of supports, including both stretched and unstretched linen, canvas boards, wood, and paper.
The present work is an example of what Yuskavage terms her “symbiotic” portraits: dual depictions of interdependent figures begun in the 2000s with paintings featuring two women, and continued from 2015 including both sexes. Here, the male figure, who is shrouded in shadow—an effect achieved through Yuskavage’s use of grisaille—kneels in front of a female figure whom he seems to be in the process of drawing.
Belgian-born Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media, including documentary film, painting, photography, performance, and video. In his practice, Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagement with everyday life. The artist has described his work as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables.”
The present diptych belongs to a series of paintings accompanying the artist's video REEL-UNREEL, which was made in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2011. Produced for documenta 13, and created in collaboration with Ajmal Maiwandi and Julien Devaux, REEL-UNREEL takes its point of departure from the classic street game in which children keep a hoop in continuous motion with the help of a stick.
American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia (b. 1959) is known for images that are at once documentary and theatrically staged, operating in the interstices of fact and fiction.
Marilyn, 28 years old, Las Vegas, Nevada, $30 belongs to the artist’s early Hustlers series (1990–1992) composed of photographs of male and trans prostitutes taken in the vicinity of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, posed in motel rooms, on street corners and parking lots, and in the backseats of cars, among other places. The resulting photographs are carefully constructed, as with many of diCorcia’s compositions.
Installation view, Philip-Lorca diCorca: Strangers, The Museum of Modern Art, 1993
Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) is known for his thought-provoking works in a wide range of media, including video, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance. Pulling intuitively from the world of advertising, the internet, and the technology industry, he produces ambitious and enigmatic narratives that frequently revolve around a series of invented, animated characters.
The present work relates to the artist's ongoing series of sculptural objects mounted to the wall that feature large digital inkjet prints on industrial supports (in this case aluminum). The central imagery in the work depicts the late John F. Kennedy Jr. with his soon-to-be wife, Carolyn Bessette, engaged in a heated fight while walking their dog in Washington Square Park, New York, in February 1996.
The dispute between the couple was widely reported on in the news media and tabloids at the time, leading to speculation over the state of their relationship. Wolfson further complicates the image by repeating the depiction of the visibly upset Carolyn several times and cryptically embedding the visual in a panel shaped like the Star of David, a form the artist utilizes in several of his panel works.
Photography is perhaps the most consistent thread throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and in many ways he considered himself principally a photographer, having received (among other degrees) his BFA from the Pratt Institute, and his MFA from the International Center of Photography.
The present work is one of fifty-five individual photographs that the artist produced as editioned jigsaw puzzles. Created between 1987 and 1992, the puzzles represent Gonzalez-Torres's longest engagement with any one body of work. He produced the puzzles using commercial, quick-access photo labs, transforming imagery into souvenirs. They speak to the artist’s interest in commercial and readily available production methods, as well as questions about how to imbue emotionality and intention within the absence of the artist’s hand. Along with his use of candy and stacks of paper, the puzzles exemplify Gonzalez-Torres's interest in the fragment and the whole, presence and absence.
Despite the resolute abstraction of much of his oeuvre, many of the artist’s works directly implicate the body itself, including a number of images of imprints or traces of an absent subject. Here, the image depicts footprints left in the snow.
Another edition of the present work is currently being featured at Art Basel Unlimited as part of a complete presentation of the artist's puzzles, the first time all fifty-five have been exhibited together.
Carol Bove (b. 1971) has become known for her steel sculptures that combine found and made elements and incorporate a variety of techniques and processes. Her works are characterized by distinctive, smooth surfaces or intricate folds that belie their material construction. Ranging from multiple welded pieces to single units, Bove’s multifaceted sculptures advance and explore steel’s formal and poetic possibilities.
—Carol Bove, in “Q & A: Carol Bove on showing in the Swiss Pavilion,” Apollo (April 2017)
—Carol Bove, in Wallpaper (May 2018)
Since the early 2000s, Josh Smith (b.1976) has developed a prolific and expansive body of painting that employs specific visual motifs as a means of exploring the potentiality of the painted surface. These visual forms, which include his name, fish, skeletons, leaves, and palm trees, among others, serve as unassuming structures through which Smith pursues his investigation of the medium, resulting in works that forthrightly present themselves to the viewer. Though fully realized as individual artworks, each painting serves as a stage in an ongoing, interrelated, and heterogeneous process of image production and experimentation, in which motifs, colors, and visuals are recycled, refined, and reimagined.
The present painting is part of an ongoing series that depicts the figure of death. Rendered in lush ribbons and fields of color, the blank, empty faces and shapeless cloaks of the reapers serve as genderless, formless ciphers for the viewer.
—Roberta Smith, in The New York Times (May 2019)
