Art Basel 2024

For the 2024 edition of Art Basel, Petzel is pleased to present works by artists integral to the program, with established histories to the gallery, and new to its roster. Artists on view will include Yael Bartana, Ross Bleckner, Cosima von Bonin, Simon Denny, Derek Fordjour, Nikita Gale, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Tomoo Gokita, Stefanie Heinze, Charline von Heyl, Sean Landers, Rezi van Lankveld, Maria Lassnig, James Little, Allan McCollum, Rodney McMillian, Malcom Morley, Sarah Morris, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, Pieter Schoolwerth, Emily Mae Smith, Nicola Tyson, and Heimo Zobernig.

Highlights include both new and significant paintings and sculpture from Yael Bartana, Cosima von Bonin, Derek Fordjour, Sarah Morris, Seth Price, and Pieter Schoolwerth, and historical works by Maria Lassnig and Malcolm Morley.

Derek Fordjour’s mechanized diorama Red Queen’s Race (2023), first debuted at his solo exhibition at the gallery last fall, will be on view, in addition to three new paintings, each depicting Black jockeys. These works continue Fordjour’s interest in the legacy of the Black jockey in horse racing and the artist’s broader examination of Black performance and success in America.

A historical painting by Maria Lassnig will be on view, coinciding with Drawings, the current exhibition of the artist’s works on paper at Petzel’s Upper East Side gallery. A fiercely observed self-portrait, this work demonstrates Lassnig’s characteristic “body awareness” approach to painting, manifesting interior, immediate sensation through line, color, and gesture.

Seth Price’s Thought Comes from the Body III (2022–23) will also be on view, following his exhibition Ardomancer last fall. Price’s work merges gestural painting with various digital methods, evoking what the artist calls “human time” and “machine time.” Placing the two temporal dimensions on the same plane, Price considers tensions between human touch and emerging technologies.

A version of the Generation Ship sculpture by Yael Bartana, part of the artist’s Light to the Nations work included in this year’s Venice Biennale in the German Pavilion, will be on view. With the artist’s ongoing work Light to the Nations, Bartana considers the present reality of planet Earth on the brink of environmental and political destruction. In an act of salvation, a spaceship, designed by the artist to mimic the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and named after a passage in the Book of Isaiah, carries multiple generations of humans toward unknown galaxies.

The painting Detector [Spiderweb] (2022) by Sarah Morris will be on view, coinciding with the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist to date at the Renzo Piano-designed Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern–a short train ride from Basel. Morris is known for her paintings of vivid geometries which form new understandings of networks, systems, economies and architectures. Morris uses reality and vivid abstraction to create a new language of place and politics. In her spiderweb series, Morris reimagines the improvisational structure of these organic forms not unlike her perception of cities in flux.

The painting Tilting (2017) by Malcolm Morley, a split composition of jousting knights faced off in contrasted, Pop palette backgrounds, previews the gallery’s upcoming exhibition devoted to Morley’s painting and sculpture. Organized in close partnership with the artist’s estate, Malcolm Morley: Painting as Model will be the first comprehensive survey of his work in over two decades. 

Cosima von Bonin reveals a new painting featuring Daffy Duck, a key figure across her oeuvre, aligning with her exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Frequently evoking cartoon characters and aquatic protagonists, von Bonin’s recurring depictions of Daffy play with pop-cultural associations, revealing both humor and darkness beneath the surface of mass media images.