Works by Christo and Donald Judd to Be Exhibited in Art Basel Unlimited
Presentations Coincide with Exhibition by Donald Judd at Gagosian’s Basel Gallery
BASEL, June 5, 2024—Gagosian is pleased to participate in Art Basel 2024, with a presentation of new, recent, and rarely available works by an international grouping of contemporary artists, as well as special entries in the Unlimited section of the fair.
On view are paintings, sculptures, photographs, and mixed-media works that range across abstract and figurative form and image, often exploring the two approaches’ fertile intersection. This is exemplified in a rarely shown sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein that wittily combines Pop and Surrealist modes, transforming the graphic representation of a woman’s profile into a “drawing in space.” Jordan Wolfson’s six-foot-tall Red Sculpture (2017–22) portrays, in the form of a grimacing larger-than-life puppet, the influence of the artist’s past on his current psychological state, while Untitled (2024), a columnar sculpture by Lauren Halsey, considers the impact of commercial aesthetics on South Central Los Angeles, reframing the area as a locus of celebration. Carol Bove unveils a new body of work with Lamy Ambuscade (2024), a stainless-steel sculpture that continues in the vein of her 2021 commission for the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More abstract still is Donald Judd’s untitled (1989), a wall-mounted stack of ten units in blue anodized aluminum and clear plexiglass that establishes a rhythmic interaction between positive and negative space.
Many of the paintings at Basel also inhabit the fluid boundary between representational imagery and nonrepresentational composition. Helen Frankenthaler’s Genie (1963) belongs to the critical period when she “composed with color” rather than with line, resulting in the freer works that came to define her practice, while Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (2018) is a lush sunset image layered with a baroque wallpaper-like design in luxuriant gold enamel, and Jonas Wood’s Bonsai Still Life (2024) locates the titular plants in a domestic scene distinguished by bright color and flattened forms. In Untitled (2024), Rick Lowe layers patterns derived from photographs of dominoes games to suggest maps of urban districts, using paint and collaged paper to echo the movement of communities over time, while the dense blocks of paintstick, etching ink, and silica in Richard Serra’s drawing Diptych #9 (2019) hint at architectural forms but function independently of external reference.
Gagosian’s booth also features work by several artists using photography, including Richard Avedon, whose set of vividly colored prints, The Beatles portfolio, London, August 11, 1967 (printed in 1990), groups four iconic images of the epoch-making band during their late psychedelic phase.
Art Basel Unlimited
At Art Basel Unlimited, an exhibition platform for large-scale projects that transcend the limits of the standard booth, Gagosian presents Christo’s Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014) and an untitled installation from 1970 by Donald Judd.
Christo
Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon (1963–2014)
For his earlier temporary sculpture Wrapped Car (Volkswagen) (1963), Christo employed a sage-green 1961 Beetle that was lent to the artist and his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude by art director Claus Harden. He swathed the vehicle’s body in tarpaulin and rope, playfully intensifying the object’s mystique and invoking a new understanding of its form (Christo admired the famous “Bug” model for its rounded design as well as for its countercultural associations). Though by 2014 Christo was wrapping entire buildings, he decided to revisit the work by purchasing the exact same model and enlisting his nephew Vladimir Yavachev to help him wrap it. The result is Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, which he dated 1963–2014 to express the project’s extended incubation
Donald Judd
Untitled(1970)
Donald Judd’s installation consists of a band of five-foot-high hot-dipped galvanized iron panels that stand end to end on the floor eight inches from the surrounding walls. Initially configured for its debut appearance at Leo Castelli in New York, the work has since been adapted to other locations including the Pasadena Art Museum (1971) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1988); at Art Basel Unlimited it appears as an immersive U-shaped arrangement. Constructed with typical precision, it is consistent with Judd’s interest in the investigation of material form through the interplay of light and color in space. Emphasizing the intrinsic qualities of the work’s components—which here include the galvanized metal’s distinctive crystalline surface—Judd explores relationships between part, whole, and setting.
