Art Basel Hong Kong

Carla Accardi was born in Trapani on 9 October 1924. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
In 1946, she moved to Rome with Antonio Sanfilippo where she met Pietro Consagra and Giulio Turcato.
In 1947 she completed her first abstract painting, entitled Scomposizione. In March of the same year she launched the Forma Group (“Forma 1” would be the name of the first and only issue of the magazine-manifesto) with Attardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, Sanfilippo, and Turcato. In 1948 she took part for the first time in the 24^th Venice Biennale, as well as in the exhibition “Abstract Art in Italy” at the Galleria di Roma. In 1954 she met Michel Tapié, whose support marketed a watershed moment for the artist. The French critic placed her among the protagonists of his theory of art autre, alongside Burri, Capogrossi and Fontana.
The 1960s were a time of major stylistic changes. Much more vivid and varied tones of color reappeared, while the sign underwent a change in structure. The first chromatic works were shown at the Parma Gallery in New York and at the New Vision Center Gallery in London with a presentation by Lionello Venturi, in 1961.
In 1964 she was invited with a personal room to the 32^nd Venice Biennale.
These years saw the first works created on sicofoil, a transparent plastic material used for the first time for art. Works from this period include Tenda (1965), Ambiente Arancio (1967) and Triplice tenda (1969-71). The following decade was dedicated to continuous experimentation with sicofoil. Colors became less strong, with pastels sometimes dominating. By the mid-1970s the sicofoil was completely transparent, in twisting braids that emphasized the support and made the frame the protagonist (in a studied “ostension of the support and the frame” she would say, which certainly has a flavor touching on the conceptual).
In 1976 was presented Triplice tenda at the 37^th Venice Biennale in the “Arte Ambiente” section. In the 1980s, Accardi returned to canvas, which she left raw: it would be animated with colored signs, which had become very large, inside of which there might be just one color. In 1983 she exhibited at the Pinacoteca Comunale
in Ravenna and at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan; while in 1988 she was once again invited with a personal room to the 43^rd Venice Biennale, where she presented large-scale works. The next year she was represented by two historical works at the “Italian Art in the 20th Century” show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 1994 a far-ranging retrospective open at the Castello di Rivoli; in the same year she took part in the exhibition “The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-1968” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Among the many solo shows and retrospectives, two big anthological exhibitions opened in Paris Parigi, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2002) and in Rome, at the MA-CRO (2004).
In 2011 the show “Carla Accardi. Segno e trasparenza” opened at the Fondazione Puglisi di Catania; for this occasion important historical works were exhibited on the two great floors of Palazzo Valle. In the meantime two volumes of the monumental catalogue of her works were released, curated by Germano Celant, published by Charta and Silvana respectively. Carla Accardi passed away in Rome on 23 February 2014, but interest in her work has continued to grow, as evidenced by the 2020 solo show Contesti, at the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the group show at the MAXXI Senzamargine Passaggi nell’Arte Italiana a cavallo del Millennio from October 2020 to January 2022, and by her inclusion in the 59^th Venice Biennale scheduled for April 2022.

