Pilar Corrias Gallery

Art BaselBOOTH M7

11–16 June 2019

This booth for Art Basel will exhibit the following selection of artists from the Pilar Corrias programme:

Ian Cheng (b. Los Angeles, 1984)Cui Jie (b. Shanghai, 1983)

Sophie von Hellermann (b. Munich, 1975)Koo Jeong A (b. Seoul, 1967)Tala Madani (b. Tehran, 1981)

Sabine Moritz (b. Quedlinburg, 1969)Elizabeth Neel (b. Vermont, 1975)

Christina Quarles (b. Chicago, 1985)Robert Reed (b. Charlottesville, 1938)

Rachel Rose (b. New York, 1986)Tschabalala Self (b. Harlem, 1990)

Shahzia Sikander (b. Lahore, 1969)

For further information on the works, please contact Sales on: +44 (0)20 7323 7000 or sales@pilarcorrias.com

Ian ChengLife After BOB: First Tract, 2019Duratran prints, lightboxes166 x 112 x 1.8 cm65 3/8 x 44 1/8 x 3/4 inEdition of 8

Installation view: 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2019.

Ian Cheng, Life After BOB: First Tract, 2019 [detail, part 2 of 4]

Ian ChengLife After Bob: First Tract, 2019

Ian Cheng uses techniques from video game design, computer programming, and cognitive science to create living environments defined by their abilities to evolve. Cheng’s most recent creature, BOB (‘Bag of Beliefs’) (2018–2019), is an artwork with a nervous system; a form of artificial intelligence whose personality and body are continually growing. BOB’s behavioural patterns are influenced by interactions with humans, who are able to affect BOB’s actions via an app.

Cheng considers stories our “emotional scaffoldings” for making meaning out of an otherwise meaningless reality. The comic, Life After BOB: First Tract, is conceived as a manga about life scripts in the age of AI and presented as a series of light boxes and a black-and-white zine. These light boxes comprise part of the storyboard for a major forthcoming animation, Life After Bob, which will be premiered during his solo show at the Shed, NY, in 2020. With this animation Cheng plans to expand upon the narrative of BOB. He then intends to create an entirely new set of AI sentient beings, similar to BOB but different. There will be a Sarah or a John coming soon.

Ian Cheng’s work is held internationally in private and public collections, including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Tate Modern, London, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, Zabludowicz Collection, London, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, YUZ Musuem, Shanghai.

Cui JieAeron Chair, 2019Acrylic and spray paint on canvas180 x 250 cm70 7/8 x 98 3/8 in(CUI 2019001)

Cui Jie applies various layers of images – some realistic, some imaginary – on her canvases, exploring multiple perspectives of various locations simultaneously. Each layer is meticulously executed to represent the transformation of China’s urbanscape. Painted with calculated and deadpan brushwork combined with a warm and affective palette, Cui’s landscapes and interiors make comparative studies of cities as distinctive models or laboratories of China’s open-and-reform policies. This is depicted as a personal history informed by the aesthetic madness in one time and place, ranging from the architectural confusion of Bauhaus, to Chinese propaganda, and to Soviet communist aesthetics. In essence, Cui Jie’s painting is a time capsule that re-imagines the past and the present.

Recent solo exhibitions include: To Make a Good Chair, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019); The Enormous Space, OCAT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2018); Latter, Former, mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2016); and Cui Jie, START Gallery, Jaffa (2015). Her work has been included in recent group shows at Para Site, Hong Kong (2019); Guangdong Time Museum, Guangdong (2018); MoMa PS1, New York (2017); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2017); Metro Pictures, New York (2017); Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex (2016); K11, Hong Kong and Shanghai (2016); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2015); Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (2014); Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (2014); Oklahoma City Museum of Art (2014); Tianhong Mei Heyuan Arts Center, Hangzhou (2013); and Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2012).

Cui JieAeron Chair, 2019

Tala MadaniPrism Pussy, 2019Oil on linen over panel248.9 x 203.2 x 3.2 cm98 x 80 x 1 1/4 in(MADA 2019002)

Whilst the figures imagined are stereotypical and loaded with associations, the activities in which they are engaged are strange and absurd. Through her distinctive painting technique, Madani imbues recurring symbols and imagery with a complexity that cannot be reduced to any single reading. Products of curiosity, fantasy, and desire, Madani’s paintings provoke a cacophony of interpretation that exceeds mere commentary. As such they exist as ‘vignettes for experimentation’, as powerful meditations on the tension between the stereotypical and the iconic.

