Art Basel: Rashid Johnson Presented his Unbridled Side with "Antoine's Organ"
Artist´s tropical chaos
Rashid Johnson showed of by presenting his luxury masterpiece installation entitled "Antoine's Organ," which is full of unexpected elements. Would you expect a steel framework containing a great deal of items? Johnson luxuriously combines 250 plants with shea butter, music, video portraits and a piano! It represents a structured heterogeneous ecosystem integrated into a hard black steel scaffolding. Visually it perhaps evokes prison cells that are fundamentally open minimalist cubes.
The work is built on a thought-through plan to build a net structure based on rigour, organisation and open space. However, the barred character is broken up by 250 live potted plants, sculptures surprisingly made of shea butter, video monitors playing movies, decorative carpets, music and carefully selected books. In the crazy heart of the luxury ´labyrinth´ is concealed a fully-functional piano, partially hidden behind the leaves.
Rashid Johnson enraptured by luxurious shea butter
Rashid Johnson is African-American conceptual artist living in Brooklyn in NY, who is often regarded as a standard representative of ´post-black´ art. In his work, whether we are talking about sculptures or photographs, the artist builds on strange objects and items, including shea butter, or cosmic space. He created a luxurious work entitled Cosmic Slop 2011 or Color Men 2015. Today his artwork is placed among collections of the Museum of American Art Whitney in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Art Museum in Atlanta.
Pay attention to Unlimited!
Unlimited traditionally focuses on artistic expression on a large scale, mainly on monumental sculptures, video projection, wall paintings, photo series and works of art, live performance beyond the scope of traditional art exhibitions. The increasingly frequent element which you may encounter here too, is the use of video equipment as an option to present a work of art. You will be able to see 71 projects in the Unlimited sector; whose curator has once again become Gianni Jetzer.
