Reality, unchained: photographers to (re)discover at Art Basel

Despite the flood of images we semi-consciously absorb every day, good photography still grabs us in a particularly visceral way. And while the medium is less present at Art Basel than painting or sculpture, there will be true gems to discover – or rediscover – at the show. Here are five must-sees.

‘Potent and magical’ is how gallerist Howard Greenberg describes the work of Josef Sudek (1896-1976, Czech Republic). And it is hard to disagree with the veteran New Yorker: Sudek’s dusky, melancholic images are loaded with a startling combination of sorrow and energy. The Czech photographer, who spent most of his career in Prague, turned simple objects into unpretentious odes to beauty, nature, and the passing of time. ‘I was completely taken with his work,’ Greenberg remembers. ‘There was a poetry, an atmosphere, and a suspension of time unlike any other I encountered previously.’ In Basel, Greenberg’s eponymous gallery will present a series of Sudek’s minimalistic still lives – wonderful examples of the photographer’s ability to convey a rich mood with a strict economy of means.

Farah Al Qasimi (born 1991, United Arab Emirates) looks at Gulf culture with an amused distance. The young photographer is fascinated by the exuberant neo-baroque style which characterizes lavish interiors in her native region. She links this profusion of pastel-colored fluff and ornaments to the colonial legacy of the British, who ruled over the area until the 1970s. Al Qasimi captures this sometimes-chaotic, sometimes-soothing visual abundance through brightly lit, almost decontextualized images of homes and objects. It is this contrast between the immediacy of Al Qasimi’s brightly-colored motifs and the ambiguous aloofness she cultivates that makes her shots so compelling. The artist will present a new body of work at The Third Line’s booth in Basel.

Judith Joy Ross (born 1946, United States) has dedicated most of her career to portraying all sorts of individuals, from unknown children to members of the United States Congress. Cologne gallerist Thomas Zander, who will show the American artist’s work in Basel, says that it ‘offers both an aesthetic and empathetic approach to photography’. Ross shoots most of her subjects in the same manner: frontally and without compromise in order to capture their inner fierceness. The artist’s’ decades-long experience and experimentation with portraiture have given her oeuvre a timeless character. It avoids sentimentalism without sacrificing emotion and has, says Zander, ‘impressive depth.’

Hal Fischer’s practice is more akin to cataloging. Embedded in the LGBT community of 1970s San Francisco, the artist (born 1950, United States) produced visual chronicles combining photographs and descriptive texts. His practice is a reflexion on ‘the romanticism of the transitory and the ephemeral’, explains Project Native Informant’s Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja, who will show Fischer’s work in Basel. The artist coupled texts he wrote with photographs of gay archetypes (which led to his most famous series, ‘Gay Semiotics’); lovers; or simply people waiting at a bus stop, whom he shot at an hourly interval for 24 hours straight. These two latter series will be the focus of Project Native Informant’s presentation. ‘They show how much Hal is a precursor in thinking about the relationship between photography, language, performance, and identity,’ says Tanbin Sastrawidjaja. 

Jan Groover (1943-2012, United States) started out as a painter but turned to photography in the 1960s to escape what she saw as the limitations of painting. While her early images functioned as studies of moving objects, Groover’s photographs soon became increasingly abstract. The artist is best known for her kitchen still lives – carefully crafted tableaux addressing the numbing absurdity of domestic work. Klemm’s co-founders Sebastian Klemm and Silvia Bonsiepe say that the moment when they first saw Groover’s work in the flesh is one of their ‘fondest memories since we have been running the gallery.’ The gallerists were beguiled by the artist’s ‘strangely beautiful and timeless visual language’, they say. The secret of Groover’s photographs, Klemm and Bonsiepe continue, is ‘the enigma of very good art.’

Project Native Informant and Klemm’s will participate in this year’s Feature sector at Art Basel in Basel. Discover more galleries from the Feature sector here.

The Third Line will participate in the Statements sector. See more galleries from the Statements sector here.

Thomas Zander and Howard Greenberg will participate in the Galleries sector. All the galleries participating in this year’s edition of Art Basel can be found here.

Top image: Judith Joy Ross, Untitled (detail), from the series ‘Northeast Philadelphia’, 1998. © Judith Joy Ross. Courtesy of Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.