Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Gaia Art Foundation was pleased to support VERTICALSEAT, Yngve Holen’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, his largest institutional show to date.

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The body is conspicuously absent from Holen’s work, but implications of the body – in all its subjectivity, messy corporeality, and imbrications in a culture of consumption – are repeatedly evoked. This is visible in his persistent exploration of the technologies that define our everyday surroundings, from transportation and plastic surgery to food. For VERTICALSEAT, the Norwegian-German artist presents an array of new sculptures that magnify this questioning. They reveal an idiosyncratic material bias and a fascination with specific, mundane objects: glass hand-blown to evoke talismans cut into the shape of Boeing Dreamliner windows, readymade barriers and plastic medical imaging parts positioned like paintings, autobus headlights gleaming anthropomorphically, and even the ultimate object of desire for the nuclear family that also craves luxury and speed, the Porsche Panamera.

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Here, industrial objects, almost inhuman in their futuristic sheen, are sliced open, or re-presented in ways that raise questions about how humans and the human-made reconfigure each other in an age of technological acceleration. Featuring several major new commissions and a collaborative project between Holen and Aedrhlsomrs Othryutupt Lauecehrofn, the exhibition highlights Holen’s different approaches to thinking about the object and its absent but implicit human users.

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Yngve Holen, VERTICALSEAT, is on view at Kunsthalle Basel from 12 May – 14 Aug 2016.