{"title":"Disease of the Eyes","metaTitle":"Disease of the Eyes · Kunsthalle Basel","uri":"exhibitions/sanya-kantarovsky","hide_title":false,"teasermode":false,"hide_artists":false,"artists":[{"uri":"artists/sanya-kantarovsky","title":"Sanya Kantarovsky","firstname":"Sanya","surname":"Kantarovsky"}],"startdate":1535666400,"enddate":1541890800,"medias":[{"url":"https://kunsthallebasel.ch/media/pages/exhibitions/sanya-kantarovsky/28ad293dca-1760086369/sanya-kantarovsky_disease-of-the-eyes_-kunsthalle-basel_01-x1400-q90.webp","type":"image","extension":"jpg","width":3000,"height":2002,"alt":"Kunsthalle Basel","caption":"Sanya Kantarovsky, installation view, Disease of the Eyes, Kunsthalle Basel, 2018. 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Lush, moody, touching, and wry, the paintings of Sanya Kantarovsky (*1982) offer a strange form of address. Their subjects gaze at you insolently (while on horseback, a corpse its casual companion), or entreatingly (while floating, probably wounded, in an endless sea). These are saturated images, built up from washes of color, layers of references, sly nods to our contemporary moment, and the self-conscious stylistic inflections of painters of yesteryear. One senses that their maker believes in the urgency but also the absurdity of painting as he assembles marks that are not afraid to be imperfect, even awkward. They make almost palpable such emotions as alienation, embarrassment, intimacy, and desire, exposing quotidian human melodrama and existential cruelty, all while being able to laugh at themselves as they turn to you so that you may laugh, too. Here, in the Russian-born artist’s largest exhibition to date and first institutional show in Switzerland, Kantarovsky shows all new paintings and monotype prints—the connections between the two mediums revealing much about his process of constructing images.
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With kind support from Nicoletta Fiorucci / Fiorucci Art Trust and Isaac Dreyfus-Bernheim Stiftung, with additional support from Dr. Georg und Josi Guggenheim-Stiftung
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