Fair: Art Basel Paris 2025

Sans titre presents a project for the General Sector of Art Basel Paris 2025, bringing together five artists from its program: Zuzanna Czebatul (1986), Aysha E Arar (1993), Hamish Pearch (1993), Sequoia Scavullo (1995) and Agnes Scherer (1985).

The presentation unfolds as a reflection on the notions of strength and fragility, two forces in constant negotiation. Bronze, marble, fabric and paper form a constellation of opposing properties: the first two convey weight, durability and monumentality, while the latter evoke permeability, care and impermanence. This tension between the enduring and the delicate echoes the way the artists approach the body — sometimes in states of excess or glory, sometimes fractured, diminished or dissolving. Together, the works reveal how physicality and vulnerability coexist, and how our ideas of strength are always shadowed by fragility.

An imposing bronze sculpture by Zuzanna Czebatul, Andrea, captures the suspended gesture of an exaggeratedly muscular arm holding a hammer. The arm’s unnatural proportions can be read as both a satire of hypermasculine aesthetics and an embrace of homoerotic visual codes. The work is inspired by Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, whose emblem has endured through centuries as a symbol of industry. Czebatul reinterprets this figure through a political and critical lens: is this gesture one of creation or destruction? By choosing a gender-neutral name for the title, she highlights the need to rethink the role of gender in industrial and political spheres.

The back wall, extending onto the right, features a large fabric painting by Aysha E Arar, It was just a cup of coffee, previously exhibited at MOCO – La Panacée. The artist explores a world drawn from her imagination, nourished by Palestinian tales and legends passed down through generations and reread in the light of the present. The composition intertwines human and non-human forms — hybrid, metamorphic bodies that shift between species and states of being. These chimeric figures embody a porous understanding of identity, where care and violence, the visible and the invisible, coexist within the same gesture. Arar’s fluid, spontaneous line unfolds across raw fabric surfaces, creating a universe where boundaries dissolve and transformation becomes the only constant.

The booth also features the work of Sequoia Scavullo, from a series inspired by car crashes, in which fragmented and dislocated bodies question how trauma and transformation intertwine. Scavullo explores the limits of the body — its fractures, its resistance, its capacity to endure change. Her paintings stage a tension between vulnerability and persistence, where physical collapse becomes a form of metamorphosis. Rooted in her Taíno heritage, this vision of the body resists fixed boundaries, embracing permeability between the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible.

Hamish Pearch presents a group of new sculptures that extend his reflection on transformation and decay. Three hand-carved marble cakes, resting on rough river stones, juxtapose refinement and rawness, domesticity and geology. By petrifying an object of celebration usually destined to disappear, Pearch turns a fleeting gesture of joy into a relic of permanence. Alongside these works, a bronze basket with delicate woven patterns echoes the textures of luxury leather goods, its metallic surface freezing the softness it imitates. Together, these sculptures form a meditation on fragility, memory, and the strange persistence of the everyday once translated into matter.

The presentation also includes a painting by Agnes Scherer, who is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery. The work depicts a mask suspended beneath a branch of mistletoe. The scene suggests the phantom presence of a fragmented body, neither fully human nor entirely inhuman. The mask, recurring throughout art history as both disguise and revelation, becomes here a stand-in for the human condition — a form without a face, a being without individuality. Echoing the tradition of painters such as James Ensor, Scherer uses the mask as a way to question what remains of humanity once its appearances have collapsed. The work extends her reflection on the dissolution of figuration, where absence itself becomes a mode of presence.

Across the presentation, materials and figures echo one another in a subtle choreography of tension — between the monumental and the fragile, the organic and the artificial, the eternal and the transient. In this dialogue, bronze, marble, fabric and paper become extensions of the body itself, vessels for desire, resilience and decay. Each work, in its own way, exposes the fragile architecture of what we call strength. Together they form a landscape of shifting states — a reflection on how vulnerability, rather than opposing power, may in fact be its most human expression.