Art Basel: Booth R14 (Hall 2.1)

Art Basel 2025 | Booth R14 (Hall 2.1)
Preview (invitation-only): June 17–18, 2025
Public Days: June 19–22, 2025
Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland

Alexander Gray Associates presents works by Bethany Collins, Melvin Edwards, Jennie C. Jones, Donald Moffett, Carrie Moyer, Betty Parsons, Ronny Quevedo, Joan Semmel, Hugh Steers, and Jack Whitten. These ten artists challenge conceptual and formal conventions to expand understandings of art-making. Their pioneering practices emphasize innovative approaches to abstraction, materiality, and representation while offering incisive social critiques.

The history of figuration and abstraction converges in Joan Semmel's Sundream (1979). From her Echoing Images series, the painting features dual renderings of the artist's nude form—one executed in vibrant, thick brushstrokes that echo her Abstract Expressionist training, the other in hyper-realistic detail. By placing her own body at the center of her work, Semmel subverts the traditional male gaze, establishing a dialogue between abstraction and realism that positions the female form as both visual content and lived experience. This feminist assertion of bodily autonomy finds resonance in Hugh Steers's Yellow Tank (1988), which confronts the AIDS epidemic through intimate figuration. Where Semmel reclaims the female form from objectification, Steers preserves queer intimacy as a form of resistance against erasure. Both artists transform representation into political commentary, challenging gender inequality and sexual discrimination through their distinctive visual languages.

Moving beyond figuration, other artists explore sociopolitical themes through abstraction itself. Carrie Moyer's Gala Returns (2019) employs lush surfaces that encode queer feminist content through an expressive visual vocabulary, while Betty Parsons's Elephant Africa (1972) articulates identity through intuitive arrangements of color and form. Ronny Quevedo's quipu for inti (2024) extends this exploration by reinterpreting pre-Columbian systems through contemporary materials. His strategic use of geometric abstraction connects personal migration narratives to broader histories of colonization and resistance. Together, these works demonstrate abstraction's capacity to address questions of gender, sexuality, cultural identity, and self-determination with equal potency to figurative approaches. Further examining materiality as a carrier of meaning, Donald Moffett's white extruded oil painting Lot 012525 (the river runs) (2025) extends into the viewer's space, challenging conventional notions of the painted surface. This material investigation connects with Jennie C. Jones's Neutral, Soft, Sharps (2024), which engages abstraction through minimal gestures that bridge visual art and musical composition. Both transform the canvas from a passive surface to an active site where meaning emerges through material intervention.

Expanding this material discourse, the sociopolitical dimensions of abstraction manifest in Melvin Edwards's free-standing sculpture Artist's Voice (1984), which synthesizes disparate materials to reflect on the African American experience—a concern further articulated in Jack Whitten's Radiator Drawing #4 (2010). While Edwards shapes physical space, Whitten's innovative techniques create surfaces that function as archives of memory and historical consciousness. Bethany Collins's The Odyssey: 1900 / 1996 (2024) completes this exploration by employing language as material, revealing how translations across different editions of The Odyssey expose shifting attitudes toward race and identity.

In our contemporary landscape, where bodily autonomy and representation remain contested, these artists demonstrate that abstraction and politics are inextricably linked—that surfaces communicate deeply personal and societal concerns. As Joan Semmel reflects, “I began as an abstract painter and as I became involved as a feminist, I wanted to connect those feelings to my work and not be doing something that was completely removed from my life. That was the beginning of my use of the body … I thought of it as having the ability to affect the way … [we] are seen in the world.”