Art Basel 2022 - Viewing Room

Nick Mauss (b. 1980) lives and works in New York. Mauss has formed his work through a finely tuned sensory register, with drawing at the centre of a praxis which otherwise eludes all simple categorizations. Expanding the medium of drawing through multiple registers at the same time, Mauss’ approach to drawing fuses peripatetically to other possible formats, including sculpture, publications, the format of the exhibition, and writing.

Nick Mauss’ reverse glass paintings are the result of an elaborate, delayed process that creates a distance in thinking, making, and perceiving the work, while at the same time maintaining a direct immediacy. Though at first sight the works appear to be painted onto the surface of a mirror, the painting takes place on the reverse side of the glass - under the surface, so to speak. This painted glass is covered in mirror coating, which brings its own reactions so that the finished painting lies within the mirror, not on its surface. The glass picture-plane absorbs the viewer, the space in which it exists, as well as other works within the space, and the changing conditions of light.

In Nick Mauss’ ceramic wall works, the preliminary qualities of a sketch are translated into a constructed material object, creating a passage between anticipation and full realization, invention and variation. They are produced at Gatti, Faenza, known for their collaboration with exponents of the Futurist movement.

Amy Sillman (b. 1955) lives and works in New York. Amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary painting, Amy Sillman paints and draws using innumerable layers, none of which the viewer sees in the final one, but which can be sensed from their active surface.

Over the last three decades, she has interrogated the language and practice of painting, reevaluating its history and extending its reach into emergent mechanical and digital processes. Working in New York, Sillman’s wayward form of abstraction has pushed defiantly at the process-oriented approaches typically associated with the traditions of post-war painting, infusing her work with a modern sensibility, critical self-reflexivity and humour.

Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) is best known as an established figure of the Pictures Generation, as well as a prominent conceptual photographer of the 1970s and 1980s. Charlesworth’s influential body of work deconstructs the conventions of photography and establishes the medium’s centrality in our perception of the world. Charlesworth stages volatile worlds, isolating objects on monochrome backgrounds to reveal the constructed nature of visual culture and question systems of image distribution.

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975) lives and works in New York. His new series of Displacement paintings posits each canvas’s ground as a touch-sensitive surface. The works adopt a uniform structure of five millimeter square black marks painted in a gridded pattern atop a white ground. Before the paint is dry, Thompson deploys an assortment of custom silicone tools against the surface, forcing the wet squares out of place. He adds no new material, but rather subjects the existing marks to this process of reorganisation. The resulting transformations appear as extensions of squares into lines, glyph-like forms, and sweeping, sinuous fields of paint. Each painting has become a record of the tools’ interaction with the surface: the stops and starts, the kinetic limits of Thompson’s body and the entropic movement of the order of painted squares into noise. But, they are also pictures, as this play of ruptures and conjured forms has been frozen into an unsettled pictorial field, still with the trappings of figure, ground, composition, and space.

Liz Deschenes (b. 1966) lives and works in New York. Since the early 1990’s, she has produced a body of work that emancipates photography from its conventional definition as a document and explores the material condition of the medium and its processes. Making use of the medium’s most elemental aspects, namely paper, light, and chemicals, Deschenes creates shifting surfaces that function as sculptural or architectural rather than photographic objects.

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942) lives and works in New York. Interacting with increasingly segmented, abstract backgrounds, the figures in Bradford’s paintings address constructed social roles, like the archetypical figure of the mother, through incongruous, dream-like scenes. Bradford creates her figures with elementary painterly marks, often lacking detail or facial feature that would allow to assign a gender identity. Although charged with social interactions shifting between domination and agency, her groups of people exist in collective fluidity, in an intangible atmosphere where bodies interweave and dissolve.

Benni Bosetto (b. 1987), lives and works in Milan. Her work combining drawing, sculpture, installation and performance always involves the body and its gesture. Her artistic practice is based on the superposition of fragmented narratives from anthropology, religion, popular beliefs and art history. Her research draws in particular on the study of ancient and contemporary healing rituals, and on the states of semi-consciousness specific to meditation and sleep. Bosetto creates open-ended visual narratives in which the gaze wanders from one scene to another without ever focusing on a specific point.