Every six weeks, members of Art Basel’s Editorial team pick their favorite exhibitions across the globe. Here are eight shows not to miss this October.
‘Poetry’
Tobias Spichtig
Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York
Until October 21, 2023
For his first exhibition with Meredith Rosen Gallery, the Berlin-based Swiss artist, Tobias Spichtig, presents a series of new paintings, including still lives, geometric abstractions, and portraits. The latter, likely depicting friends and acquaintances of the artist, make up the core of the exhibition. Spichtig captures the essence of his models with intense colors and often brutal strokes. As the title suggests, he presents a community of poetic beings: beautiful, lunatic werewolves forced to live in our time, who meet our gaze, ready to tear us apart. Unable to fully understand what lies behind their eyes, we look at them in awe. P.S.
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Frith Street Gallery, London
Until November 11, 2023
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s monumental tapestries at the Polish Pavilion were a standout contribution to the last Venice Biennale. Working with a group of seamstresses, the Romani-Polish artist realized an extraordinary cycle of images celebrating Romani culture using gifted fabric scraps. The everyday images she conjured up with bits of skirts and shawls were magnificent – on a par with the Renaissance frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy, that served as a starting point for the series. Beyond the frills and decorative flourishes, what’s at stake in Mirga-Tas’ practice is an attempt to reinstate the dignity of a people persecuted for centuries. For her first solo show at Frith Street Gallery, she continues in the same vein, creating a portrait gallery of the first-generation Romani inhabitants of the Nowa Huta district – an infamous socialist urban experiment in Eastern Krakow. C.M.
‘Killing TV’
Group show
Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
Until November 19, 2023
Among the works included by curators Jill Angel Chun and Tiffany Leung in this international, cross-generational group show, is Chris Burden’s Through the Night Softly. Aired in 1973 as a TV commercial, Burden moves his prone, near-naked body across broken glass with his hands behind his back. The intervention both disrupted and appropriated what the artist described as TV’s ‘omnipotent stranglehold’ – a premise that ‘Killing TV’ extends. Take Magdalen Wong’s mmm wow (2013): monitors positioned screen-down on the floor emit utterances like ‘mmm’ and ‘ohh’ recorded from Hong Kong television ads, their images reduced to a mesmerizing underglow. S.B.
‘The Triumph of Being’
Peter Uka
Mariane Ibrahim, Paris
October 13 to December 2, 2023
Over the past two decades, a return to figurative art has been embraced by a new wave of young Black artists, among them, Peter Uka. Deeply rooted in his Nigerian heritage, Uka’s work beckons us to explore the memories of his childhood, a place where Afro hairstyles, bell-bottom jeans, music, and dance converge. His compositions highlight the impact of globalization and the cultural markers that link Nigeria to Germany – the country where the artist has since settled. With a palette of vibrant colors and use of dynamic patterns, the fragments of everyday life reveal the sheer sincerity of human emotion. T.D.
‘From Sugar To Shit’
Henry Taylor
Hauser & Wirth, Paris
October 14, 2023 to January 7, 2024
For the much-awaited inaugural exhibition of Hauser & Wirth Paris – with the new gallery occupying a neo-classical hôtel particulier close to the Champs-Élysées in the 8th arrondissement – the Angeleno, Henry Taylor, takes over the entire space. Paris, with its rich artistic heritage and outstanding museum collections, inspired Taylor and provides the ideal backdrop for his new exhibition. Featuring a series of paintings, sculptures, and installations, created, in part, during his stay in the French capital last June and July, the show confirms the breadth of the artist’s practice, and his commitment to exploring various aspects of the human experience, and encapsulating the raw, complex, and authentic nature of life. P.S.
‘Behold’
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Until January 14, 2024
Eyes looking out at us and ties binding people together, are recurrent motifs throughout María Magdalena Campos Pons’ major survey, celebrating four decades of the artist’s multimedia work. She draws on her Cuban family’s experiences to discuss global histories of enslavement, indentured labor, motherhood, and migration. The rituals of Santería are invoked through healing gestures and connect to Campo Pons’ complex concept of self, which she attempts to capture through her spiritual eye as well as her photographic eye: ‘I am from many places. I live with that duality and multiplicity in my mind, and in my soul, and in my body.’ E.B.
‘Happy Gas’
Sarah Lucas
Tate Britain, London
Until January 14, 2024
With more than 75 works spanning sculpture, installation, and photography, this survey of Sarah Lucas’s oeuvre shows how the British artist has, for over four decades, explored the human body, mortality, and experiences of sex, class, and gender with bold irreverence. ‘Happy Gas’, curated in close collaboration with Lucas, takes the chair as a central point of departure. Many of the artist’s best-known works feature funky figures and oversized genitalia – made from materials ranging from bronze to stuffed stockings – positioned on chairs. ‘I decided to hang the exhibition mainly on chairs. Much in the same way that I hang sculptures onto chairs,’ Lucas says in the exhibition text. With her works, she recasts such domestic pieces – not to mention, the female form – as subjects rife with overt sexuality and desire, giving them the potential to be seen anew. E.M.
James Lee Byars
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
October 12, 2023 to February 18, 2024
James Lee Byars was an artist concerned with transcendence. Along with his sculptures, installations, and performances, he also wrote a novel in which he was a hero on a tireless search for the infinite. I once heard an (apocryphal?) anecdote that perfectly encapsulates his character: One day, out of the blue, he called his gallerist Michael Werner from Cairo, urging him to send money. The artist believed he had found artisans able to blow gold like glass and he hoped to commission a sphere the size of his heart. Shortly after, he was dead. Gathering works from throughout Byars’ nomadic career, this ambitious exhibition promises to be an unmissable landmark in the legacy of the most alchemist-like artist of the 20th century. C.M.
Art Basel’s Editorial team is composed of Juliette Amoros, Emily Butler, Karim Crippa, Tifenn Durand, Jeni Fulton, Coline Milliard, Alicia Reuter, and Patrick Steffen. Art Basel’s commissioning editors are Stephanie Bailey, Kimberly Bradley, and Emily McDermott.
Published on October 4, 2023.
Caption for full-bleed image: James Lee Byars, The Diamond Floor, 1995. © The Estate of James Lee Byars, courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.