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In Basel, a Show to Talk About Opens at the Schaulager |
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Schaulager® Münchenstein/Basel, Photo: Tom Bisig, Basel |
When the art world flocks to Basel, Switzerland, in two weeks for the most important annual fair on the calendar, there will be numerous important museum exhibitions to see—Basel has a rich art culture for such a tiny canton—but there will be only one show that tells an important story about collecting.
The Schaulager, a cavernous, Herzog & de Meuron–designed contemporary art museum a half-hour tram ride from the city center in Münchenstein, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a collection exhibition called “Out of the Box,” the title presumably an allusion not only to the uncrating of an artwork, but also to the museum’s founding concept as a kind of visible storage.
The granddaughter of art collector Emanuel Hoffmann, Maja Oeri founded the Schaulager in 2002, but its history goes back centuries. As Nate Freeman wrote in ARTnews in 2017, in a profile of Oeri’s cousin, the collector Maja Hoffmann,
the two women’s “ancestor Hans Hoffmann became a Swiss citizen in the late 15th century. But the family’s true mark on the city came at the end of the 19th century, when Maja’s great-grandfather Fritz Hoffmann-LaRoche started a pharmaceutical enterprise, F. Hoffmann-La Roche & Co., that would become one of the largest healthcare companies in the world and help make Basel a European pharmaceutical capital even today.”
The article continues:
“In the 1960s, the company played a pivotal role in a confluence of vital postwar trends incubated along the Rhine River. Midway through the decade, it introduced a drug that would forever alter the contemporary psyche and bring wealth to many a Swiss pharmaceutical kingpin: a member of the benzodiazepine family that would come to be known as Valium. The economic windfall it generated in Basel collided with a collective civic life wherein increased income and free time—and, perhaps, medicated happiness—led to a newfound appreciation for contemporary art.
With the backing of a company that today is worth $220 billion, Hoffmann-LaRoche’s son Emanuel began collecting artwork that became the basis for the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, which fast-tracked Basel to become one of Europe’s leading hubs for art. The foundation supplied works to institutions such as the Kunsthalle Basel and the Kunstmuseum Basel, and it funded the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the first museum in Europe devoted exclusively to art made after 1960. Since 2002, all work from the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation not held by other institutions has been on view nearby at the Schaulager ...”
(For those curious about the Hoffmann-Oeri family tree, Bloomberg has a handy chart.)
The Schaulager has an unusual design, a slablike, polygonal construction that the architects made more inviting by adding a little gatehouse out front—an entirely separate building that looks cartoonishly small against the 215,000-square-foot main structure but makes visitors feel as though they are about to enter a magical world. When it opened in 2003, a write-up in the New York Times concluded with something of a quizzical shrug
: “There is artificial light from Dan Flavin-inspired fluorescent tubing, and the administrative spaces have windows of a sort. To be honest, they look more like a long gash cut into a foam model of the building and translated into architecture. But who knows? After all, the Schaulager is art or, rather, storage.”
A press release for the celebratory group show notes that the exhibition title also references how the concept of contemporary art has expanded in the two decades since the museum’s opening. (For cognoscenti the title will also call to mind Brian O’Doherty’s famous 1976 essay “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.”) Its offerings nod to both past and present: works by Dieter Roth recall the Roth exhibition at the Schaulager inaugural, along with recent acquisitions by Tacita Dean and Klara Lidén.
The show opens June 10, just before Art Basel. It should give fair visitors a lot to talk about. |
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That’s the total the Sacklers have agreed to contribute to efforts to fight the opioid epidemic as part of a new deal approved Tuesday by a federal appeals court. In exchange, the family will be shielded from future civil lawsuits related to Oxycontin, but it does not stop museums and other institutions from continuing to remove the family name from buildings. |
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Los Angeles’s Hannah Hoffman Gallery to Co-Represent Darrel Ellis Estate: The West Coast–based dealer will represent the Darrel Ellis Estate in collaboration with New York gallerist Candice Madey. Ellis, who died in 1992, merged painting, printmaking, and photography. He is currently the subject of a posthumous comprehensive survey at the Bronx Museum.
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Xavier Hufkens Takes on Representation of Leon Kossoff: The Brussels-based dealer now represents the estate of the British figurative painter, who was active in the mid-20th-century and whose gestural paintings center on London-based scenes. The gallery plans to show works by Kossoff at Art Basel 2023 and will host a solo exhibition in February 2024.
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Los Angeles’s Regen Projects Appoints Magnus Edensvard as Director: Edensvard formerly ran Ibid. Projects across locations in London, Los Angeles, and Vilnius, Lithuania. He has worked on exhibitions for artists such as Unica Zürn, Rodrigo Matheus, Carsten Nicolai, Chris Burden, Anthea Hamilton, Jānis Avotiņš, Carlo Mollino, and Dan Perjovschi.
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Van Doren Waxter to Represent Estate of Zoe Longfield: Longfield, who died in 2013 at the age of 88, was a first-generation Bay Area Abstract Expressionist painter active in the West Coast movement in the 1940s. Her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location in 2024.
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UOVO Acquires Fine Art Storage Company Amid Expansion in California: The art and archival storage services company has acquired Orange County Fine Art Storage and Display Art Services. The acquisition comes amid UOVO’s expansion in Southern California.
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Venus Over Manhattan Takes On Susumu Kamijo: The New York–based Japanese artist, whose graphic-design-inspired paintings center around depictions of dogs, was the subject of a show at the gallery’s 55 Great Jones Street location this past fall.
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It’s often tempting to think of artists and the art world as existing in some rarefied air, far from reality. But a new report in the New York Times on the devastating effects of Sudan’s civil war on the country’s art scene
brings art back down to earth. Artists were critical to the country’s 2019 revolution and, in the years since, the scene has only grown. But since the war’s outbreak in April, the fighting has centered in Khartoum 2, a capital neighborhood abundant in newer galleries and artists’ studios, and artists have been trapped and galleries looted. As veteran Sudanese artist Eltayeb Dawelbait told the Times, “Inside the war, the physical war, there’s another war for art.” — Harrison Jacobs, digital director |
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