Camille Graeser, Imi Knoebel and Jean Arp among the artists who von Bartha will present at Art Basel 2016
Bernar Venet, Imi Knoebel, Andrew Bick, Sarah Oppenheimer, Daniel Robert Hunziker, Christian Andersson and Terry Haggerty, amongst others.
Taking a considered curatorial approach, von Bartha will combine works by modern and contemporary artists to encapsulate a sense of the gallery’s 40 year history as well as the innovative contemporary programme.
Camille Graeser (1892-1980) was a Swiss painter and one of the key exponents of the art movement Zurich Concrete. His art adheres to geometrical-mathematical principles, while also being characterised by a lyrical, playful approach to pictorial elements.
Imi Knoebel (1940) is a German artist living and working in Düsseldorf. Renowned for his minimalist, abstract painting and sculpture, the “Messerschnitt” or “knife cuts” are his most frequently employed techniques, along with the regular use of the primary colours. His work has been compared to the high modernists such as Kazimir Malevich and the Bauhaus because of his concern with formal principles. The artist has exhibited, amongst others, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965) was a Belgian abstract sculptor and painter. Born in Antwerp, Vantongerloo met Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck, and Theo van Doesburg and collaborated with them on the magazine De Stijl, which they founded in 1917. After moving back to France, he developed a close friendship with the artist and architect Max Bill, who organised many of his exhibitions. In 1930 he joined the Cercle et Carré group in Paris and a year later helped found Abstraction-Création.
Jean Arp (1887-1966) was a French sculptor, painter and poet, one of the leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of the 20th century. Arp enjoyed many successes in his later decades, including being awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, a commission for the UNESCO building (UNESCO Constellation, 1958) in Paris, and retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1962.
Lygia Clark (1948-1988) was a Brazilian painter and sculpture seen by some critics as foreshadowing the modern era of digital information. Clark co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement (1959-61), which argues that art ought to be subjective and organic. In the late 1960s and 1970s she created a series of unconventional artworks alongside a run of psychoanalytic therapy, leading her to develop a series of therapeutic propositions grounded in art.