Arcadia Missa returns to Art Basel, Booth R24 Hall 2.1, with a group presentation of new works by Japanese painter Reina Sugihara, American-Senegalese artist Coumba Samba, British artist Jesse Darling and selected works from the Estate of Irma Hunerfauth.
In the dense and amorphous works of Reina Sugihara, incertitude overlaps with metaphysical concerns. Her rust-coloured, sulphurous compositions, reminiscent of biological structures – luminous deposits of gesso, oil and binder – evidence an internal process which cannot be assimilated into the domain of representation. They become haptic recollections, a ritualistic process of tracing and layering, visualising the body as a porous and mutable site, suspended between pigment, gesture and environment.
Constructing her canvases over time, painting over many months and often years, she returns to it only after losing memory of the thoughts, reference objects or metaphors that guided her preceding session. Sugihara proposes alternative connections between twentieth-century European lineages such as Art Informel and the process-oriented, bodily nature of the Gutai movement. Her works unfold as layers that obscure and inform one another, suggesting a reality all their own.
For Art Basel, Sugihara extends her recent presentations at Midway Contemporary and current body of work in the 59th Carnegie International, connecting the sensory experience of the garden with internal systems of occupying the world – exploring how what feels private can also be collective, and how meaning remains recognisable, yet never fixed.
The practice of Turner Prize-winning artist Jesse Darling explores the contradictions and complexities of the present continuous and past imperfect, bringing to light the latent narratives embedded in the objects. Working primarily with industrial materials, Darling underscores the agency, fragility and subversiveness of life, societies, technologies, the hubris and desire of human beings, and the objects we gather around ourselves as narrative totems.
Darling’s wall-based sculpture 1 Corinthians 15:44, composed of porcelain, steel, bells and doilies, sits between the sacred and the abject. Connecting individual existence and collective experience, he combines and distorts familiar objects to create sculptures that hover between relics and contemporary figures, often revealing the fragility of systems that consider themselves invulnerable.
Citing the Biblical verse: “It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body”, Darling’s sculpture, an object of embodiment and transformation, appears to hold that tension materially: brittle, devotional, domestic. Darling expertly pulls together recurring interests in faith, collapse, bodily vulnerability, folk devotion, classed or domestic material culture and the unstable boundary between relic and object.
Coumba Samba’s celebrated interdisciplinary oeuvre spans sculpture, installation, painting, drawing and performance. Citing the geometric forms and industrially fabricated objects of American minimalist and post-minimalist artists, she is drawn to objects that exist as signifiers of histories and national identity. Her work dissects networks of capital, questioning the impact of institutional/colonial structures – materialising the invisible imbrications of the micro and macroscopic, global and local, personal and collective.
Recently exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition The National Expo at gta exhibitions, ETH, Zurich, Samba’s scattered steel bollards, each coated in monochromatic car paint, gather across the booth. Spatial authority as minimal forms, these replicas address actants of shaping behaviour, the coded signs that communicate webs of authority, exclusion, global anxieties and how vast, impersonal, architectures inscribe human bodies into regulated pathways. Samba’s sculptures are painted in car colours taken from incidents of vehicle ramming attacks during the 2020 George Floyd Protests Rebellion across the US. Her colour codes are measures of drama; one concerning incendiary revolt and uprising catalysed by police brutality, another the recurring textures of a city’s urban environment. The National Expo is available as both individual sculptures and a complete site-specific installation of 38 bollards.
In considering the ideological inscriptions and semiotics of overlooked objects, Samba’s materially charged work expands on recent presentations at Kunstverein Hamburg, MMK Frankfurt, Kunsthalle Basel, and public installation, Wild Wild Wall. Samba’s work Panels, 2026, is currently included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, US and Poles, 2026 in Fade at Studio Museum Harlem, New York, US. Later this year, she will present her first US institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Arcadia Missa proudly introduces works from the Estate of German painter and sculptor Irma Hünerfauth. Her long-overlooked practice – now made available for collections – incites pertinent poetic, satirical and critical reflections on the conditions and social relations of modern life. She explores alienation, love and longing, as well as the correlation between narratives of progress and the extractive violence of Western modernity that plays out in wars, environmental pollution and extinction.
In the early 1970s, Hünerfauth began a small series of celebrated Vibrationsobjekte, assembling delicate compositions and precarious geometries, using consumer society’s detritus. Suspended in sealed Perspex boxes, her sculptures are a diagrammatic whole, a study in form, line and, absence of, volume. These architectures of overlapping outlines and jewel-like appendages appear anxiety ridden, an unknowable codified system. Yet, they are eerily habitual, prescient in their anticipation of our now omnipresent cybernetic systems.
Against the modernist ideal of the formalist object, vibrations cause disruption to the seemingly static compositions. They approach collapse, amplifying some splinter of the real and surrendering to their own dissolution, enacting the precarity of existence. Hünerfauth’s works question rationalism and technological determinism that underlies a central “fetish of modernity”, a standoff between resolution and irresolution, minimalism and maximalism. Hünerfauth’s was recently included in Radical Software at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna and MUDAM, Luxembourg, contextualising works alongside VALIE EXPORT, Isa Genzken, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rosemarie Trockel, amongst others. In 2027, Museum Tinguely, Basel, will present the first major survey of Hünerfauth’s work.
