FOX JENSEN & FOX JENSEN McCRORY ART BASEL HONG 2025

Our presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong centres on Abstraction spanning three generations including two of Europe’s most acclaimed painters, Imi Knoebel & Hanns Kunitzberger. Kunitzberger currently has a celebrated exhibition in the Kuppelsaal (Domed Hall), at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Sixteen grand paintings fill this historical space in a manner evokes the natural world – one thinks of Monet, but also of the existential embrace of Rothko. Important examples of his paintings across a 15-year period will be installed.

Knoebel’s Elemente T.2, is an emblematic triptych demonstrating the historical arc of Knoebel’s practice. Reaching back to Suprematism and forwards to a newer cosmopolitan symbolism, the painting is an antidote to the barren analogies of so much Minimalism.

One of Britain’s most respected painters, Mark Francis Transverse Wave series demonstrate his rare capacity to finesse material, establishing a weave of colour and form that feels partially rooted in Francis’s long interest in the making the invisible visible.

The tender procedural action of Francis finds its antithesis in Koen Delaere’s extravagant paintings that appear to be made by deep tectonic actions where pigment is driven from top to bottom and back again, revealing a complex stratum of pigments and polymers that gather at the top and bottom edges in unlikely accumulations that feels more geological than gestural. If ever there was a reimagining of Rosenberg’s “action painting” – this is it.

Jan Albers & Ulrike Schulze  are both sculptors, but neither can quite rid themselves of the influence of painting. Both use colour expressively and one senses that they both are drawn to colours capacity to inflame and to temper. Alber’s faceted works – carry a folded neo-Cubist sense of the figure and Schulze’s ceramic forms hold an echo of Cycladic sculpture, both in geometry and personality.

Tomislav Nikolic (AUS) is a painter but like Albers and Schulze he sees painting as an event in the round. His extravagant frames are fully complicit in the composition and in the complex cocktail of colours that comprise his neo-Rococo portraits. Sitting out from the wall they behave like sculptural reliefs and like ancient reliefs, which we have become accustomed to seeing as weathered marble monochromes, they are profoundly animated by colour.