ART CITIES:Basel -Yngve Holen

Yngve Holen uses sculpture and imaging techniques to explore themes of transportation, technology, and the body. The multiple series of works he made between 2010–15 illustrate Holen’s use of 3D printing, water-cutting, tailoring, and consumer spare parts to test the material limits that define today’s industries and our everyday surroundings.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Artchive

Featuring several major new commissions and a collaborative project between Yngve Holen and Aedrhlsomrs Othryutupt Lauecehrofn, the exhibition “VERTICAL SEAT”, highlights Holen’s different approaches to thinking about the object and its absent but implicit human users. The forms of Yngve Holen borrow materials and designs from the engineering, aviation, automotive and consumer appliance industries. His often human-like titles further instill his sculptures with a corporeal sensibility. In this sense, Holen’s work interposes between man and the man-made. The body is absent from Yngve Holen’s work, everywhere in his work, however, the implications of the body, in all its subjectivity, messy corporeality, and imbrications in a culture of consumption, are evoked. This is visible in his exploration of the technologies that define our everyday surroundings, from transportation and plastic surgery to food. For his largest institutional exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, the 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. 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.

Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 12/5-14/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch