WILLAS contemporary taking the stage at Photo BASEL

14th - 19th of June 2022

WILLAS Contemporary is thrilled to announce the participation at Photo BASEL (Booth A3), bringing together acclaimed artists who are at the forefront of movements for change, grappling with society’s most prescient challenges, injustices, hopes, and joys: Roger Ballen, Nick Brandt, and Jeff Cowen. 

Photo BASEL is Switzerland's first art fair dedicated to photography and takes place at the Volkshaus Basel, a recently renovated Art Deco building with a bar, brasserie and beer garden, about a 10-minute walk from the Messeplatz, the central square where Art Basel is held.

Jeff Cowen will show a selection of works focused on the artist’s life-long investigation exploring the conceptual and technical potential of photography, an art form which is still in its early evolutionary stages. Cowen’s work examines the poetics of the non-visible world by means of mating the power of photography and painting. The image taken by the camera is not the final product but marks only the starting point of the artistic reflection of the motif.

The unique analog prints are attacked with various chemical procedures, mark-making, brushwork, and often contain post-darkroom finishing techniques of painting and collage. The images are not presented flat and take on a more three-dimensional, sculptural and textural look. Paradoxically, Cowen´s photographic work is less concerned with the ephemeral than it is with reflecting the unknown and eternal realms.

Jeff Cowen will be present in BASEL from 13-16th of June.

The eminent artist, Roger Ballen, representing South Africa at the Venice Biennale 2022 with The Theatre of Apparitions, will exhibit selected artworks from that series. Inspired by the sight of hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison, Ballen experimented using spray paints on glass and then ‘drawing on’ or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The profoundly psychological series takes the viewers on a journey into their subconscious. Earthly and otherworldly, physical and spiritual, his work transcends all traditional concepts of photography, revealing the shadows of the human psyche. 

An artist and a witness, Nick Brandt, shows how people and animals are connected in sharing the same planet under environmental siege. In his ongoing global series The Day May Break, Brandt portrays people and animals together in the same frame, reflecting on the consequences of climate change for the whole planet. Emotionally loaded artworks, include a portrait of Harriet, the owl of 30 years, carrying the despair of humankind on her shoulders. The works from the series are a call to action on behalf of the upcoming generation.