Volta Announces Gallery Line-Up For Art Basel 2016 Event

VOLTA, Art Basel’s most respected satellite fair for new international galleries and artists, returns to Markthalle for Art Basel Week, June 13 – 18, 2016. In the fair’s twelfth Basel edition, exhibitors from 20 nations and 33 cities assemble within Markthalle’s iconic cupola structure to present dynamic projects by artists from over 40 nations.

“As a ‘pre-teen’ and having moved into our grown-up digs, VOLTA is maturing along with the years,” notes VOLTA Artistic Director Amanda Coulson, on the fair’s progression following its decade in Basel and ongoing residence at stately central venue Markthalle. “While we still represent emerging positions, the exhibitor base has also adapted organically to include positions of global relevance, in some cases regardless of decade conceived. Going forward, we subtitle the Basel fair with ‘new international positions’ to encapsulate the breadth and level of our range of galleries and their projects.”

Though this edition reflects VOLTA’s highest brand retention yet, with 90% of exhibiting galleries having participated in prior Basel and New York fairs, a very carefully considered selection of six entirely new exhibitors contributes further depth to VOLTA’s ongoing efforts to highlight the global arts community’s diverse voices. These first-time VOLTA galleries are: knoerle & baettig (Winterthur), presenting a pair of up-and-coming Cuban artists: Alejandro Campins, finalist for the Farber Foundation’s inaugural Young Cuban Artist of the Year award, and Frank Mujica, featured in the 2015 Bienal de la Habana; Project ArtBeat (Tbilisi), presenting Post-Soviet explorations by three Georgian artists: Gio Sumbadze, who designed Kamikaze Loggia for his nation’s Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, plus Nino Chubinishviliand Lado Pochkhua; Galerie l’Inlassable (Paris), spotlighting young French artist Caroline Corbassonvia a mixed-media constellation of new works following her research at LAM, the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Marseilles; Causey Contemporary (New York), unveiling Kevin Bourgeois’ site-specific socio-political installation At Play in the Fields of the Lord; Anca Poterasu Gallery (Bucharest), presenting two Romanian artists who analyze the natural world via painting and photography, respectively: Zoltán Béla, subject of the 2014-15 solo exhibition Anexa at MNAC, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest), and Nicu Ilfoveanu, featured in Vision of a Nation at Fotogalleriet Oslo last year; and taubert contemporary (Berlin), who amplify their European geometric abstraction-themed booth with a site-specific wall painting by Jan van der Ploeg, concurrent with the Dutch artist’s solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland, his first institutional exhibition in Switzerland.

VOLTA’s commitment to presenting new international positions includes acknowledging specific and localized artistic efforts from decades past and re-contextualizing their significance within a contemporary global context. Several long-time exhibitors look back to the 1970’s for their VOLTA12 discourses: beta pictoris gallery (Birmingham AL) plans a booth featuring rubber and mixed-media “tough paintings” by late Mono-ha kindred Yoshishige Furukawa, subject of a posthumous career retrospective at the Fukuoka Art Museum last year; as well as Austrian-German conceptual photography duo Barbara and Michael Leisgen’s pivotal Mimesis series, concurrent with the couple’s participation in Sublime. The Tremors of the World, on view now at Centre Pompidou-Metz. Plus, P74 Gallery (Ljubljana) highlights Slovenian artist Milena Usenik’s classic and mostly overlooked Op-Pop Art hybrid paintings. Usenik’s oeuvre spans a 1973 exhibition at the Slovenj Gradec Art Pavilion — parallel with producing some of the paintings on view here — and inclusion in 2015’s Ludwig Goes Pop at the Ludwig Museum Budapest.

Solo projects remain a fundamental component to VOLTA’s platform for focused artistic discoveries. Echoing the fair’s solo-format American edition, which hosted a critically lauded ninth New York fair at Pier 90 this past March, 17 galleries will stage solo projects in Basel and another 22 will position two artists “in dialogue”, totaling over 60 percent of booths at VOLTA12. Featured projects include: Tschabalala Self(American, Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York), fresh from her residency and solo exhibition at T293 Naples and featured in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s cross-generational survey A Constellation; Eric Pina (Senegalese, Ed Cross Fine Art, London), whose fluidic Paysages works on paper were included in the 2014 DAK’ART Biennale; a ritualistic installation by Yasmin Alt (German, ROCKELMANN &, Berlin), who has shown recently in Anti-Monuments at KKW (Leipzig) and Chaos/Cosmos at Kunstverein Offenburg; and Alpin Arda Bağcık (Turkish, GALERI ZILBERMAN, Istanbul), who renders disinformation and manipulation of current events in startling photorealism. Plus: krupic kersting galerie || KUK(Cologne) installs a “circus of lights, sounds, and images” to underscore sociopolitical narratives by Tracey Snelling (American), a recent Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant recipient and subject of current solo shows at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (Brussels) and Baltimore Museum of Art, and cinematic artist-auteurist Ulu Braun (German), featured in the IBB Videoraum at Berlinische Galerie (Berlin) plus recent film festivals throughout East Asia and Europe; YOD Gallery (Osaka) considers contemporary means of communication via two Japanese multimedia artists, Masashi Hattori, who gained prominence at the Gunma Biennale for Young Artists and Wonder Seeds at Tokyo Wonder Site, and self-titled “geek hand-stitch” phenom Stitch Dog; and Fresh Window (Brooklyn) pairs Fanny Allié (French), a recent recipient of Brooklyn’s A.I.R. Fellowship Program, with Berlin-based Diana Sirianni (Italian) in a cross-media exploration of spatial reinvention.

The complete list of VOLTA12 exhibitors follows below and can also be viewed online at www.voltashow.com

 

Tags

,