Born in Tehran in 1981, Tala Madani is one of the most engaging painters of her generation. Madani’s work is characterised by loose expressive brushwork rendered in a bold, distinctive palette. Rich in narrative and heavy in irony Madani’s paintings depict darkly comic mise-en-scénes. Whilst her more abstract large-scale works usually contain a mass, group or collective, Madani’s more descriptive and intimately scaled paintings, and painterly video animations, depict uncomfortable scenes in which bald, middle-aged men engage in absurd scenarios that fuse playfulness with violence and perversity.

Madani recieved her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include: Tala Madani, “Oven Light”,Portikus (2019); “First Light”, organised in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MIT Visual Arts Center,Cambridge (2016); ”Tala Madani”, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville (2014); “Tala Madani”, Nottingham Contemporary,Nottingham (2014); and “Tala Madani: Rip Image”, Moderna Museet, Malmö; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2013).

Madani’s work is widely represented in major international public and private collections, including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles,Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art,, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,Tate Modern, London, LUMA Foundation, Zurich, Moderna Museet Collection, Stockholm/Malmo, Serralves Foundation, Porto,National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Tala MadaniPrism Pussy, 2019

Tschabalala SelfRed Bottom 1, 2019Acrylic spray paint and Flashe on wood243.8 x 121.9 x 1.9 cm96 x 48 x 3/4 in(SELF 2019023)

Installation view: Tschabalala Self, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, US, 2019.

Tschabalala Self has constructed a singular aesthetic, harnessing painting, printmaking, collage and sculpture to explore ideas about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The exaggerated biological characteristics of her figures reflect Self’s own experiences and cultural attitudes toward race and gender. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self has said. “I amattempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”

Self presses viewers to negotiate their own expectations for how sex is (or should be) mapped onto black bodies. Self’s large-scale, freestanding sculptures that center the body’s lower half may prove to be the most generatively challenging in this regard. The exclamatory size and colors of Big Red and Garter (both 2018) draw the viewer in by their seemingly frank representations of vaginas. They are, however, physiologically indeterminate sculptures that merely gesture toward the anatomical expressions of sex organs amid the rounded feet, knees, legs, and asses that are also figured. As you are able to stand next to these pieces, putting your own body in conversation with them, you are asked to question your own investments in how the gendered body “should” be registered through readily discernible sex organs.

As happens in much of Self’s work, Red Bottom 1 provides the opportunity to think more creatively and expansively about how black genders and sexualities are shaped and inhabited. Her sculptures are part of her larger practice of refusing ready-made images of black people that you might easily contextualize and thus consume. Her collected works instead ask you to sit in and think with the very notion of being-in-relation, necessitating more critical understandings of how black life is felt in a range of bodies, emotions, and environments that are not—and perhaps should not be—readily available or easily detected.

Tschabalala Self (b.1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in New York and New Haven. Selected solo exhibitions include: “HammerProjects: Tschabalala Self”, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); “Tschabalala Self”, Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); “BodegaRun”, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Tschabalala Self, Tramway, Glasgow (2017); Tschabalala Self, Parasol Unit Foundation forContemporary Art, London (2017); “The Function”, T293, Naples (2016).

Self is currently an Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Tschabalala SelfRed Bottom 1, 2019

Rachel RoseFirst Born, 2019Rock and glass33 x 22.9 x 22.9 cm13 x 9 x 9 in(ROSE 2019024)

Rachel RoseFirst Born, 2019

First Born, 2019 is the latest work in Rachel Rose’s ongoing sculptural Eggs series, which takes as its point of departure The Chemical Wedding, a story of alchemical lore published anonymously in Strasbourg in 1616. There was a proliferation of texts written during this period which draw heavily on the theme of alchemy, and the egg, an enduring subject of investigation and experimentation for the artist, is the ultimate alchemical symbol: the source of life itself.

The process of ovulation is contingent on the pituitary gland, a tiny organ, the size of a pea, found at the base of the brain. Hormones secreted from the gland cause the egg to release during ovulation. Described as the “master gland” of the body, it is thought by neuroscientists and philosophers from the beginning of time to also be the locus from which conciseness itself emerges.

The glass yoke at the centre of Rose’ First Born is hand blown, and suffused to a geode shaped into an egg form, a clear allusion to the moment of insemination, itself a crucial alchemical theme. This work is the latest development in the artist’s ongoing and varied sculptural Eggs series, which was began in 2016.

Formally, the works draw on Constantin Brancusi’s The Newborn. Version I, 1920, a shimmering bronze ovoid. Conceptually, however, Rose’s obsession with the origin of life denotes her own interest in conveying an idea of originality in her work. Indeed, despite the seriality of the egg motif in her current practice, no two sculptures are the same: they are different sizes and made from different materials: resin, glass, crystal, rock and wood; thereby compellingly demonstrating the individual distinction of each.

Rachel Rose (American, born 1986) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, US (2018); Fondazione Sandretto, Turin, Italy (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2017); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, US (2016); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2016); Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, UK (2015); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US (2015).

