Art Basel 2024

Throughout her oeuvre, Mamma Andersson has explored and reshaped the genres of still life, interiors, and landscapes. In these prints Andersson expresses haunting moods of quiet mystery, and subtle connections appear through their colours and scenic atmospheres. Potpurri is striking for its combination of a still life composition against a background of a sepia toned stylized landscape, while the two other etchings Morgon and Bakgård, convey idyllic scenes of a meandering river and a sheer cliff face in the landscape.

Butterflies light up at dawn in Morgon, while a river winding its way through the landscape makes up the main motif. The image is an open invitation to become immersed in nature as the scenery dissolves into the horizon. In contrast, a view of the landscape is abruptly blocked by a looming mountainside that dominates Bakgård, while a delicately glowing sky appears in the background through the trees.

In their own right, each etching is a testimony to Andersson’s uncanny ability to translate unspoken moods into imagery through her use of a combination of intaglio techniques, giving voice to her striking visual language. Tactile qualities of nature are evoked with the combined use of finely etched lines, the blurs of the drypoint technique, together with the painterly brushstroke effects of spit bite and sugar lift aquatints.

The flickering imagery in Nanna Debois Buhl’s new photogravures depicts matter that is normally too microscopic to grasp, and too foundational to comprehend.

Visualisations of dust grains from meteorites form the basis of her series of four black and white prints titled A Cosmic Roar. These dust grains contain particles that are more than 4.5 billion years old – older than our solar system. The wealth of detail invisible to the eye on the dust grain’s surface is given a new digital entity when read by the microscope and translated by computer software. In the resulting computer-generated 3D model, the meteoritic dust samples appear as black-and-white digital landscapes of stirred waters, peaks, and valleys.

The choice of the medium of photogravure allows Nanna Debois Buhl to visualise this otherwise invisible materiality and three-dimensionality: intaglio prints are made through indentations in a printing plate which are filled with ink and transferred onto paper. The ink sits in thick layers where it is darkest and finer layers where it is lighter. What makes the photogravure print exceptional is its own microcosm of tonalities which isn’t sensed through a screen but in the physical meeting between print and eye. By turning the meteoritic images into photogravures, Nanna Debois Buhl utilizes the inherent tactility of the medium to highlight the tactility of the microscopic particles.

The botanical category of the Solanaceae (Nightshades) comprises a highly diverse group of plants. Some look inconspicuous, others flower magnificently; some are edible herbs known for their medicinal qualities, while others are extremely poisonous. Their appearance can belie their effect – the most beautiful plants can be the most dangerous.

Similarly, Peter Linde Busk’s series of monotypes titled Natskygger/Nightshades conveys a wide range of individual aesthetic expressions and atmospheres, linked strategically with recurring pictorial elements throughout the series, which hint at an overarching narrative without ever proposing a specific reading.

‘I think of the monotypes as illustrations of a mysterious, unknown story that has either been lost or has not yet been written´- Peter Linde Busk

The ability to simultaneously work with the concepts of uniqueness and seriality testifies to Busk’s decades of experience with printmaking. It is this familiarity with the medium that allows him to embrace another inherent advantage of printmaking: the act of collaboration: ‘Working with master printer Mette Ulstrup was a genuine dialogue, and our collaboration was both playful and experimental. In printmaking you must trust the process, it is impossible to intellectually think yourself towards the final result.’ Paradoxically, it is his deep knowledge of the print medium which allowed Busk not to rely on previous experience, but to turn the unpredictable encounter between printing plate and paper into the project’s conceptual backbone.

A patchwork of shapes coalesces in Andreas Eriksson’s etching Skimmer. It bears his painterly signature of working on the border between figuration and abstraction. The individual colour fields can be read as geological forms, patches of grass, bushes, or trees; the overall composition evokes a sense of the landscape. Like in his paintings, Eriksson’s choice of colours radiates intention. Nevertheless, the etching’s colour palette is surprising, ranging from soft, muted pastel shades to strikingly bright, almost neon-like tones.

For Skimmer, Andreas Eriksson has further developed a sandblasting drypoint technique, which he had first experimented with for his print Risberg, 2022. The tonal patchwork of shapes was created by sandblasting the copper plates through specially made stencils. A variety of particles was used in the sandblasting process to create different indentations in the plates: sand resulted in smooth, grainy surfaces, whereas gravel left a coarse, stipple texture. The final etching is composed from the five individually sandblasted plates printed on top of one another, so that the different shapes meet and overlap.

The owl staring out of the image in Ann Lislegaard’s photogravure Animoid appears at once hyper-realistic and artificial. In fact, it is not a depiction of an existing animal, but an image generated by Artificial Intelligence. The blurred cityscape has an unsettling and dystopian atmosphere that, like the owl itself, references Ripley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. In Scott’s fictional universe, most animals were extinct, and animoids are deceptively real synthetic organisms, which were created to resemble real animals.

