Art Basel 2021: Highlights
Nadav Kander (b. 1961) is a London-based photographer, artist, and director renowned for portraiture and large format landscape photographs. His multiple series of landscape images, such as Dark Line - The Thames Estuary, are often dominated by immense architectural elements and slow-moving dark waters with seemingly-infinite horizons; ultimately rendering humans diminutive and inconsequential in the overall environment. Kander’s latest body of work to be shown at Basel, The Pause, runs with the idea of nearing the end of a journey; of confronting our ultimate fears as humans, seeking out something greater than ourselves.
Mark Cohen (b. 1943) is known primarily for his black and white images, though was also a pioneer of the 1970s color movement which shifted the visual dynamic of American photography. Shooting “from the hip” with a wide-angle lens, Cohen’s work exhibits the spontaneous intimacy associated with street photography. Intrusive yet elegant, the cropped bodies and landscapes of his photographs exude a gritty, albeit sensuous glimpse into his transitory aesthetic.
Pieter Henket (b. 1979) developed an early fascination with film and photography after he located to New York City from the Netherlands. After much experimentation with staging and production, Henket had a successful run doing portraits of famous celebrities, friends, and strangers. However, it is his series Congo Tales which encapsulates strong, cinematographic characteristics while capturing a story in a single shot. It is through this sequence of images that Henket explores the cultural mythologies of the local inhabitants of the Congo Basin, a project which was done in collaboration with the non-governmental organization, Tales of Us in Berlin.
Z.J.S. Ndimande founded a photo studio initially in located Greytown in the South African province of Natal in the 1940s during the oppressive regime of the Apartheid Government. The family business changed hands over to his son Richard in the 1960s, who eventually moved the studio to a less segregated, rural area outside of Greytown. A spin-off of vernacular studio portraiture, Ndimande’s work shatters the perceived stereotypes of South African people as seen through a western tradition of studio portraiture. Each image has become a nostalgic act of reclamation in a world where the color of one’s skin was often negated.
Bruce Davidson (b. 1933) is known for his dedication to the documentation of social inequality, particularly photographing communities hostile to outsiders. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958, where he created seminal bodies of work such as Brooklyn Gang and East 100th Street. During the 1980s, Davidson documented New York’s subway system, a series which will be on view at Basel, and marked the photographer’s shift from black and white to color. Work from his fifty-year career have been extensively published in monographs and are included in major public and museum collections around the world.
Aaron Siskind’s (1903—1990) first artistic inclinations centered around music and poetry. It was not until receiving a camera as a wedding gift that he began his photographic career. Starting in the realm of documentary photography with the New York Photo League in 1932, Siskind’s work later shifted focus to a subject’s transformative properties, lacking the scale and context of the original subject. Siskind’s images can seem both sculpturally vast and ambiguously painterly, drawing from elements of the abstract expressionist movement of which he was closely involved. A rare, nine-part installation, Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, embodies his aesthetic approach to the photographic image.
Ruth Bernhard (1905—2006) initially began with a career in commercial photography after moving to New York City in 1927. Influenced by Berenice Abbott and Edward Weston, Bernhard’s passion for the medium became driven by the concept of minimalism. Primarily photographing in black and white, Bernhard captured a range of subject matter; from sumptuous still lives to dramatically-lit nude figures, creating abstract shapes and sculptural masses using composition, light, and shadow. Vintage examples of her early still life work are rare to the market.
