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With great pleasure we participated again at Art|41|Basel. This year, we presented a selection of works by:
William Anastasi
Tacita Dean
Olafur Eliasson
Carsten Höller
Takehito Koganezawa
Robin Rhode
Danh Vo.
We draw your attention in particular to three of the most recent projects we have completed:
Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2010
Dean’s latest project with the Niels Borch Jensen Galerie captures moments and auras from a rehearsal for one of the last events which the choreographer Merce Cunningham would create on his dance company. Each print, based on a still from the film Dean made over the course of three days with the company in Albert Kahn’s 1930s Ford assembly plant in Richmond, California, overlooking San Francisco Bay, expresses movement. The series forms a moving portrait of one of the most influential choreographers of the 20th century. But it also reflects the special perspective which the artist brings to all her subjects. The camera here is an equal participant in the Craneway Event. Dean’s extraordinary unique treatment of the prints create a dialogue among dancers, architecture, sunlight, and passing ships, delicately moderated by the tranquil, forceful presence of Merce Cunningham, just months before his death in July of last year.
Takehito Koganezawa, untitled 2009
Japenese artist Takehito Koganezawa was inspired to make the etchings we exhibit in Basel by his second trip to Copenhagen. “The city was as beautiful as before, but the shadows cast on the ground were a bit longer. In the small, monochrome prints, you can see a trace of those long shadow tails stretching out behind people and objects under a clear, dazzling late-summer sky.” The mood Koganezawa creates reveals the influence of Japanese culture and, in particular, its closeness to nature. His images appear to us as if stolen from a dream-world. And yet Koganezawa’s larger themes and minimalist technique are utterly contemporary.
Danh Vo
By dint of an elaborate printing procedure, the works of Danh Vo, who collaborates here for the first time with Niels Borch Jensen, achieve virtuosic shading effects. Vo employs images that portray his subjects in a deeply personal space, and creates a close connection between the viewer and the pictured memory of the vietnamese artist. Questioning both cultural identity and individual behaviour, Vo bridges distant worlds with a reflective narrative technique that is critical, highly individual and melancholic. The viewer finds himself exploring, vicariously, unconscious assumptions about his own perspective, direction, ancestry, generation, and sense of home.
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