Her work was included in the Carnegie International (2018), the International Exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), and the Sao Paolo Biennial (2016). Forthcoming solo exhibitions include the LUMA Foundation, France (2019), and The Park Avenue Armory, New York (2020). Her work is held in the permanent collections of major public institutions, including: Tate, London; LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Whitney Museum of American Art; and SFMOMA, among others.

Robert ReedSan Romano, Hydraulic Lift, 1979Aquatec acrylic on canvas211.3 x 360.5 x 4 cm83 1/4 x 141 7/8 x 1 5/8 in(REED 1979002)

Robert ReedSan Romano, Hydraulic Lift, 1979

Robert Reed (American, 1938 - 2014) was an abstract painter who lived and worked for much of his life in New Haven, Connecticut. Reed taught at Yale School of Art from 1969 until his death in 2014. Despite teaching full-time Reed maintained an active studio practice producing a body of work that included paintings, collages, prints and constructions. A student of abstract painter and Bauhaus designer Josef Albers, Reed learned to skillfully mix his own colours, often reflecting his personal experiences in vibrant compositions of geometric form.

In 1973, he had a major solo exhibition the Whitney Museum, but following this Reed was rarely exhibited, partly due to constrictive exhibition opportunities for African-American abstract artists in the ’70s and ’80s. The San Romano paintings were first shown in 1980 at the Silvermine Guild to great critical acclaim, including from the New York Times:“Full of movement and many bright Aqua-Tec colors, these are good-looking, enormously clever paintings that are dazzling patterns of squares, slats, stripes, checkerboards and arcs, all beautifully balanced against each other. At the same time, they are monologues and full of technical witticisms.”

Elements of these paintings recall early abstractions by William T. Williams, or segments of Alvin Loving’s hardedged polyhedrons. But Reed shreds recognisable geometrical shapes, constructing his compositions out of formal fragments (the studs on a horse’s harness, lines echoing lances) put together with an eye for both dissonance and harmony. In the process, subtle references to his own childhood in segregated Charlottesville, Virginia, and personal motifs, such as the checkerboard box given to him from his son, make their first appearances.

The titles of Reed’s works were often carefully structured. He places each painting within its series, and then tethers it to a nostalgic symbol of his childhood. This titular strategy charges the abstract form of each work with meaning. San Romano, Hydraulic Lift recalls the place Hydraulic, Virginia the artist’s father’s home. Reed wrote about this work in a later essay: “The ingredients are autobiographical in nature…suspended in a cultural broth of Virginian memories and earth.”

Reed’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Detroit Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Yale University Art Gallery, and Bayly Ar

Click here to read Jessica Tam’s, The Bauhaus and the Black Experience: The Magnificent and Mysterious Robert Reed

Click here to read a review of Robert Reed, San Romano Series, Pilar Corrias Gallery, 12 April - 18 May 2019

Robert ReedSan Romano, Ten and One Half, 1984Aquatec acrylic on canvas unfinished with pencil marks213.4 x 182.9 cm84 x 72 in(REED 1984001)

Robert ReedSan Romano, Ten and One Half, 1984

Robert Reed (American, 1938 - 2014) was an abstract painter who lived and worked for much of his life in New Haven, Connecticut. Reed taught at Yale School of Art from 1969 until his death in 2014. Despite teaching full-time Reed maintained an active studio practice producing a body of work that included paintings, collages, prints and constructions. A student of abstract painter and Bauhaus designer Josef Albers, Reed learned to skillfully mix his own colours, often reflecting his personal experiences in vibrant compositions of geometric form.

In 1973, he had a major solo exhibition the Whitney Museum, but following this Reed was rarely exhibited, partly due to constrictive exhibition opportunities for African-American abstract artists in the ’70s and ’80s. The San Romano paintings were first shown in 1980 at the Silvermine Guild to great critical acclaim, including from the New York Times:“Full of movement and many bright Aqua-Tec colors, these are good-looking, enormously clever paintings that are dazzling patterns of squares, slats, stripes, checkerboards and arcs, all beautifully balanced against each other. At the same time, they are monologues and full of technical witticisms.”

Elements of these paintings recall early abstractions by William T. Williams, or segments of Alvin Loving’s hardedged polyhedrons. But Reed shreds recognisable geometrical shapes, constructing his compositions out of formal fragments (the studs on a horse’s harness, lines echoing lances) put together with an eye for both dissonance and harmony. In the process, subtle references to his own childhood in segregated Charlottesville, Virginia, and personal motifs, such as the checkerboard box given to him from his son, make their first appearances.

