Fair: ART021 2023, Shanghai

For its first participation in ART021 Shanghai, Sans titre proposes an exhibition of three artists of its program: Ezio Gribaudo (1929-2022), Tanja Nis-Hansen (b. 1988) and Sequoia Scavullo (b. 1995). The artists’ respective practices, while separated by generation and geography, are united by references to text, language, and communication.

The exhibition comprises a substantial corpus - half of the works exhibited – by American painter Sequoia Scavullo. She has lived and worked in France since graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris in 2022. Through the expressive force of color, the density of material, and a mode of representation that borders abstraction, Scavullo explores manifestations of non-verbal communication. The artist’s father is of Taïno origin, and she adopted from this native Caribbean culture its technique of dream analysis and its holistic approach to the world. This latter takes into account the human being in its entirety, caring for the spirit as for the body, contrary to the approach of western medicine. Transposing this idea to painting, Scavullo uses color as a mediator of emotional states leading, ideally, to a healing synesthetic experience. She will present a new series of works, produced for the fair, spotlighting an alphabet the artist herself wrote and developed, which makes reference to letters and words, but also to feelings, emotions, and intuitions.

The presentation will also comprise a few iconic works from the seminal Turin artist Ezio Gribaudo. The artist, who was also among the greatest art publishers of his time, was inspired by printing techniques to develop large works that he called Logogrifi. These consisted of series of motifs and alphabets, embossed on thick blotting paper, presented as attempts to “make language.” They garnered the artist a prize at the Venice Biennial of 1966. For ART021, Sans titre presents an extremely rare Logogrifo from the 1980s, which depicts a pagoda and which was created during of the first of the artist’s very long series of voyages in China. The exhibition is complemented by several paintings also produced during this first trip, along with a drawing, excerpted from one of hundreds of travelogues produced by the artist in the course of his life. Conceived as an homage to the recently-deceased maestro, the booth presentation will anticipate the major retrospective of Gribaudo’s work held at the Grazer Kunstverein and opening on December 7, 2023.

In the same manner, text and literature are at the heart of the practice of Tanja Nis-Hansen. The works shown at ART021 Shanghai are the continuation of a series on dizziness, vertigo, and unease, which the artist has pursued for several years. Among different writings, the artist is inspired by Julia Stephen’s Notes from sick rooms, prefacing her daughter Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill. In this iconic work, both emphasize the absolute degree of intimacy that develops between the ill person and the person who cleans up after them. She became in such a way the first to analyze and theorize about caregiving, which has since come to comprise a subject of great contemporary relevance. It is, among others, one of the major areas of research led by Tanja Nis-Hansen, who takes a particular interest in the depiction of unproductive or idle bodies, in contrast to the contemporary obsession with productivity.

In such a way, throughout diverse media, in practices that range from figuration to abstraction, these works, some historic, others contemporary and produced specially for the fair, converge around notions linked to language, to text, and communication. These are, indeed, among the principal areas of research of the gallery’s artists.