Dorothy Cross examines the relationship between living beings and the natural world, seeing nature, the ocean and the body as sites of constant change and flux. Her works also draw upon a rich store of symbolic associations across cultures to investigate the construction of religious, social and sexual mores, subjectivity, memory and vulnerability. At Art Basel 2023, Cross’s sculpture Earth will cascade down from the ceiling of Kerlin’s booth. Though at first it resembles a stalactite, closer inspection reveals it to be a chain of layered and interlinking human hands cast in bronze. This unexpected encounter places the body in a dynamic interplay with the natural world – ‘earthing’ it and positioning the human finger as a site of generative energy throughout art history, citing, for instance, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

Dorothy Cross has exhibited in museums including MoMA PS1; ACCA, Melbourne; Tate, St Ives; ICA, Philadelphia; Modern Art Oxford; Turner Contemporary, Margate; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London. Cross is currently working on an ongoing project titled KINSHIP, a ritualised journey returning a mummified body from Ireland to Egypt. The artist has recently had work included in Tangible/Nothing, Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas; girls, girls, girls, curated by Simone Rocha, Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; Performing PAC: Take Me to the Place I Love, PAC Milano; Bones in the Attic, The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (all 2022); The Museum of Ancient History, University College Dublin; UnNatural History, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry (both 2021); other.worldly, Fries Museum, The Netherlands (2020); Shaping Ireland, National Gallery of Ireland; Desire, the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and Sights & Sounds, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (all 2019). Cross has participated in the Venice, Istanbul and Liverpool biennales.

Influenced by the language of classicism and informed by the history of Italian art, Du Pasquier’s paintings splice together simplified still life compositions, architectural plans, industrial drawings, and playful fragments of text with boldly simplified blocks of colour. New objects constantly enrich Du Pasquier’s imaginary and symbolic world and she follows particular, poetic paths to construct and compose forms, sculpt space, and render representation anew – as well as using her own archive as raw material to be reshaped. Exploring the links between objects, geometry, representation of space and psychic life, Du Pasquier’s paintings often expand into clustered arrangements or onto the surrounding walls, taking a fluid and porous approach to traditional distinctions between ‘fine’ and ‘decorative’ arts. 

Born in Bordeaux, France, Nathalie Du Pasquier first discovered pattern and texture in West Africa in the 1970s, and has lived in Milan since 1979. A founding member of the Memphis design group, she designed textiles, carpets, plastic laminates, furniture and objects before dedicating herself to painting in 1987. Her work has been exhibited at MACRO, Rome; MRAC, Sérignan; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna and, most recently, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in France. 

One of the most important figures in international contemporary art, Liam Gillick works across diverse forms, including sculpture and installation. A theorist, curator and educator as well as an artist, his wider body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects, all of which inform (and are informed by) his art practice. Gillick’s line of enquiry is into conditions of production, including how it continues to operate in a post-industrial landscape: questions of economy, labour and social organisation are ongoing preoccupations. He is perhaps best-known for producing sculptural objects – platforms, screens, models, benches, prototypes, signage, or structural supports made from sleek modular Plexiglas and aluminium forms in standardised colours from the RAL system. These seductive materials speak the language of renovation and development: originally refined by the military, they’ve been widely used in corporate interiors since the 1990s, a decade in which post-industrial societies saw a shift from the collective to the individualist and privatised. Drawing upon engineering and industrial design as well as the legacy of hard-edged minimalism, these abstract quasi-architectural forms offer a critique of neo-liberal or corporate aesthetics, automation and endless (re)development. Focusing on secondary or incomplete forms such as screens and platforms, Gillick pinpoints structures which have the potential to destabilise the power of architecture and the architecture of power, creating generative spaces for discussion or the development of ideas.

Liam Gillick has had solo exhibitions in many of the world’s leading museums, including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; MAGASIN, Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate Britain, London and IMMA, Dublin. In a groundbreaking collaboration between German national museums, his current solo exhibition Filtered Time is at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin (6 April – 15 October 2023). Current/forthcoming projects and exhibitions include A Variability Quantifier, a weather station on Fogo Island, Canada (2022–2026); However Many Times We Ran The Model The Results Were Pretty Much The Same, a collaboration with Hito Steyerl in Roddino, North Italy; and the inaugural Vilnius Biennial for Performance Art (from 23 July – 6 August). Gillick has participated in major international exhibitions including Okayama Art Summit, Japan and the Venice, Shanghai, Istanbul, Yinchuan and Singapore biennales.

Callum Innes creates abstract paintings that carry a powerful tension between control and fluidity. Dissolution is central to his practice: layers of deep pigments are brushed over with turpentine, breaking down sections of paint and leaving watery, trace elements, before being painted over again. Repeating this process of painting, dissolving and repainting multiple times, Innes builds depth and a sense of history: oblique panels of dense pigments become embedded and fortified, while tiny trickles or rivulets of liquified paint point to their underlying fragility. 

