Artrust @ Art Basel 2015. Our Top List

The 46th edition of Art Basel is over. This year the fair hosted 223 galleries from 33 countries, presenting about 4,000 modern and contemporary artists. They call it “The Mecca of art”, the center around which turns the worldwide artistic excellence and the best place to host a booming market.

We entered the Pavilions during the days of the fair Preview, enjoying the electric atmosphere and discovering in advance the works that have then guided the million-dollar sales during the last four days.

GALLERIES

This year, the division between emerging artists and big names was more pronounced: on the ground floor, in fact, were placed the most important galleries related to modern art, as Acquavella, Landau and Gmurzynska and the cornerstones of contemporary art, such as Gagosian, Lisson, Continua, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, David Nolan, Sperone. On the second floor, instead, galleries were mainly linked to emerging artists: Marianne Boesky is, in our opinion, among the best of this section, with a choice of elegant and minimalist works, as Frank Stella and Pier Paolo Calzolari, sold during the second day of Art Basel official opening (respectively € 1 million for Stella and a range of prices between 150,000 and $ 750,000 for Calzolari).

Among the big names, we choose Galleria Tega, Milan, presenting two large works by Lucio Fontana, Christo’s last project, The Floating Piers and a work by Valerio Adami. Luhring Augustine Gallery has also captured our attention with the works in blue copper sulphate by the young artist Roger Hiorns.  The top of our list surely include also LEVY Galerie, Hamburg, which proposed a mini-monograph of Daniel Spoerri and part of his latest work Meissen Porzelan. If we just have had enough space, we would have gladly brought in our offices the marble sculpture Snow White, Bambi by Paul McCarthy, sold for $ 2.8 million by Gagosian (which also sold, among others, Koons and Anish Kapoor) but also some sculptures by Tony Cragg, who was omnipresent this year, from Marian Goodman to Buchmann and Lisson. As usual, Landau Fine Art presented the best of modern art, with works by Chagall, Picasso, Arp and Miró, as well as Moeller, who led a Lèger’s work remained, until now, unpublished in the art market.

DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY

Outside the halls, as in past editions, Messeplatz has turned into a large outdoor installation, thanks to Rirkit Tiravanja’s effort. With DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY, Tiravanja turned the square into a large collective canteen where food and sharing become the soul of the performance. Among grilled vegetables and hot soups, Tiravanja approaches an idea of vegan vegan, environmentally friendly that he hope for the future, according to the model already developed in Chiang Mai, in his homeland.

UNLIMITED

The Art Unlimited section, dedicated to the works of large scale and curated by Gianni Jetzer, welcomes the visitors with the performance Egocentric System by Julius Von Bismarck, the young artist from Berlin who, for all the duration of the day, he never get off his “rotating room”, keeping his arms folded and occasionally using his smartphone. Among the most interesting works, we found the tower of 760 bicycles by Ai Wei Wei presented by Galleria Continua and … in continuum, an installation of 110 works on canvas by Emilio Vedova, represented by Galleria dello Scudo, Verona. Among the most significant and important works, we place the replica of the work Untitled (Blue Placebo) by Gonzalez-Torres, made by Sturtevant, the installation Life Model by David Shrigley, where anyone can sit down and create a portrait of a particular mannequin-model, the work of Kader Attia Arab Spring, a metaphor of the destruction of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the super-socialized work Plastic Tree by Pascale Marthine Tayou, a reflection on the abuse of plastic that creates, with its colorful leaves, a fairytale dimension.

SPOTTED

Moreover, spotted by Artrust, a Leonardo di Caprio intented to admire works by Giacometti, Picasso, Jasper Johns and Takashi Murakami. It seems he was also focused on the Basquiat’s artworks, exhibited at the Beyeler Foundation booth, where we were (coincidentally) at that moment!

Well, three days of discoveries and meetings between the booths of Art Basel, but also a long journey in Basel between the city’s museums: Tinguely, Gauguin and Marlene Dumas at the Beyeler, a morning at the Vitra Design Museum. But all of this will be tell in the next post…