<div><p>Their works will be on view both on the Hong Kong show floor and in the Online Viewing Rooms</p></div><p><strong></strong></p>

Payal Uttam

From Renoir to Kusama: famous artists at Art Basel

<p><strong style="background-color: initial;">Alice Neel<br /></strong><strong style="background-color: initial;"></strong>‘One of the reasons I painted was to catch life as it goes by, right hot off the griddle,’ said the American artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9857/Alice-Neel">Alice Neel</a>. From the 1920s through the 1980s, Neel painted expressive portraits of artists, activists, nude pregnant women, and marginalized individuals like her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, at a time when figurative painting was deeply unpopular.&nbsp;Often starting without preliminary sketches, she painted spontaneous black outlines directly onto the canvas and used thick impasto brushstrokes and a bold color palette. Deeply attuned to the interior world and body language of her sitters, Neel’s works not only asserted a sense of her subjects’ dignity but also laid bare their vulnerabilities<span style="background-color: initial;">.&nbsp;</span></p>

<p><strong>Rashid Johnson<br /></strong>American artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7139/Rashid-Johnson">Rashid Johnson</a> is known for his visceral works made from domestic materials including wood flooring, black soap, and bricks of shea butter. The result of intensely physical processes involving burning, pouring, scratching, and sculpting, they probe issues of identity, race, and collective loss.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1146/Gray">GRAY</a>'s booth and&nbsp;online viewing room (OVR) will featrure&nbsp;a <span style="background-color: initial;">photogram from an early series of works, made by overlaying objects such as cotton seeds, chicken bones, black-eyed peas, and watermelon seeds onto photosensitive paper which Johnson then exposed to light, leaving an abstract imprint on the surface. These ethereal images conjure astronomical diagrams. ‘This abstraction reinforces the idea of culture being beyond definition and that cultural experience is transcendental,’ says Johnson.</span></p>

<p><strong>Lalan<br /></strong>Born in Guizhou, China, in 1921, Lalan grew up in a literati family who encouraged her passion for music. She trained as a composer and soprano singer before moving to Paris in the 1940s with her first husband, the artist&nbsp;<span style="background-color: initial;"><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11857/Zao-Wou-Ki">Zao Wou-Ki</a>. While Zao’s fame long eclipsed Lalan’s</span>practice, her work is finally emerging from the shadows over the past decade. Her absorbing, dream-like abstract paintings draw from myriad inspirations including Chinese calligraphy, music, dance, and the French Art Informel movement.Lalan also invented her own cross-disciplinary art form which she called <em style="background-color: initial;">l’art synthèse</em> – highly experimental works that included her performances of self-choreographed modern dance in front of her paintings, set to original electronic compositions.</p>

<p><strong>Jordan Wolfson<br /></strong>The work of Los Angeles-based artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/11616/Jordan-Wolfson">Jordan Wolfson</a>&nbsp;elicits extreme reactions, ranging from disgust and repulsion to confusion and anger. His animatronic sculptures and virtual-reality projects, which conjure <span style="background-color: initial;">scenes of violence and depravity, have been variously described as noxious, nightmare-inducing and irresponsible. According to Wolfson, however, the works tap into the zeitgeist and the paranoia of our times: ‘I’m trying to say something that other people are all thinking but no one is daring to say,’ he once explained. On view at the fair and in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1103/David-Zwirner">David Zwirner</a>’s OVR will be a series of AI-generated prints made using DALL-E software as well as <em>Red Sculpture</em> (2023) – a menacing, burgundy puppet boy with hollowed-out eyes. Dangling from a chain, the ominous animatronic figure seems as if it may spring to life at any moment.</span></p>

<p><strong style="background-color: initial;">Yayoi Kusama<br /></strong>At 93, Japanese artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7763/Yayoi-Kusama">Yayoi Kusama</a>&nbsp;is relentless in her output and her work remains as relevant as ever. Currently the<span style="background-color: initial;"> subject of a major retrospective at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, she also has a significant presence at the fair.</span><strong style="background-color: initial;">&nbsp;</strong><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/33701/LGDR">LGDR</a>&nbsp;will be showing her vivid painting <em style="background-color: initial;">Sunset</em> (1988). In this work, Kusama enveloped the canvas with repetitive red, bubble-like polka dots on a vivid green background. For Kusama, dots are filled with spiritual significance, evoking ideas of obliterating the self, oneness, and infinity. After living in the US for more than a decade, Kusama returned to Japan in the late 1970s and, as a result of worsening hallucinatory visions, voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric facility. Having fallen into obscurity, she was forced to rebuild a name for herself as an artist, only beginning to gain recognition in the late 1980s, when this work was painted.</p>

<p><strong>Pierre-Auguste Renoir<br /></strong>It’s not often that you walk through the aisles of Art Basel Hong Kong and spot a Renoir. But, this year,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1231/Helly-Nahmad-Gallery">Helly Nahmad Gallery</a>&nbsp;will be showing a rare portrait by the famed French impressionist. On view in both their booth and OVR will be <em style="background-color: initial;">La leçon (Bielle, l’institutrice et Claude Renoir lisant)</em> (1906), a painting of the artist’s youngest son absorbed in a lesson with his teacher. Renoir was 60 when Claude was born, and the young boy quickly became his favorite model. His affection for the cherubic child is clear in this tender, intimate domestic scene. Suffering from worsening rheumatoid arthritis, Renoir depicted the boyas a symbol of vitality and youth, both of which were slipping away from him at the time.</p>

<p>
	<strong>Adam Pendleton</strong><br />When American conceptual artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9197/Adam-Pendleton">Adam Pendleton</a> first began making paintings, language was his primary material. Today, the written word – often drawn from African American historical, political, and literary material – continues to be a driving force in his body of work, which spans installation, painting, performance, printmaking, and video.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1101/David-Kordansky-Gallery">David Kordansky Gallery</a>’s  booth at Art Basel Hong Kong will be filled with Pendleton’s new palimpsestic paintings emblazoned with text and his large-scale drawings on Mylar. The artist  has described his dramatic silkscreen on Mylar works  as ‘containers for different marks, gestures, and departures: visual departures, textual departures, incomplete utterances, visual and otherwise.’
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<p>Payal Uttam is an independent writer and editor who divides her time between Hong Kong and Singapore. She contributes to a range of publications including <em style="background-color: initial;">Artsy</em>, <em style="background-color: initial;">The Art Newspaper</em>, <em style="background-color: initial;">South China Morning Post,</em> and <em style="background-color: initial;">The </em><em style="background-color: initial;">Wall Street Journal</em>.</p><section><p>Published on March 17, 2023.</p><p>Caption for top image:&nbsp;Pierre-Auguste Renoir, <em>La leçon (Bielle, l'institutrice et Claude Renoir lisant) (detail)</em>, 1906. Courtesy of Helly Nahmad Gallery (New York).</p></section>

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Their works will be on view both on the Hong Kong show floor and in the Online Viewing Rooms

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