Art Basel Hong Kong

Drawing on art historical, political and personal references, Njideka Akunyili Crosby creates layered compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. The domestic spaces the artist depicts feel intimate yet are often suspended between continents and through time. As seen in this important 2019 work, vegetation in the form of houseplants, wallpaper, patterned fabric or views of foliage snatched through windows often serves to break down distinctions between interior and exterior space.

Works by the artist are currently on view internationally in exhibitions including The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery, London (until 19 May 2024), Soulscapes at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (until 2 June 2024), Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (until 12 May 2024), Capturing The Moment at Tate Modern, London (until 28 April 2024) and the collection display Desire, Knowledge, and Hope (with Smog), The Broad, Los Angeles (until 7 April 2024).

‘My art has always expressed the strong universal desire of humanity to experience the beauty of life and the marvellous mystery of the universe.’ — Yayoi Kusama

Throughout her career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences. Central to Kusama’s practice is her acclaimed Infinity Mirror Rooms – immersive environments in which mirrors create the illusion of an expansive, infinite space. Where the Lights in My Heart Go is a polished stainless steel room punctured with small holes activated by natural light to create an ever-changing constellation. Kusama has referred to the effect as that of a ‘subtle planetarium’ – a space in which to ponder the mysteries of the physical and metaphysical universe. It is the first Infinity Mirror Room by Kusama which relies solely on ambient light to create an experience of entering an expansive cosmos.

Click here for more information about Where the Lights in My Heart Go

On view are examples of iconic Infinity Net painting by Yayoi Kusama. Forging a path between Abstract Expressionism, then the dominant style, and the nascent Minimalist movement, Kusama first showed her Infinity Net paintings in New York in the late 1950s, to great critical acclaim. In these works, Kusama responded to the bravado of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, redefining the heroic gesture as a smaller, incremental, highly sophisticated loop – obsessional, meticulous and labour-intensive. Conversely, especially when seen en masse, these works were often described in oceanic or even celestial terms – the distillation of an endless idea, covering the world. In paintings such as these, Kusama continues to develop the chromatic and emotional possibilities of her Infinity Nets.

Current major exhibitions include Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love at the San Francisco Museum of Art (on view until 7 September 2024) and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Rooms at Tate Modern, London, UK (until 28 April 2024). Yayoi Kusama: 1945 – Today is on view at Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 27 March–29 September 2024.

‘Intimacy and closeness are at the centre of my practice. Whether it’s a portrait of a friend or depictions of a couple in bed, I want to express the multivalent and complex nature of relationships, highlighting our connectedness to one another.’ — Doron Langberg

The presentation features a number of new works by Doron Langberg, whose intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another. Langberg’s paintings often dissolve certainties of form between individual bodies and between bodies and their surroundings. Orchestrating multiple figures, as well as details of textiles, clothing, interior patterns and aspects of nature he builds compositions in which figures appear to move in or out of focus, emerging from or receding into their surroundings, at times declarative, at times spectral. Areas of a painting might appear emphatic or consciously indeterminate, leaving passages of abstraction: gaps, questions – or breathing spaces – that lend the work a more speculative emotional register.

Doron Langberg: Part of Your World, the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition in Europe, is on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam until 26 May 2024. Doron Langberg: Night continues at Victoria Miro, London, until 28 March 2024. Doron Langberg: Flowers continues at Victoria Miro Venice until 30 March 2024.

In this work, Chris Ofili draws on mythological and symbolic sources to create a rich, ambiguous atmosphere. Alternating between figurative and abstract elements, the painting shows, kneeling in the lower right of the canvas, a nude character with long, dark hair. Holding an axe in one hand, while a trumpet-like instrument protrudes from its back, the figure may be engaged in a ritual of some kind, possibly one that pertains to the work’s title, Dry Season. Areas of colour seem to emanate from the trumpet, suggesting atmospheric changes, while the rich colours of the painting and the descending brushmarks along its left-hand side indicate that a spell of drought may have been broken.

Works by the artist are currently on view internationally in exhibitions including The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the National Portrait Gallery, London (until 19 May 2024) and Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (until 7 April 2024). Requiem, a major site-specific work Ofili, is on view at Tate Britain, London.

‘I am amazed at how beautiful the circle can be.’ — Howardena Pindell

Howardena Pindell’s expansive canvases are the result of years spent thinking about studies into the great range of emotional responses elicited by colour, discussions surrounding the meaning and cultural significance of colour, and colours found in the natural world, such as glaciers, bioluminescent plankton, and solar storms. Informed by her understanding of geometry (in geometry, a tesseract is a four-dimensional cube) but judged by eye, these paintings feature fields of radiant dots punctuated by larger circular and quadrilateral shapes that provide rhythmic interplay between background and foreground. These developments add further complexity to works that, symphonic in their structures and rhythms, reveal new variations as the artist advances her exploration of colour and its effects, resonating emotionally, conceptually and perceptually. Meditations on the relationship of form and colour, they make evident her continually evolving practice and approach to the micro and macro; as she notes, ‘I feel like I am a tree with many branches’.

