kurimanzutto's participation in Art Basel’s second edition of Online Viewing Rooms will feature a selection of works by: 

danh vo
nairy baghramian
rirkrit tiravanija
haegue yang
jennifer allora & guillermo calzadilla
gabriel orozco
leonor antunes
gabriel kuri
jimmie durham
wilfredo prieto

preview: june 17 – 18, 2020
public: june 19 – 26, 2020

Presenting a focus of ten gallery artists - Allora & Calzadilla, Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Jimmie Durham, Gabriel Kuri, Gabriel Orozco, Wilfredo Prieto, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Danh Vo, and Haegue Yang - our Basel Online Viewing Room presentation shows how our artists engage with formal vocabularies and language systems to understand the different ways of perceiving the world we live in.

Where Rirkrit Tiravanija appropriates slogans to comment on the possibility for hope and utopia in everyday living, Haegue Yang seeks to communicate without language, in a primordial and visual way. Her work engages with materiality to provoke questions on authenticity and originality and by doing so interrogating the ‘original' and the ‘rest,’ to rattle at the rights of cultural ownership, taught ‘authentic’ meaning, and the challenge between the sign, the signified and the signifier. Similarly, Danh Vo engages with the language of biography to produce deeply personal yet political artwork; through the readymade, calligraphy and photography, Vo reminds the viewer that when you examin the present you must understand your past: the past that has identified your own present.

Engaging with the language of news media in our everyday lives, as a daily exercise Wilfredo Prieto read the news from the national and international press and interprets that information (or misinformation) into the most traditional media of painting. Continuing this idea, Gabriel Kuri utilizes language systems that exist in the paper detritus of our everyday, namely shopping receipts and dry cleaning tickets, and creates extraordinary tapestries out of these ordinary fragments. In his artistic research, Jimmie Durham is interested in what happens “away from language”, in the relationship between forms and concepts. Working against Western rationalism, his practice is rooted in uncertainty and paradox. 

Allora & Calzadilla incorporate the found material of used sand paper to develop a language of abstraction that plays with the dichotomies of presence and absence, inscription and erasure, appearance and disappearance.Gabriel Orozco locates language system with the ‘Veladoras' series arises from an aesthetic attraction to the material and the patterns formed by the fabric of hosiery. Leonor Antunes, too, explores the visual language of 20th century architecture, design, and art, to reflect on the function of everyday objects and the potential of modernist forms to become sculptures. In a similar way, Nairy Baghramian creates abstract sculptures that rethink our understanding of forms and concepts inherited from the history of art to address issues of functionality, decoration, abstraction, and feminism. Specific to our Basel OVR presentation, the language and meaning of support and instability, reliance and dependency, are played with.