June 16 – Aug 8, 2026
Basel
For our inaugural exhibition across the entire newly renovated gallery in Basel, two esteemed artists present a selection of career highlights in dialogue. Irish-Welsh artist Barry Flanagan (1941–2009), primarily known for his bronze sculptures, presents a handful of works, ranging from his larger-than-life cricket-playing hare to smaller, at times miniature, castings of dogs, humans, and elephants. German-born Danish artist Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b. 1943), whose practice spans more than sixty years, presents several large-scale paintings and drawings from this period. The juxtaposition of their works promises a lively, animated exhibition full of stories and fantasies.
As the artists’ work suggests, there is a moment in every fable where the boundary between the human and the animal becomes unstable and fluid. A creature speaks, a body transforms, a familiar form reveals an unfamiliar truth. It is in this threshold space, between the told and the seen, the known and the strange, that the works of Flanagan and Reuter Christiansen find their common ground. Reuter Christiansen’s paintings place the human figure at the centre of a psychological reckoning. Her subjects are exposed yet resistant, vulnerable yet insistent on their presence, in a world that feels at once raw and mythic. Each canvas unfolds a story, revealing the innermost characteristics of the subjects. As in Woman with Serpent (1983), the protagonist is both fragile and powerful. She looks down her nose whilst raising her chin in defiance. She is one with the snake that furtively navigates her neck. Flanagan’s bronze hares occupy a different register. Leaping, balancing, resting, performing, his figures move through the world with a lightness that belies their material weight. The hare, long a creature of fable and folklore, carries in Flanagan’s hands both wit and melancholy, reflecting something irreducibly human back at us. Brought together, the two bodies of work illuminate what fables have always known: that the figures we tell stories through — human or animal, painted or cast — are never simply themselves. They are vessels for what we fear, what we desire, and what we cannot quite say directly.
Image: View on Barry Flanagan’s “Large Boxing Hare on Anvil,” 1984, and Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s “Leipzig Vulcan Woman, Is this my town? Eine Wunde, Viele Wunden II,” 2019
URSULA REUTER CHRISTIANSEN 