Lislegaard created the motif with the help of AI language models. Using text, she prompted the software to generate an image. Instead of presenting BORCH Editions’ printmaking studio with a final version of this image, she kept adjusting it during her exchange with the master printers, discussing different versions and integrating their feedback into later versions. During this process, the demands on the system became increasingly complex, until, unable to process the large amount of information, it created glitches and visual imperfections.

The interaction between AI and traditional craftsmanship, with Lislegaard as the mediator, formed the conceptual basis of the project. Instead of simply executing a digitally conceived image in a classic intaglio printing process, she decided to consider the physical realization of the digital image into her creative process from the very beginning. She thus facilitated a feedback-loop between present and past, between disembodied intelligence and physical craftsmanship, between the elusive concept of creativity and its physical manifestation.

Wardell Milan’s large-scale prints are complex, multi-layered compositions that combine a myriad of etching techniques. They depict human bodies immersed in arcadian landscapes, which were drawn on copper plates with etching needles, brushes and acid. Milan’s new prints offer an almost utopian counterproposal to his previous etchings, which referred to the political and social reality of the United States with explicit and at times brutal honesty.

For all their serenity, the etchings still present the human body as fundamentally political: his protagonists interact not through words, but through body language and touch; they seem removed from societal power struggles, but they still negotiate social relationships through sexual and spiritual intimacy.

Milan carefully planned and executed the individual pictorial elements, but deliberately delayed decisions regarding the overall compositions until the individual printing plates were assembled for proofing. He thus combines the signature technical precision of his work on copper plates with the intuitive feel for the construction of multi-layered pictorial spaces, which he developed through his practice in the medium of collage.

The modernist architectural structure which occupies the centre of Jockum Nordström’s 2024 monoprints appears unstable, as if it could tip over to one side at any second. The building’s straight, geometric lines contrast with the oversized figures in old fashioned clothes that occupy the image’s foreground, moving past like spirits from another time. Nordström grew up in the city; as a child he was fascinated by the changing cityscape with high-rise buildings growing into the sky like trees. This interest in architectural structures as elements of an urban landscape continues to inform his artistic practice.

Nordström’s monoprints are unique prints using etched plates on which individual marks are added before each print is made. He combines painterly marks with fine etched lines to create his engaging and distinctive images. The fields of surprisingly bright, contrasting oil paint enrich the images, and the resulting colour fields create a visual theme which connects the image’s contrasting elements. In Nordström’s hands, colour becomes the mediator between the old-fashioned nostalgia of a fairy tale and the cool rigour of architectural modernism; it bridges the gap between disparate aesthetic universes and historic epochs.

Two versions of the same image form the basis of Sickbed I and II: the composition is dominated by a massive bed that almost swallows up the female figure lying in it. The resting figure, a recurring motif in Orupabo’s work, references Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah’s concept of rest as a survival strategy in response to traumatic events.

All elements in Orupabo’s digital collage are riddled with unresolved contradictions: the figure in bed could be resting, but on closer inspection she appears to be fixed to the bedframe. The visual elements that make Orupabo’s composition are charged with tension highlighting a crucial element of Armah’s idea: that after rest, awakening must follow. With that in mind, the bed itself could be interpreted as a place of comfort and rest; but its oversized proportions seem almost threatening as something one cannot escape from.

Tal R’s collaboration with BORCH Editions spans almost three decades and encompasses a wide range of printmaking techniques, from intimate black-and-white etchings to large-scale multicoloured woodcuts. Considering his productivity and willingness to experiment, it is all the more notable that Weather Report is Tal R’s first exploration of monotypes.

Monotypes are unique prints, created by painting on a featureless plate, which is then run through the printing press with a sheet of paper. In contrast to other printmaking techniques, the artist does not leave permanent marks on the plate but simply paints on its surface. The resulting image cannot be reproduced. For Weather Report, Tal R painted on PVC sheets which he cut into unique shapes, balancing between geometry and deliberate imperfection. Re-using the same plates several times, shapes return throughout the series of monotypes with fresh marks and, in some cases, the residue ink of previous monotypes which in printmaking is referred to as a ghost print.

The relation between frame and image is a recurring theme in Tal R’s work; in 2023 he has been exploring this relationship in a series of paintings referenced in the Weather Report monotypes. Like these paintings, the monotypes depict the felled trees, light and colours of an eye-shaped clearing in a Danish forest. But instead of opening up the pictorial space to convey a sense of vastness and airiness, Tal R narrows the viewer’s field of vision to focus on subtle shapes and colours, as if through a peephole, with the unprinted parts of the sheets pointing to all that remains unseen.