BASEL.- The work included in PATTERNS are comprised of compositional arrangements that create equilibrium, predictabilities, and cohesion. The repetitive tempos and aesthetic rhythms at play in the paintings, textiles, drawings, and sculpture create integrated unified experiences. Originating their own system of repetition, each artist embraces the affordances of pattern to articulate knowingness and foreseeability, forms of stability, and compositional strength. The work in this group exhibition reaches beyond the decorative and activates patterns that offers alternatives to the disorganization and the commotion defining a shapeless social and political contemporaneity.

Deploy the quintessential modernist grid, Dan Walsh’s paintings evoke inexhaustible compositional variations within the limitations of the two-dimensional structure. Stephen Westfall’s co-mingles the warp and weft anatomy of textiles with the tenets of hard-edge abstraction. Edda Renouf’s compositions negotiates labor, line, and materiality to confound pattern and mass, accretion and cadence. Sheila Hick’s fiber-based sculptures index rhythmic bodily rotation and celebrate the dynamics of color and the unification of texture. The brass cast reliefs comprising Michelle Grabner’s contributions fix delicate unique weavings into a hard metal topography. In each case, pattern and its repetitive formation is more than routine decoration but instead imposes emergent formations and additional logics.

Stephen Westfall lives and works in New York City and Columbia County, New York. He is a painter, critic, and Professor at Rutgers University. He has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts, and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Nancy Graves Foundation Fellowship. He holds an MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara. He has held teaching positions at Bard College and at the School of Visual Arts, New York City. He recently served as the Jules Guerin/John Armstrong Chaloner Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy.His work is in the collections of Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark); Albertina Museum, Vienna; Baltimore Museum of Art; Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Vogue, The New York Times, Arts, Art News, the Partisan Review, and the New Criterion.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and a curator based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. In addition, Grabner has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Yale Norfolk; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts – Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. She was the Artistic Director for the inaugural exhibition, FRONT International, the 2018 Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Her reviews are regularly published in X-tra and Artforum.

Edda Renouf holds an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University and was a recipient of the 1990 Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. She and her husband, composer Alain Middleton, have spent their lives living and working between Paris and the greater New York area for extended periods of time. They have travelled throughout India, Mexico and Europe. Her works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; High Museum of Art, Georgia; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, of Art, Washington D.C.; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art to name a few as well as private collections throughout the United States and Europe. Her work was collected in depth by Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.

Sheila Hicks resides and works in Paris. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Gallery, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Hicks is the recipient of numerous awards including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2010). She was named a Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 1987, and elevated to Officier in 1993. Additionally, she holds Honorary Doctorates from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (2014) and the Rhode Island School of Design (1984).

Dan Walsh lives and works in New York City. His work is included in public collections around the world, including the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It has been exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, the New Museum, New York, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Nice, the Speerstra Foundation in Lausanne, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art in Providence, and the Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz. His prints and limited-edition books were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva, Switzerland. He was also included in the Ljubljiana Biennial, Slovenia, and the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, France (both 2003), and the recent Whitney Biennial, Spring 2014.