(中文) Within the context of a stretched canvas about two metres high and one metre wide. An amorphous square yellow (dirty) mass is linked to one beneath it (less dirty yellow) by a pull link of artistic white. Just above the bottom edge of the (less dirty) yellow square a scrubbed puce & grey rectangle is imposed veering toward a justified left edge of the (less dirty) yellow square.
–Lawrence Weiner on Mark Rothko’s Untitled, c.1950–2[1]
In 2007, Jonathan Monk began a series of works titled “What is Seen is Described, what is Described is Seen”, which involved the British artist sending images of canvases by Mark Rothko to different contemporary artists and asking them to describe the piece in their own words.[2] These written interpretations would subsequently be given to an unnamed painter to produce a new canvas based on the description provided – a process that would result in the creation of a Rothko-esque, bootleg work of Abstract Expressionism.
In this series, Monk plays with ideas of authorship – does a simulacrum of a Rothko still hold the same potential to captivate and beguile as an original? Or does a work painted by the hand of one of the icons of AbEx inspire a greater response in the viewer? And, if it does, how much of that is due to the name attached? Yet what Monk also does, with this series, is to highlight the indelible mark that Rothko et al. made on the history of contemporary art, as the visual language is unmistakable, even when not an original. And it is this continuing legacy that is explored in this exhibition.
Alongside Monk’s imitation Rothko, Within the Context of a Stretched Canvas brings together other contemporary artworks that – in various ways – continue or respond to non-representational art from the twentieth century. Whether directly referencing, adopting and pushing, or claiming and renewing some of the techniques, methods and aesthetics of the various strands of abstract art developed during the nineteen hundreds, the exhibited works highlight the lasting influence of these styles and their ongoing impact on contemporary art.
Sheila Hicks’s wrapped, folded, twisted and weaved textile works provide a direct link to the protagonists of twentieth century abstraction. Hicks studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale during the 1950s, where she was immersed in the ideas of Modernism. But through her subsequent travels in Chile, Mexico, India and Morocco (among others), Hicks created a unique practice that amalgamates the principals of Western non-representational art with aesthetics, techniques and sensitivities drawn from global textile practices, as exemplified in her piece Blue straight-up, 2023.
The study of colours, their potential to hold meaning and an interest in how they interact in their purest form are elements present in the work of many twentieth-century abstract artists. However, colour, in Tamina Amadyar’s practice, is particularly personal. The pigments she employs are all made by hand, with many holding deep, individual significance – the rich blue used in works such as harvest moon, 2024, for instance, is extracted from lapis lazuli, a stone mined in the country of her birth, Afghanistan. Amadyar combines these handmade colours on the canvas to depict memories of places and situations, reduced to their simplest forms.
On the other hand, and despite (or as a result of) originally training as a painter, Jeewi Lee does away with pigments entirely in the canvases she makes as part of her “Field of Fragments” series – a body of work that focuses on a material that holds great significance for humanity’s relationship with the earth: sand. Although generally abundant, certain specific, scarce and high-quality types of sand used in construction, technology or tourism are highly prized, a fact that has led to both ecological degradation and conflict in different parts of the world. In these works, Lee uses sand sourced from specific locations to produce monochromatic paintings that highlight the complexities that surround the material.
Henrik Håkansson also eschews traditional pigments in his “Untitled (Papaver Somniferum)” series, replacing them, instead, with botanical specimens. In these pieces, Håkansson swaps acrylics or oils for poppy seeds – which are widely used both in the ecology of our food chain and also in the production of opium – to “paint” geometric compositions, fixing the seeds to raw, unprimed canvases. In doing so, Håkansson creates abstract paintings for the twenty-first century, which call to mind humanity’s increasingly fraught relationship to the natural world, and simultaneously demonstrate (together with the other works in this exhibition) the continued potential of non-representational art as a visual language today.
Kunsttage Basel is a collective event for contemporary and modern art. From August 29 to 31, 2025, various institutions in Basel will present a joint, art-filled program: here
Opening: Thursday 28 August, 5–9 pm
[1] The work described by Lawrence Weiner was donated to the Tate collection by the Mark Rothko Foundation in 1986: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rothko-untitled-t04148
[2] Alongside Lawrence Weiner (who provided the description quoted above), the likes of Art & Language, John Baldessari, Daniel Burren and David Shrigley have all contributed descriptions of Mark Rothko works for the series “What is Seen is Described, what is Described is Seen”.
