Endless Possibilities: Geometric Abstraction
The UBS Lounge at Art Basel in Basel 2025 features works in the UBS Art Collection by international artists who engage with geometric abstraction.
Drawing from her background in stage design, Gina Fischli merges traditional fine art processes with unconventional production methods, often incorporating craft-related techniques and unexpected, kitsch materials. Her practice in sculpture, painting and drawing explores the appeal of consumer objects. With her signature wry humor, Fischli transforms these banal items—including domestic animals, wine glasses, soft drink bottles, household furniture and birthday cakes—into whimsical objects of desire, recontextualizing them from the mundane to provoke new interpretations and reflections on domesticity, identity and the passage of time.
Albers(pool) (2023) is from a body of work that appropriates the format of Josef Albers’ iconic Homage to the Square series (1950-1976). Albers’ series consists of more than a thousand paintings, drawings and prints depicting nested squares in different colors. This geometric abstraction was a template for Albers, a renowned theorist and instructor at the Bauhaus, to explore the subjective experience of color—the effects that adjacent colors have on one another and the illusion of flat planes of color advancing or receding in space. The makeshift quality of Fischli’s version, made from glitter and glue on plywood, challenges the seriousness of these works which Albers created under meticulously controlled conditions.