Callum Innes has been the subject of solo exhibitions at De Pont Museum, Tilburg; Kunsthalle Bern; Neues Museum, Nürnberg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the ICA, London; the Scottish National Gallery, and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Modern Art Oxford; the Whitworth, Manchester; IMMA, Dublin, and Château La Coste, Provence. His work can be found in the collections of Albright-Knox, Buffalo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museé des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; National Galleries of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York and Tate Gallery, London.

Merlin James considers the history and legacy of painting from an unconventional viewpoint. As commented by Artforum’s Sherman Sam, his work “has sought to rigorously problematise the experience of painting while simultaneously deepening its formal language”. Generally small in scale, his works depict diverse subject matter including vernacular architecture, riverside views, post-industrial landscapes, empty interiors, mysterious figures and scenes of sexual intimacy. His works refine and renew many of painting’s most time-honoured concerns – genre and narrative, pictorial space and expressive gesture, the emotive resonance of colour and texture.

Merlin James has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Venice Biennale, Wales Pavilion; Sikkema Jenkins, New York; KW Institute, Berlin; CCA, Glasgow; Kunstverein, Freiberg; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; OCT, Shunde & Shenzhen; Anton Kern, New York; Philadelphia Art Alliance. Selected international collections include Tate, London; Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China and National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. 

Since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s, Brian Maguire has approached painting as an act of solidarity. He operates a truly engaged practice, compelled by the raw realities of humanity’s violence against itself, and the potential for justice. Maguire’s monumental 2.9 x 3.2m painting The Rainforest takes on what war reporter Ed Vulliamy has described as the “war on the world”: the destruction of the Amazon. The work is informed by the testimonies of the indigenous Maraguá nation, whom Maguire travelled to remote regions of northwestern Brazil to meet with last year. The artist transformed their stories into blisteringly powerful works of art, capturing the beauty of the rainforest as well as the horror of its destruction. 

Brian Maguire has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Missoula Art Museum, Montana; Crawford Gallery, Cork; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; Void, Derry; American University Museum, Washington DC and United Nations Headquarters, New York, USA. In 2023, Maguire has a solo exhibition at Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen, Norway, and will take part in Converge 45, a biennial exhibition in Portland, Oregon. In 2024, he has solo exhibitions at Missoula Art Museum, Montana and Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. In 2025, Maguire will be the subject of a major retrospective beginning at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. 

Maguire’s work is represented in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art; The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Museum of Fine Art Houston, Texas; Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, The Netherlands; Alvar Alto Museum, Finland and The Tia Collection, Santa Fe.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is an Irish artist working with film, computer-generated imagery, collage, tapestry, print and installation. At Art Basel, we are pleased to present a textile-based work recently included in the 16th Lyon Biennale as well as Ní Bhriain’s 2022 solo exhibition at CCA Glasgow. Intrusions III is a jacquard tapestry that collages images of excavated Irish landscapes with damaged cityscapes caused by natural and man-made disasters. Ní Bhriain populates these fictional sites with strange animals, creating a dizzying amalgam that weaves fragments of the past with a potential dystopic future.

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain studied at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, the Royal College of Art, London and Kingston University, London, where she was awarded a PhD by practice in 2008. Her work has been shown widely internationally, with exhibitions including Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin; Broad Museum, Michigan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; CCA, Glasgow; Hammer Museum, LA; Istanbul Modern, Turkey; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid and the 16th Lyon Biennale. Ní Bhriain will present her first solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery in November 2023.

Liliane Tomasko’s abstract paintings employ a distinctive, bold lyricism, with an equally unabashed sense of colour. The artist often begins with a study of the personal effects of everyday domesticity such as bedding or clothing to create work that suggests a gateway into the realms of sleep and dreaming; delving into the gulf between what we understand as the ‘conscious’ and ‘subconscious’.  Recent paintings display increasing vitality and assertiveness, articulating an abstraction that is rooted in the physical realm but ultimately transcends it. Intense colour, subtle tone, shadows and painterly gestures are woven together in such a way that space comes in and out of focus, suspending one’s perception of them and emulating the clarity or lack thereof of dreams and memories.

Selected solo exhibitions include Name me not, CAB Burgos, Spain (2023); S P E L L O F T H E W O O D, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Evening Wind, Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York, USA (both 2022); Morpheus, Kunstmuseum Kloster unser lieben Frauen Magdeburg, Germany (2021); dark goes lightly, Château la Coste, France (2019); Caja de sueños, Museo MATE, Lima, Peru; 12 nights x dreams, ROCA Rockland Center for the Arts, New York, USA (both 2018); Kunstwerk, a two-person exhibition with Sean Scully, Sammlung Klein, Germany (2017); Mother-Matrix-Matter, Lowe Art Museum, Miami, USA; In Visible World, Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA and dusk at dawn, Kunstalle Rostock, Germany (all 2015). Tomasko’s work is represented in the public collections of The Albertina, Vienna; Hilti Art Foundation, Liechtenstein; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Lowe Art Museum, Miami; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.