The titles of Reed’s works were often carefully structured. He places each painting within its series, and then tethers it to a nostalgic symbol of his childhood. This titular strategy charges the abstract form of each work with meaning. San Romano, Ten and One Half is the name of the street that Reed grew up on in Charlottesville. Reed wrote about this work in a later essay: “The ingredients are autobiographical in nature…suspended in a cultural broth of Virginian memories and earth.”

Reed’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Detroit Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center, Yale University Art Gallery, and Bayly Ar

Click here to read Jessica Tam’s, The Bauhaus and the Black Experience: The Magnificent and Mysterious Robert Reed

Click here to read a review of Robert Reed, San Romano Series, Pilar Corrias Gallery, 12 April - 18 May 2019

Sabine MoritzUntitled, 2019Oil on canvas200 x 200 cm78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in(MORI 2019003)

Sabine MoritzUntitled, 2019

Moritz abstract works are always closely related to her figurative painting, which employ both memory and historic source imagery as their origin. Continuing from this trajectory, Moritz’s explorations into abstraction grew through the development of her use of colour and the exaggeration of her brushstrokes, eventually progressing towards complete abstraction. The artist’s abstract paintings are intense compositions of dynamic impasto brushstrokes. Their vivid colours and forms evoke a wide spectrum of visual and emotional associations. Though very different in their form, all of her works deal with fundamental human experiences and emotions, on a personal as well as on a collective level. As Moritz has said on the relation between her figurative and abstract paintings, “The basic subjects remain the same, but these are different ways of visualising them.”

Moritz started her studies at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (from 1989 to 1991) and completed her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (graduated 1994). Moritz has been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Brussels, Paris and London.

Sabine Moritz lives and works in Cologne.

Elizabeth NeelFlitted Seed, 2019Acrylic on Canvas200.7 x 175.3 cm79 x 69 in(NEEL 2019008)

Elizabeth NeelFitted Seed, 2019

Fitted Seed is part of a new body of work that continues to foreground Neel’s reflections on the physical landscape that surrounds us as well as the inner landscape of the mind. She pours, brushes, prints, rolls and folds paint, propagating a choreography of marks that mirror the bilateral architecture of the body and its movement through environments of human habitation.

Elizabeth Neel’s paintings complicate relationships between architecture, the body, nurture and nature. Her lexicon of marks, produced with brushes, rollers, rags and the force of gravity are a collective imprint of her experience and action in relationship to shared cultural signifiers and designations. She activates the narrative potential of Abstraction using visual similes that belong as much to the viewer’s world as they do to her own.

Elizabeth Neel was born in Stowe, Vermont, in 1975. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, Providence, in 1997; a Diploma Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2002; and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York, in 2007.

Neel has had solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museum around the world, including the SculptureCenter, Long Island City; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; and Saatachi Gallery, London, and was included in Prague Biennial 5 in 2011

Shahzia SikanderRizwan Ahmed, 2018Ink and gouache on Paper61 x 50.8 cm (framed)24 x 20 in (framed)(SIKA 2018004)

Shahzia SikanderFatima Mernissi, 2018Ink and gouache on Paper61 x 50.8 cm (framed)24 x 20 in (framed)(SIKA 2018005)

Shahzia SikanderFahmida Riaz, 2018Ink and gouache on Paper61 x 50.8 cm (framed)24 x 20 in (framed)(SIKA 2018007)

Shahzia SikanderAOC 2, 2019Ink and gouache on Paper61 x 50.8 cm (framed)24 x 20 in (framed)(SIKA 2019007)

Shahzia SikanderRecent Portraits, 2018–19

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, 1969, Shahzia Sikander has throughout her career explored ways to stretch and pull apart the vocabulary of miniature painting in different media and at different scales, creating a hybrid imagery that blurs such polarities as Hindu and Muslim, traditional and contemporary, East and West, representation and abstraction. Sikander’s portrait series are investigations into the cultural, literary and social global histories. Sikander strives to be open-ended. She creates portraits of people, dead and alive, whose works have influenced her and others.

Major solo exhbitions of Sikander’s work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria (formerly Philip Morris) (2000); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2004); The San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego (2004); Miami Art Museum, Miami (2005–06); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2007); daadgalerie, Berlin (2008); IKON, Birmingham, U.K. (2008); (2014); Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain (2015); and MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome (2016).

Artist’s statement, April 2019:

“Portrait to me is like a poem. It can be a reflection of a human emotion. It can also represent the human as a template to deconstructlayers of fixed historical and cultural representations.

Portraiture within the genre of Indo-Persian miniature painting is another springboard for ideas. I have examined the art-historicaltradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting for almost three decades and see my role as primarily investigative. While I understandhow cultural and historical traditions clearly inform identity, I also aim to define and redefine representations within such contextsthrough my work. Making a portrait of another is like playing the role of the detective, to look behind the mask and the perception,to highlight how mercurial identity can be.”