‘A beautiful side of plankton is bioluminescence. At night along the shore and in the waves, it creates a luminous hue of blue as the waves roll in.’ — Howardena Pindell

In her celebrated Plankton Lace works, Pindell draws inspiration from the luminous displays of plankton she saw at the American Museum of Natural History. With its stitched and layered surface resembling the microorganisms that are essential to the health of the planet – as both a food source for marine life and significant generator of the world’s oxygen – the work highlights the beauty of nature while pointing to the fragile balance of ecosystems necessary for our planet’s survival.

Works by the artist are on view internationally in institutional exhibitions including Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (until 12 May 2024), Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950–1970 at Turner Contemporary, Margate (until 6 May 2024), Day Jobs at Canton Arts Center at Stanford University, California (until 21 July 2024) and A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts (until 22 June 2024).

‘Celestina is shown holding her daughter. She has caught her. Now she can keep her forever.’ — Paula Rego

Executed in 2001, Untitled is the final work in a series made by Paula Rego around the story of the Spanish literary character Celestina. Rego reimagines Celestina through her own lens. In this work, Rego depicts Celestina as a matriarchal figure cradling her daughter. Celestina is portrayed with her daughter in her arms as though she has just saved her from a terrible fall. While at first glance suggesting a moment of maternal tenderness, there is characteristic ambiguity in Rego’s depiction of the relationship between the figures and the exact nature of the scene. As Rego described when discussing this work, ‘in the final picture (Celestina) is shown holding her daughter. She has caught her. Now she can keep her forever.’

Works by the artist are on view in solo institutional exhibitions including Paula Rego: Rupture and Continuity, at Museu do Côa, Portugal (until 28 July 2024), and Paula Rego: Manifesto, at Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal (18 April–6 October 2024). This autumn, the major exhibition Paula Rego: Power Games will open at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (28 September 2024–2 February 2025).

‘As each viewer gazes upon the shifting surface, strange patterns seem to appear and vanish, new thoughts are triggered and memories recollected all while neural pathways and connections are forged for the first time.’ — Conrad Shawcross

This new wall-based work comprising two slowly counter-rotating discs, both perforated using a mathematical algorithm, continues the artist’s exploration of optics and visual perception. The sum effect allows light to permeate through the voids within their surfaces, producing an effect reminiscent of those experienced in nature, such as the shifting light of the sea.

Of his investigation of optics to achieve disrupted dynamic sculptural surfaces though the juxtaposition of hole patterns, Shawcross explains, ‘In essence this can be described as the moiré effect but we have tried over the past eight years to create a very empirical understanding of the variables and constraints that creates such varied effects. While I love the complex visuals, I’m drawn also by the philosophical and perceptual implications; that combinations of absences can create pattern, complexity, even illusion… I hope the work shows a mathematical simulation of these very beautiful phenomenon that we find so inspiring and transformative. They’re all about pattern and about nature – about the simulation of nature in very geometric, very refined ways.’

Cascading Principles, an exhibition bringing together more than 35 sculptures realised by the artist over the past 17 years, is on view at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, until 30 June 2024. From 16 May 2024, Expansion Fields, featuring sculptures and drawings by the artist, will be on view in the gardens and galleries of Glyndebourne, East Sussex, as part of Glyndebourne Festival 2024.

‘Each object is one that I have a relationship with, that I have touched on a regular basis at some point in my life.’ — Do Ho Suh

Drawn from places the artist has inhabited, such as his childhood home or Western studios and apartments, Do Ho Suh’s delicately precise, weightless impressions give form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities. Speaking about works such as Sockets/Switches (Rectangular/Horizontal): Berlin, Horsham, London, New York, Seoul, Venice, 2021, the artist says: ‘Much of my work is about the body and how we clothe ourselves to move through the world. I relate architecture to clothing and the Specimen are like pressure points or the anatomical parts of a building – there is actually something very bodily and intimate about them for me. Each object is one that I have a relationship with, that I have touched on a regular basis at some point in my life. The process of measuring the spaces for the patterns is also a loving, caressing gesture for me, it’s how I make sense of my surroundings.’

Works by the artist are currently on view in Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time, an expansive exhibition exploring the foundational role of drawing in Suh’s practice. The exhibition takes place at Modern One, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, until 1 September 2024. Artland: An Installation by Do Ho Suh and Children is on view at Brooklyn Museum until 5 May 2024. Suh’s major 2015 sculpture Portal is now on long-term display at MFA Houston. From 27 April, a special edition of the artist’s Public Figures will go on long-term display outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC. Work by the artist features in The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989, on view at Minneapolis Institute of Art from 23 March–23 June 2024. Suh also created a large-scale work for the Atrium Project, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, on view until 2 February 2025.