LISTE ART FAIR BASEL
Sophie Utikal
16.–22.06.2025
Booth 67
Messe Basel, Halle 1.1Maulbeerstrasse / Ecke Riehenring 113, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
☞ Portfolio
Sophie Utikal’s practice always departs from her own brown body as an anchor point and a feeling that needs to find translation into a scene. Sensual worlds of pastel colors incite the audience to be vulnerable with one another. Utikal’s hand-sewn textile works reach impressive sizes, each measuring several meters wide, and come to own the exhibition space by dominating it with softness. Dedicated to those whose biographies are usually underrepresented, the works always focus on the body and its language. The ambivalence of the softness of the materials and the soothing color palette, when set in relation to the distressing issues portrayed, points to the opportunity that lies within the multiple crises of our times for the depicted women — namely, the possibility to acknowledge their personal pain, and in so doing finding the force and power to transform what is hurting them in the first place.
The stories, sewed in her contemporary arrays, are based on her own experiences of migration as a woman of color from the US to Austria and Germany, where she currently lives. To solve her traumatic experiences Utikal depicts oniric landscapes, where the tension between the epigenetic trauma of cultural and identity eradication and the individual process of healing is shaped in self-portraits. Appealing to the decolonized gaze and non-rational forms of knowledge she reproduces her own body in multiple textile bodies.
EBENSPERGER is pleased to present a large scale textile installation specially conceived for Liste Art Fair Basel. The presentation will be based on Utikal‘s solo exhibition `SHE HAD ALREADY LEARNED TO BREATHE UNDERWATER` (2023) at Kunstraum Innsbruck and the exhibition `There Is No Separation`, (2022) at NKW – Neue Kunstverein Wien.
