Art | 46 | Basel
Tilton Gallery - Booth T9
Basel | June | 18-21 | 2015
Sakshi Gupta, Simone Leigh, and Brenna Youngblood
Tilton Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the Feature sector of Art Basel | Basel 2015 with a three person presentation of sculpture by Sakshi Gupta and Simone Leigh and paintings by Brenna Youngblood. Each of these artists use materials metaphorically and transform nature through the language of abstraction.
Indian artist Sakshi Gupta will present sculpture based upon animal forms, subjects that she finds essentially emotional. Utilizing found scrap metal, bronze, concrete and papier-mâché, Gupta builds up semi-abstract sculptures that are suggestive of nature and living organisms. Her goal is to make elusive emotional and philosophical processes tangible.
Simone Leigh, a Brooklyn based artist, works primarily with ceramic sculpture. Her practice revolves around the exploration of female African American subjectivity, informed by both ancient African and African American object making. Leigh also makes videos and is involved in conceptual real world projects such as the Free People’s Medical Clinic, commissioned by Creative Time. Her sculpture, often large installations, is informed by an ongoing interest in the anonymity of women’s piece-work and has evolved into an obsessive repetition of form, whether in hand-crafted roses, made petal by petal, or in glazed and fired cowrie shells made from watermelon molds that evoke both ancient artifacts and open-ended metaphors for the female body.
Los Angeles painter Brenna Youngblood explores the delicate juncture between abstraction, illusion and the concrete object. Utilizing forms and elements from the urban and domestic environment, she creates works that are layered and visually complex in meaning as well as in the process of their construction. She began making urban collages with materials intimately associated with her personal history and has moved ever further towards a wider discussion about painting. She layers paper and paint, repetitively added and reworked, with found elements that retain emotional vestiges of their former lives.
All three artists in their approach to object making reflect an obsessive repetition that was historically essential to woman’s work. Each artist, in her own distinctive style and materials, reinvents this concept of reiteration to make it her own, taking her process to a new level of aesthetic abstraction.