ART BASEL PARIS

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to present works by Giulia Andreani, Karel Appel, Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Sarah Crowner, Jeremy Demester, Ida Ekblad, Elmgreen & Dragset, Günther Förg, Katharina Grosse, Raymond Hains, Hans Josephsohn, Friedrich Kunath, Eddie Martinez, Albert Oehlen, Bridget Riley, Tursic & Mille, Rinus Van de Velde, Edmund de Waal, Grace Weaver and Toby Ziegler.

‘Brown’s marks are a testament to the capacity of the drawn line to create life. Quick or slow, thick or thin, bold or soft, each mark exhales. This mark-making functions like Dr. Frankenstein’s sutures – they stitch together bits and pieces of art history to form a new entity.’

Jeff Fleming, 2016

‘While at first glance people might see the colour and graphic aspect to the paintings, on closer inspection they see that it has a joined line, that it is a physically constructed object.’

Sarah Crowner, 2024

Against autonomy, we often reuse the same sculpture in different settings, so they start telling stories distinct from those of the previous context in which they’ve been shown. In that way the sculptures are reanimated and maintain a non-static relevance.’

Ingar Dragset, 2024

'In the Gitterbilder […] the grid seems to develop into a kind of mesh or net that doesn’t so much map the surface of the painting as capture it. The grid becomes a malleable form that seems to buckle like lead, or breaks up into fragments that overlay each other to suggest a more complex approach to composition and illusionistic depth than in his previous works where composition occurs essentially on a lateral plane.’

Kirsty Bell, 2018

‘There is a nice anecdote: Raymond Hains was on the train to Venice, to the Biennale, where everyone already knew that American Pop Art would now celebrate its triumph. On the train, someone had a matchbox that was very modern for the time. Raymond Hains took it out of his hand, looked at it and said: “this will be my next work”. These matchbox works […] then began in 1964. He continued them in loose succession throughout his life. It is, of course, a very beautiful response to American Pop Art and a beautiful dialogue between the second and third dimension, between the everyday object and the purely conceptual, intellectual object.’

Robert Fleck, 2021

‘The oscillation between figuration and abstraction in the half-figures thus creates a field of gravitation that tempts the viewer to continuously move around it and position their own body in relation to the corporeality of the sculpture.’

Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck, 2018

‘The Ω motif is a compositional disruptor, and for this reason it sometimes calls for containment or amputation. Like a mask, the sharp, clean edges of the cut-out symbol hide and interrupt the drippy, smeared, oily gestures beneath it. […Oehlen’s] compositions involve an unsettling dialectic of under/over, figure/ground, hole/mask, cut/glue that keeps the whole series moving and undermines any one painting’s identity. Cast down on the canvas, the Ömega Man is like a sigil or rune that disrupts the paint job every time.’

John Kelsey, 2023

‘Perception is the core of Bridget Riley’s practice, the object of her aesthetic investigation. Forms that appear in her art share with geometry its conceptual nomenclature; yet they originate in perception, not in theory. And from perception, they proceed to perception. With or without an external reference, a shape leads to a shape, a colour to a colour.’

Richard Schiff, 2018

‘It is a metalanguage and once again, there is the question of objecthood. Where is the object? What is it? […] There was this desire to abstract "the thing". As a result, the figurative “thing" becomes abstract, emptied of meaning. There is always this conflict in painting, when you see an image. Is the image itself being represented? What is the totality of the thing?’

Tursic & Mille, 2022

‘I depict a life I never had. For me, daydreaming is more important than what happens in reality. After all, you can experience so much more in your mind than you can in reality.’

Rinus Van de Velde, 2023

‘I was always painting flowers
Though before, they had faces,
Limbs and ponytails.
I was always painting flowers
In the sense that
The most important thing was
The drooping, the swaying,
 the bending, the springing.’

Grace Weaver, I was always painting flowers, 2024 (excerpt)