The Green Gallery and MISAKO & ROSEN will jointly present an exhibition at this year's Basel Social Club Bank. New pieces by David Robbins, Ryan Peter, Ken Kagami, Scott Reeder, COBRA and a multi-artist collaborative project run by Katy and Scott Cowan all employ a distinct sense of humor and self-referentiality. They toy with expectations and the art market itself. Many of the works coax the viewer in with pleasure but spin into a more profound reflection.
Ryan Peter photograms find a shallow space where forms are staged as abstractions alluding to bodies and/or landscapes. For Peter, these decisions come by way of an automatic process; one that is tied both from the hand to mind but also the mind to the digital. In this way, tendencies of the personal as well as the collective fuse to generate works that feel both recognizable but also ghostly. COBRA’s recent series Story of Eggs employs a metalinguistic humor. The works suggest fictional avian audiences engaging with the artist's recent paintings. Often romantic in their depiction, the paintings and apparatus suggest a playful wit the artist often embodies. Charlie Brown and Snoopy are reconsidered as Ken Kagami debuts some of his first paintings with the subjects he’s spent decades manipulating. The shift in material and object suggest a sense of gravitas for the artist's otherwise grotesque humor. The duality opens a spirited conflation of characters and interactions. Scott Reeder's new paintings present shameless interactions of money with animate and inanimate objects. The artist’s deft sense of touch is offset by this salacious visual scenario. While initially appearing light and airy, the works posit an underlying comedy that reveals a subtle yet critical commentary on socioeconomic themes.
Basel Social Club will also feature projects from:
David Robbins Wall Safes
With cheeky candor the Wall Safes address the reality that artworks are often purchased for their investment value. Depicting imaginary vaults created with the use of artificial intelligence, 50 Wall Safes comments on the assetization of art, literalizing this development with cracked panache. Gold or silver and jewel-encrusted, the Wall Safes are impossible cartoons of opulence, their style conjuring the exaggerated capacities of excessive wealth as it is pictured in the popular imagination.
An ideal gift for the oligarch in your life, each of the individual Wall Safes is available for purchase as an NFT, the recent innovation in provenance proof and value storage for digital art. Priced at $1000, each unique Wall Safe is on a continuum of collectible between mass-produced trading card, a casino chip, and one-of-a-kind fine art, with the confusion deliberate and timely.
Ob Dob
Ob Dob is an artistic project put together by Berlin-based artists Katy and Scott Cowan. The project's output includes a range of handcrafted items, notably hand-dyed clothing and limited-edition pins. In addition to producing its own distinct merchandise, Ob Dob operates as a collaborative platform—facilitating the creation of artist-designed pins, handmade bags, and bespoke stitched hats—in conjunction with other artists.
For this year's Basel Social Club, Ob Dob has worked with several artists, to create limited edition pieces specifically for the event. Collaborating artists include: Phillipa Atkinson (Amsterdam), Melina Ausikaitis of Aitis Something Apparel (Chicago), Tina Braegger (Switzerland), Katy Cowan (Berlin), Scott Cowan (Berlin), Mari Eastman (Chicago), Heidi Howard (NYC), Margaret Lee (NYC), Amy Giovanna Rinaldi of Intimate Revolution (California), and Kirsten Schmid (Berlin).
Location
Rittergasse 21-25
4051 Basel
Public Hours
Sun, June 15 - Sat, June 21, 2pm - midnight