Robert Barry was born in 1936 in New York where he lives and works.
He studied and graduated from Hunter College, The City University of New York, in Fine Arts, Master of Arts,
Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media. In 1968, Robert Barry is quoted as saying “Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world”.
Barry’s work focuses on escaping the previously known physical limits of the art object in order to express the unknown or unperceived.
Transcending the physical limitations of space and material, he has employed radio waves as medium, and performance, installation, and attempted telepathy as technique, challenging what would be accepted as “typical” artistic practice or experience. For his word list installations, Barry imprints capitalized words directly on walls or surfaces to evoke narrative and inspire contemplation. Barry encourages free association of meaning to his work.
Major nonvisible works from his early period include Carrier Wave, in which Barry used the carrier waves of a radio station for a prescribed length of time “not as a means of transmitting information, but rather as an object.”, Radiation Piece, and Inert Gas Piece, in which Barry opened various containers of inert gases in different settings before groups of spectators, such as a canister of helium released in a desert.
When asked about his piece for exhibition “Prospect ’69,” his response was “The piece consists of the ideas that people will have from reading this interview… The piece in its entirety is unknowable because it exists in the mind of so many people. Each person can really know that part which is in his own mind”.
Barry’s work has been shown in international events such as the Paris Biennale (1971), Documenta, Kassel (1972), and the Venice Biennale (1972).
Barry is included in the permanent collections of renowned museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée National D’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Matthias Bitzer was born in 1975 in Stuttgart, he lives and works in Berlin (D).
He graduated from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany in 2004.
His artistic practice combines drawing, sculpture and painting creating experience spaces with strong references to history and intellectuals and a deep reflection on their identity, in which the viewer can immerse himself. The development of his work shows itself in the increasing complexity of the installations, maintaining their focus on the construction of memory and the reconstruction of reality. His research involves literary personalities, writers and their characters who have frequently slipped into outsider positions. Fascinated by the relation between the invisible and the real, Bitzer layers symbolic fragments and fractured forms on top of one another as citations. In a new inspection of classical modern art from today’s perspective, the artist combines portraits and geometric constructions in his drawings, paintings and sculptures. Through the analysis of this multiplicity of figures, Matthias Bitzer’s work investigates different looks on reality and through his more and more complex abstract patterns he gives the viewer a visual translation to this fragmentary dimension, to these different points of view, to possible gazes. Through paintings, sculptures and mural drawings, all strictly connected to each other, he thinks the exhibition space as an autonomous body, where you can “consider the works as a kind of symbolist translation or a decoding of reality that tries to make visible something that was invisible before” as the artist says.
His works are part of Public collections at LACMA, Los Angeles, USA, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, Geraer Sammlung, Gera, Germany, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, and Rosenblum Collection & Friends, Paris, France.

Sheila Hicks was born in Hastings, Nebraska and received her BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University. She received a Fulbright scholarship in 1957-58 to paint in Chile. While in South America she developed her interest in working with fibers. After founding workshops in Mexico, Chile, and South Africa, and working in Morocco and India, she now divides her time between her Paris studio and New York. ​
Hicks is a celebrated artist, known for her innovative use of weaving and textiles and her sculptural installations made of yarn. Her work ranges from small wall hangings, to enormous site-specific installations, and critics frequently locate her art at the intersection of decorative objects and fine art—though the artist herself in uninterested in the distinction.
Hicks has exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions. She was included in the 2017 Venice Biennal,  2014 Whitney Biennial in New York,  the 2012  São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Recent solo presentations include “Lignes de Vie” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2018, Free Threads 1954-2017 Museo Amparo, Mexico,”Pêcher dans La Rivière” at the Alison Jacques Gallery, London (2013); A major retrospective Sheila Hicks: 50 Years debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC.

Hicks‘ work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago; solo exhibitions at the Seoul Art Center, Korea; Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

New York-based artist Landon Metz has garnered critical attention for his ability to imbue a spare language of abstraction with visual dynamism and sense of movement. His paintings have the capacity to expand and deal with space serially, while being site-responsive rather than site-specific. Metz’s painting practice is marked by a great sensitivity to site and scale and increasingly incorporates performance and sculptural approaches to activate the space.
Strategies of display are central to Metz’s visual language and his installations often incorporate elements of rhythm and repetition. Multi-panel paintings are frequently presented in his work as diptychs and triptychs, which he sometimes installs abutting one another, reaching into or wrapping around corners. He also produces shaped canvases that mimic the abstract shapes that appear in his other paintings. As Metz has observed,
“My work is largely about breaking down polarities, and I think that’s apparent in the way I present space. It’s about negotiating between setting and subject, public and private.”

Metz’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions in Norway, Italy, Denmark and Canada. In 2014, he was the artist in residence at the ADN Collection in Bolzano, Italy. In 2018, Metz was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome. Metz was recently featured in the group exhibition Blue, at The Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, and Greffes, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto at Villa Medici in Rome. Metz was born in Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives and works in New York.