Discover six striking Meridians projects, from outsized ceramic installations to sprawling paintings

Curated by Magalí Arriola, the Meridians sector showcases sculpture, installation, painting, and moving image art – all on a monumental scale. Here, we take a closer look at six notable (and sizable) works on view at the Convention Center this year.

Janaina Tschäpe, Between Veils of Blue and Grey, a Forest, 2021
Presented by Sean Kelly, New York City
For years, Janaina Tschäpe’s mixed-media paintings have resembled landscapes. Though abstract, their organic forms and gestural marks suggest hills, rocks, trees, and underbrush. But when the German artist recently left New York City to be closer to nature, a shift took place in her work. Spending more time outdoors, Tschäpe was struck by a sense of the sublime like the German Romantics before her. In Between Veils of Blue and Grey, a Forest (2021), the exaltation is palpable. Around 8 1/2 meters long, the painting is one of the artist’s largest pieces to date. As in her previous work, she used oil sticks to create energetic marks atop washes of water-based pigments. The finished scene suggests a reflective lake at twilight, populated by barely-there creatures.

Conrad Egyir, 700 Cycles of Somatic Renditioning, 2021
Presented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
Conrad Egyir paints regal portraits of Black people surrounded by symbols from Afrocentric folklore, religious motifs, and pop culture. He adopts a colorful, graphic style and on occasion the edges of his canvases are scalloped so the paintings recall the portraits on postage stamps. However, his new painting, 700 Cycles of Somatic Renditioning (2021), looks more like an open book than a stamp. Just over 6 meters wide, the work’s curvature tricks the eye into seeing a massive open volume. Painted on the ‘pages’ is a collaged ensemble cast of Black figures in domestic spaces. Embedded within the scenes are Adinkra symbols from the artist’s native Ghana and references to artists such as William Kentridge, Charles White, and Faith Ringgold.

Rebecca Manson, Gutter, 2021
Presented by Josh Lilley, London
Fall is in the air in Rebecca Manson’s installation Gutter (2021). A drainpipe hangs from the top of the booth and from its spout thousands of porcelain leaves appear to cascade into a heap on the floor. Against one wall lean two crisscrossed rakes with sculpted leaves trapped in their tines. The leaves are frozen mid-flutter, as though time has suddenly stopped on an ordinary fall day. New York-based Manson has long been interested in plants and the way they move in nature. For this piece she calls upon her childhood nostalgia for the change of the seasons, aiming to achieve a sense of what she calls the ‘visceral commonplace.’

Jacqueline de Jong, The Backside of Existence, 1992
Presented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
Jacqueline de Jong’s The Backside of Existence (1992) comes with an unusual story: nearly seven meters in length, the double-sided painting on sailcloth was originally commissioned by the Dutch National Bank to divide the space between the tellers and the public in a branch in Drachten, in the northern Netherlands. At Art Basel, the work is presented suspended by cords pulled taut between floor and ceiling, appearing as if caught in a gust of wind. On both sides of the painting, an expressionistic landscape is populated by a tangle of hybrid figures with wild, jutting limbs, pointed wings, and tortured-looking faces. The work possesses a nightmarish intensity, which in this renewed context is nothing short of bewitching. 

Nicholas Galanin, The Value of Sharpness: When it Falls, 2019
Presented by Peter Blum Gallery, New York City
Violence and vulnerability are intertwined in The Value of Sharpness: When it Falls (2019), by Alaska-born Tlingit/Unangax̂ artist, Nicholas Galanin. Hanging from the ceiling in an arc, are 60 delicate porcelain hatchets, representing the restriction of indigenous sovereignty through colonial and settler violence. The once-powerful tools have been rendered useless by their reduction to decorative objects. Galanin has adorned their surfaces with gold luster and Dutch Delftware patterns, referencing the European appropriation of East Asian ceramic motifs. Charged with the tension between precarity and force, the work seems to suggest an impending crash, reminding us that wherever power structures are imbalanced, something has to give.

Howardena Pindell, Sweatshop, 1998 – 1999
Presented by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York City
Since the 1990s, the work of American artist and professor Howardena Pindell has addressed social issues. In Sweatshop (1998 – 1999) – which hasn’t been exhibited since the exhibition ‘Witness to Our Time’ at Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY in 1999 – Pindell makes a somber comment on manufacturing labor conditions. Laid across the sprawling canvas are monochrome cutouts of images depicting ordinary consumer items such as scissors, a hat, gloves, and cooking utensils. Each object is marked with a price ranging from 5 – 20 cents, ostensibly alluding to the wage paid to workers to produce them. Pointing to consumer waste, poverty, and the alienation of labor, the work’s social message is just as poignant today as it was more than two decades ago.

Discover all Meridians projects here.

Top image: Detail of a work by Conrad Egyr, whose painting 700 Cycles of Somatic Renditioning (2021) is part of Meridians, presented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.