The third annual edition of June Art Fair is taking place during Basel Art Week from September 20-26, 2021 in Hall 4.1 of Messe Basel.
The Green Gallery is presenting paintings by Dominique Knowles.
Knowles’ work invites through the archetypal & moves beyond as an incredibly specific expression of interspecies companionship. At once a seemingly private language, its monumental character reveals that the work is generated from primordial knowledge. They garner strength from the formless, fluid movement of unbounded rhythm. His poetics are epic in scale, with an intimate cadence that ebbs & flows in sub-realities. There’s a symbiosis of confessional narrative & emotional lyric, acting as a soft ground for a central figure of luminously erotic queer desire.
Romantic longing nourishes an empathic absorption into a space pulsating with aliveness. The aesthetics consistent resonance of humane & animal grief is redemptive. Through alchemy, there’s hope for rebirth as its ochre atmosphere breathes prenatal warmth & a givenness for meditations on ancient sentience.
This open & untethered vision of inter-being is more than a pollyannish dream of a beautiful ecology. The stakes of this cosmology are deep within solemn contemplation of what is nature, how does one maintain another’s quality of life & what capacity of being death doula allows for a way to die with dignity & grace.
Dominique Knowles
(b. 1996 in The Bahamas, based in Chicago, IL)
Knowles received both his MFA in Painting as a New Artist Society Award scholar in 2020 as well as his BFA in 2017 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Chapter NY (New York, NY), Chart Gallery (New York, NY), KINDL (Berlin, Germany), Institut Findlandais (Helsinki, FIndland), Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York, NY), Vdrome (Milan, IT), Galerie Emanuel Layr (Vienna, Austria), Sperling (Munich, Germany), Four Flags at Chicago Manuel Style (Chicago, IL), Soccer Club Club (Chicago, IL), The Green Gallery East (Milwaukee, WI), The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (Nassau, Bahamas), Popop Studios (Nassau, Bahamas), The Bahamas International Film Festival (Nassau, Bahamas), The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Medulla Gallery (Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago), 14°N 61°W (Martinique), HilgerBROTKunsthalle (Vienna, Austria), Halle 14 (Leipzig, Germany), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Illinois), Andrew Rafacz (Chicago, IL), The Packing Plant (Nashville, TN) and Julius Caesar (Chicago, IL). Knowles has participated in a residency at The Suburban (Milwaukee, WI) and has curated a group exhibition at The Condo Association (Chicago, IL). Knowles is featured in publications such as Artforum online, Frieze Magazine, Spike Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Garage Magazine, Contempoaray Art Daily, Art Viewer, Bad at Sports, Hyperallergic, Arc Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, Parnass, Kuba Paris, Blank Canvas podcast, Das Kunstmagazin, New American Painting, The Seen Journal and The Poor Farm Press.
About June Fair:
Established in 2019, the inaugural edition was set inside a concrete bunker transformed into an exhibition space by Pritzker Prize winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron.
An alternative to a conventional art fair viewing experience, the fair is gallery led and distinguished by a highly-selective, intergenerational group of participants presenting projects in an open format more akin to a meticulously curated, collaborative, public exhibition.
A modest scale and convenient site located in close proximity to Messeplatz and Art Basel are notable attributes. This year’s edition marks the fair’s physical return to Basel after last year’s Special Online Edition presented on Hauserwirth.com in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth and ArtReview.
Founded as an independent project by galleries VI, VII (Oslo) and Christian Andersen, (Copenhagen) the fair was conceived as a platform to promote the work of emerging artists and to encourage the discovery of under-recognized figures.