The big picture
Art Basel HK breaks fresh ground by introducing curated shows into a space primarily meant for deals and sales. reports.
Visitors to Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) this year might have noticed a frail, elderly man with a canopy of wispy white hair around his head, sitting surrounded by a cluster of admirers in the Gallerie Gmurzynska booth as the shutterbugs fall over each other to click his picture. He is the Bulgarian artist Christo Javacheff. The hallmark of his art is wrapping up famous monuments and landmarks. While it seems nothing is too dauntingly huge for this man to cover and bind up, as if these were consignments being readied for shipping — he once wrapped two and a half kilometers of coastline and cliffs in Little Bay, Sydney — the mighty Christo too seems to have started small.
Three early works by Christo from the 1960s are on show at ABHK. A mysterious object covered and tied up in a striking red polyethylene sheet and horizontally-laid on a raised platform, like a corpse, makes the centerpiece. Mathias Rastorfer, co-owner of Gallerie Gmurzynska, says these relatively smaller pieces “radiate the energy” that also informs Christo’s signature works, which are usually gigantic, “bigger than life, installations that are only up for 10 days and then they are gone forever”. The show, says Rastorfer, is a “lifetime opportunity to see the earliest mature examples of Christo’s historic masterpieces” which have been shown togeth- er only once before.
Christo is among the 19 artists chosen from across the world to be presented in the context of their entire oeuvre and artistic philosophy at ABHK. Some of them, like the Chinese-French master of modernist painting, Sanyu, are deceased. As to the artists currently active, the exhibits, mostly, were created some years, often decades, ago. Scattered across two levels at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, these artworks — informed by the history of the times they were created in and sometimes having made history in the world of art themselves — together make the Kabinett section. This is the first time Art Basel has introduced Kabinett to its Hong Kong edition.
Rastorfer, who was on the Art Basel Miami Beach selection committee where the idea of Kabinett was first mooted, says, showcasing pieces from an artist’s past, might, in fact, be particularly useful at art fairs, given these spaces could “sometimes feel like too much all at once”. The Kabinett concept, he says, “allows a more in-depth possibility to learn about one artist or one curated exhibition. You could say they are like watering holes where the curious novices,