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Paris | Art Basel Location Booth October 24—26, 2025
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill
75008, ParisA45
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Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Icarus (ramo), 2024direct microcasted in bronze, and natural cocon
33.5 x 8 x 10 cm -
Giorgio Andreotta Calò
Clessidra Q, 2025bronze
202 x 22 x 23 cm
2 AP of 1 + 2 AP -
Giorgio Andreotta Calò has been making Clessidre [Hourglasses] series of sculptures with variations and evolutions since 1999. These works feature some of the core references and practices of his artistic research. From a formal point of view, each Clessidra is generated from a bronze reproduction of a fragment of briccola, a type of wooden pole typically used in the Venice lagoon to mark the boundaries of a canal or to moor boats, as well as element that characterises the urban genesis of the city. With its rhythmic changes in level as the tide ebbs and flows, the water corrodes these poles at the lagoon’s surface, thinning their central section until the upper part becomes detached from the base sunk into the lagoon bottom. The artist subsequently repurposes this residual form, created over time by the water’s ceaseless erosive action—from the cast of the fragment are generated two identical wax positives, subsequently cast in bronze, an incorruptible material. The two elements, assembled vertically on top of each other, generate the shape of an hourglass, an instrument used for measuring time. Natural forces and human gestures thus come together to determine the shape of the sculpture, initiating a process of material transformation that alternates and interleaves through time and space. The artist’s work is to recognise and intercept this change: through bronze casting, he arrests the natural course of events, subjecting the material to a final metamorphosis and then fixing it in suspended time. The specular reunion leads back to the original vision of the wooden pole reflected in the surface of the lagoon water. Through the concept of “reflection”, which refers both to the symmetry of the structure and to the act of “reflecting” understood as thinking, the coincidence and synthesis between the formal and conceptual dimensions of these sculptures is highlighted. Specularity is one of the elements that run transversally through the artist’s research, whose gaze has been shaped by the city and the Venice lagoon, emblem of integration between natural and anthropic. The work condenses the modes of this coexistence and translates them into sculptural language, crystallising them in a formal balance. The horizontal movement of the surface of the water and the rising tide determine the breaking of the briccola in its central part—at the intersection of the two orthogonal axes, at the point of greatest fragility of the wooden fragment, its symbolic reconfiguration is grafted. The hourglass thus becomes an instrument of landscape awareness, a material synthesis of the relationship between human forces and natural processes.
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Giorgio Andreotta Calò
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Alighiero Boetti
Bisogna essere leggeri come gli uccelli non come le piume, 1988embroidery
30 x 30 cm -
Pietro Consagra
Piano sospeso bianco, 1964painted wood
carved and painted panel
170 x 154 x 2 cm -
It was Pietro Consagra’s vision of life that shaped his first sculptures which were meant to be seen whole, from a single vantage point, thus foregoing the need to circle round them. Instead they established relationships of equality with the viewer; like looking straight into someone’s eyes. The appeal of these sculptures intensifies when imagined all together, forming a kind of artificial landscape, combining an emotional experience of plasticity and of fantasy made real.
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Pietro Consagra
Ferro trasparente bianco I, 1966painted iron
cut, bent, welded, and painted sheets
65,4 x 38,3 x 3,5 cm
base: 0,3 x 20 x 14,5 cm -
“I go from inside out and from the outside I try to go back inside: for me it’s like breathing.”– Pietro Consagra
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Painted with industrial varnishes used for cars and freed of their pedestals to hang in mid-air or against a wall Piano Sospeso Bianco together with Ferro Trasparente Bianco I, suggest how sculpture might also embody the freedom to appear fragile and changeable.
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Pietro Consagra
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Antonio Dias
The Image, 1971acrylic on canvas
120 x 120 cm -
In the early 1970s, as Dias’s palette retreated into near-monochrome, his paintings became sites of quiet inquiry into the very nature of art. From another angle, they may be read as spiritual cartographies: intimate yet unbound, personal yet cosmically scaled. His works from this period inhabit a unique position between two of Brazil’s most distinct artistic legacies: the festive, vernacular, colourful lyricism of Tropicália and the contemplative, visually concise humanist geometry of Neo-Concretism.
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Antonio Dias
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Drawing, for Durham, is not a means of reproducing reality but a practice that underscores its impossibility. In this sense, the medium carries with it an intrinsic freedom, an openness that has accompanied the artist throughout his career, much like writing. His drawings, often enigmatic and seemingly accidental, move away from illustration toward a more conceptual and poetic terrain.
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Jannis Kounellis
Untitled (carte azzurre, segnali), 1961painting on light blue tissue paper
70 x 100 cm
framed: 85,5 x 115,5 x 4,5 cm -
Among his many explorations of language and material, one remarkable group emerged from this series: the Carte Azzurre (Light Blue Papers), created on light blue tissue paper. The choice of tissue paper is not arbitrary; its translucency and airy quality create a striking contrast with the bold black marks that define his visual language introducing a new layer of finesse and ephemerality to his practice. Another crucial feature of these works is their size: 70 x 100 cm, the standard format for Italian drawing paper. This dimension is not incidental but reflects Kounellis’ deep understanding of materiality and format, becoming iconic within his practice.
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Jannis Kounellis
Untitled (carte azzurre, segnali), 1961painting on light blue tissue paper
70 x 100 cm
framed: 85 x 115 x 5 cm -
These works encapsulate the Artist’s mastery of contrast, unique and distinct within his oeuvre; not just between black and blue, but between solidity and vulnerability, assertion and silence. They remind us that his exploration of language was never just about the mark itself, but about the tension between the mark and the world it inhabits, “a whisper rather than a declaration, yet one that resonates with equal intensity”.
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Jannis Kounellis
Untitled, 1963pastel and black pencil on paper
70 x 100 cm
framed: 85,5 x 115,5 x 4,5 cm -
This work belongs to the Alfabeti series, which began shortly after Jannis Kounellis developed works inspired by urban signage. Influenced by his experiences in Rome's everyday life, these combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols represented the personal language of the artist. Using various types of paper, Kounellis applies these symbols with stencils and eliminates the traces of the "artist's hand”.
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Kounellis makes use of remnants of torn coats skewered to frightful butcher's knives, clasped between two metal bars. The restrained composition and the shade (ombra) created by the torn coats on the white wall evokes the dark shadowy light in the art of Caravaggio (Rudi Fuchs, 2014; translation by Beth O'Brien). This work contains numerous typical elements of Kounellis’s artist practice as well as the everyday materials used in the Arte Povera. The coats that he uses, for instance, express the scale of the human figure.
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Jannis Kounellis
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