White Cube is pleased to participate in Art Basel’s first-ever online viewing room, presenting works by Tracey Emin, Theaster Gates, Andreas Gursky, Al Held, Magnus Plessen, Kaari Upson, Jeff Wall and Zhou Li.
Highlights include:
Zhou Li’s large-scale painting La Bleu J'adoré NO.5- Nature (2019). Line-making lies at the core of the artist’s abstract works, which incorporate illusory endless loops and defining blocks of colour that delimit transient, open spaces.
Utah (2017) by Andreas Gursky, a vast, cinematic work that was inspired by a photograph taken on the artist’s mobile phone through the window of a moving vehicle. Intrigued by the result, Gursky later returned with his professional equipment to recapture the scene.
Kaari Upson’s TK (Day Coffin - MASTER) (2018 -19), an installation featuring larger-than-life resin sculptures of pillboxes. Referencing hallucinatory suburban domestic life, the work draws upon the pillbox as both a mundane object and a reminder of our mortality and increased dependency on supplements.
Untitled (Fig. 12) (2020) by Magnus Plessen, which explores the intangible dynamics of human relations, investigating positive psychic forces of love, faith and hope. The painting’s compositions are inspired by research into new theories of quantum physics, bio-electromagnetism and the positive psychology movement, and reflect the intangible yet powerful energies binding humans together.
Mercury Zone IX (1976) by Al Held, who is the subject of a major solo presentation at White Cube Bermondsey in November 2020. A pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, Held created works of great complexity during his 50-year career. In this painting, the artist’s fascination with perception is prevalent as the geometric forms pass over and impossibly overlap each other.
Theaster Gates’sWhite Painting #1 (2019), which forms part of a recent body of work made using roofing materials, tar and white enamel paint. In these paintings, Gates’s personal history with materials associated with labour is formally linked with his long-standing interest in Japanese aesthetics.
Parent child (2018) by Jeff Wall. Depicting a parent and child on a sidewalk in a suburban shopping district, this work has the relation to street photography that the artist has developed over the past decades; a mode he calls 'near documentary'.
Beatriz Milhazes’ Pó de arroz (2017-18), which makes reference to the flattened sense of space in Matisse’s paper cut-outs and the colourful compositions of Sonia Delaunay. In this painting, Milhazes employs a bright, riotous colour palette with ‘Neo-Concretist’ and geometric shapes.
Tracey Emin’s neon work Move me (2015). In November, Emin will open at major solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Titled ‘Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul’, the exhibition is organised in collaboration with Munch Museum, Oslo, and reveals Emin’s long-held fascination with Munch.
