For the 2024 edition of VOLTA Art Basel, we choose a curated show with a surreal twist. The participating artists look at the universe with a magnifying glass and back to the small and intimate, mold the earth into images, numbers and color their footprints.
Maaike Kramer creates works in which fleeting ideas are materialized. By combining monumental imagery with a fleeting visual language, she constructs compositions that carry both monumentality and uncertainty, inviting contemplation. She opts for materials that can borrow from each other, resulting in a blending and distortion of their properties. Layered works emerge, challenging logical perception and associated expectations. This disruption of conventional logic invites viewers to embark on their own exploration. The works are not easily captured in a single glance, as they upset the concept of reality.
Simone Albers paints and makes installations reflecting on the natural world and the way we relate to it. In her research she combines natural sciences, philosophy, scientific imagery and other cultural visual representations of nature to propose alternative representations, free of objectification or appropriation. Although she paints from observations based on scientific images, the work often has a mythical quality where it is not always clear what exactly we are looking at. Are these images real or are they constructed? And do these two really differ from each other or is reality actually actively constructed?
Louise te Poele works with digitally manipulated photography. Her art is reminiscent of surrealistic dream images, going beyond the known. She combines familiar and seemingly logical objects into a whole that seems familiar at first but evokes wonder on closer inspection. In these works, the boundaries are constantly blurring. What are we looking at, a photograph or a painting? At history or at the present? At a sculpture or at an image of it? She takes her inspiration from modern life, in which we also see the boundaries blurring between real and fake and between virtual and physical. She works from the conviction that experiencing beauty leads to concentrated attention and ultimately to a caring relationship with the world.
Marena Seeling has spent her entire creative career by taking the few hectares of land in her native region as a starting point for an artistic development in which she reduces her observations to their essence and then uses them in her visual work. For the ‘Pools of Light’ series she photographed pools and gullies near her birthplace. The shapes of these shiny water surfaces were the inspiration for a series of manually sanded aluminum panels on which the light is refracted. It is painting without paint and color, but with light. In these works, the reality of the pools has been transformed into a condensed image in which viewers can populate their own dreams.
Wieteke Heldens‘s ‘Legends’ originated at a time when I she was in intensive care, restricted to her bed, with nothing to do except count colors—a pastime that in a way, created a key, or legend, for deciphering the world immediately around her. The project has evolved into a series of paintings which document and label by number the individual colors of paint and other materials she has in her studio at any given time. In new ‘Legends’ she shows all the green colors in her studio. Green is a healing color, even blind people get positively affected by the color green.