Petzel is pleased to return to Art Basel Hong Kong for its 2023 edition and present works by artists integral to the gallery’s program. Artists on view will include Ross Bleckner, Cosima von Bonin, Derek Fordjour, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Charline von Heyl, Sean Landers, James Little, Malcolm Morley, Joyce Pensato, Pieter Schoolwerth, Dirk Skreber, Emily Mae Smith, Hiroki Tsukuda, Nicola Tyson, Xie Nanxing, and Heimo Zobernig.

The works available here will be on view at Petzel’s Art Basel Hong Kong stand in Booth 3C11.

In Analytical Cubism Flattened (After B) (2022), James Little’s ovular canvas framed by a sculptural rhombus examples his rigorous knowledge of color theory and painterly technique. Little builds on this material awareness with the help of an eye dropper, swirling up to a hundred different colors that pierce through a checkerboarded lattice of thick white oil paint.

Cosima von Bonin’s presentation in Venice featured this axe sculpture alongside a school of fish and sharks perched atop the entrance of the Giardini’s Central Pavilion. This work shares an eccentric, satirical twist that is a hallmark of von Bonin’s practice, and continues her study of the relationships between craft, installation, the hand-made, and the ready-made.

In Aircraft on a Yellow Plane (2014), Malcolm Morley revisits his signature aeronautic subject matter to explore the power of vibrant colors assembled in a de-centered composition. While his boyhood in London was marked by aerial attacks that ultimately destroyed his family home, as a child, Morley also enjoyed assembling planes from model kits, which he collected and incorporated into his works till his death. 

In Portrait O (2023), Xie Nanxing moors his rigorous formal experimentation to the deeply personal to create a visceral portrait of his dealer friend. The artist embraces complexity and contradiction, his paintings resisting categorization and interpretation and hovering between aesthetic object hood and conceptual de-materialization. Nanxing uses different approaches to distort his source material to create a painting that is wide-ranging formally while remaining rooted in the artist’s own lived experience.

In Ahoy (2020), Landers paints a personal note over a fierce ocean. A cornerstone of inspiration for Landers is his long-term interest in the work of American painter Winslow Homer (b. 1836 – d. 1920) and in particular Homer’s ocean paintings. The vast and unpredictable ocean marks time and space, a preeminent symbol used throughout the years in Landers’ paintings and art history. 

Emily Mae Smith’s The Veil and the Window (2023), which foregrounds her emblematic broomstick, is a remake of Gerard Dou’s Man Smoking a Pipe (c. 1650), furthering her engagement with the Dutch genre painting of women in domestic settings too preoccupied to notice the viewer’s gaze. The painting additionally plays on the Greek story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, in which Parrhasius painted a curtain so realistically that Zeuxis reached out to pull it back.

In Big Al (2013), Joyce Pensato’s spatters, splashes and drips capture the explosive character with which cartoon subjects are defamiliarized in her practice. Pensato’s seemingly frenzied painting technique involves the accumulation of successive layers of bold linear gestures, rapid repainting, and frequent erasures. The resulting frontal emblematic face is both humorous and sinister, giving new life to her fictive characters.