20 April 2008 – 8 June 2008

Aleana Egan - We sat down where we had sat before

The Irish artist Aleana Egan (*1979, Dublin, Ireland) will present at Kunsthalle Basel her first major solo show in an institutional context. Egan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art and her work has gained wider attention in the last few years with solo and group shows at Mary Mary gallery, Glasgow (2006) and Galerie Sandra Buergel, Berlin (2007), among others. She is also currently participating in the 5th berlin biennial.
The title of the exhibition – We sat down where we had sat before – is a reference to a line from the novel The Sea, the Sea (1978) by the Anglo-Irish writer Iris Murdoch. The novel explores the human obsessions of love, vanity and jealousy against a backdrop of poetic descriptions of the sea and rugged coastline. The title is also a reflection of Egan’s working method: her art embraces intuitive and subjectively motivated processes of interpreting literary source materials as well as precise observations of her immediate surroundings and of people who are close to her. Egan’s sculptures, collages and drawings evoke abstract forms and are made from simple, relatively crude materials which she assembles and transforms using manual techniques such as dyeing and bonding. She often relates her sculptures to the exhibition space by incorporating selected architectural features in a modified way into the formal structure of her works. Egan creates highly evocative settings that instil an atmospheric mood in the exhibition space through the forms, materials and colours that give her works their physical and fragile tactility.

Address

Kunsthalle Basel
Steineberg 7
Basel
phone +41 61 206 99 00
http://www.kunsthallebasel.ch

Opening Hours

Tuesday-Friday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Thursday until 8.30 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., closed on Monday

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