Ignasi Aballí and Eva Fábregas, the most outstanding Catalan artists at Art Basel 2022

The new edition of the most important fair of the international artistic circuit, Art Basel 2022, has successfully restored a "new normal", despite the uncertainty of the market. Long queues of avid art collectors and art professionals to enter the different locations and be the first to see and acquire the work of their favorite artist. During Art Basel’s first VIP day, the mega gallery Hauser & Wirth said it sold a 1996 steel version of Louise Bourgeois ’iconic Spider sculpture for $ 40 million.

Liste, aimed at young proposals, was the first fair to open on June 13 at 11 am. This year, for the second year in a row, Bernat Daviu and Joana Roda, from Bombon Projects (Barcelona), took part. One of the requirements of the fair is to participate with a single artist or with a dialogue of at most two. Bombon presented a solo booth by the artist Eva Fábregas –born in 1988 in Barcelona and with a studio in London, where she resides– which she had already exhibited her colorful sculptures in the room of the Barcelona gallery. In Switzerland we were able to see a selection in the line of these pastel-colored, hard-looking but soft sculptures in the center of the booth. These organic forms make one think of sexual organs, uteri, and other human parts so alive that, in some cases (pieces called Sheddings or "shedding"), they seem to suppurate or release organic matter. From the walls hung a series of drawings that accompanied the sculptures, shaping in a two-dimensional plane the universe of the figures of Fábregas. The show aroused great interest from collectors, it was a resounding success.

At 3 pm on June 13 the route continued with the inauguration of the acclaimed Unlimited, the section of the fair that hosts large-scale artistic projects, almost monumental, curated by Giovani Carmine, curator of the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2011.

In this venue he exhibited Ignasi Aballí, born in 1958 in Barcelona, where he currently lives, and who was selected this year to represent the Spanish pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. On this occasion, the Elvira Benítez and Nordenhake galleries - with which he worked - presented an installation made with cropped photographs belonging to the Polyptics series, which evolved from a previous series that also used newspapers as material. main. In the case of Horizons , all the selected press clippings contain various images of the sky and the sea in compositions of landscapes that reflect on notions of constraints and endings. The work is assembled in the form of a puzzle in which all the individual pieces must be placed correctly so that the whole can be assimilated. Here, in the installation, spectators occupy an imaginary space where their position is similar to standing on the shore: watching the union of the sky and the sea along the horizon line.

Image: Horizons. Photography Digital printing. 700x2400 cm. Courtesy of Galeria Elvira Benitez and Galerie Nordenhake