MARIA CEPPI | SARAH DWYER | WERNER FREI

16 - 22 June 2025 | Booth 10 | Riehenstrasse 90B, Basel, CH

exhibited artworks:

Galerie Fabian Lang is pleased to announce our participation at June Art Fair 2025 with a group show including works by Maria Ceppi, Sarah Dwyer and Werner Frei.

Our 2025 June Art Fair presentation aims to create a dialogue between the contemporary works of Sarah Dwyer and the earlier works of Werner Frei, highlighting the stylistic affinities that connect them. The distinctive traits of Frei's works from the Art Informel period of the 1950s and 1960s vs today’s abstract practice in Dwyer's paintings and sculptures.

Sarah Dwyer (b. 1974, Ireland) is an artist whose practice centers on drawing, often extending into painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Her work merges figuration and abstraction through dynamic compositions that reflect both personal experience and a playful engagement with the everyday. Using exuberant color palettes and lively, intuitive mark-making, Dwyer creates works where abstract forms emerge gradually from shifting fields of color. Her physical, almost performative approach to painting leaves behind structured surfaces that retain traces of their creation, offering viewers a navigable visual history.

Werner Frei (born 1907 in Rickenbach, CH) is perhaps a forgotten master from Zurich, who died in 1983. But his works have a freshness and radiance that have no equal, and it is surprising how much of his stylistic influence can be found in the works of contemporary artists today. His work ranges stylistically from impressionistic portraits, landscapes and still lifes to wild, tachistic abstraction, pioneering ‘Concrete Impressionism’ and minimalism. In the 1950s, Werner Frei experimented with a new artistic style, influenced by the Art Informel movement. This movement aimed at a new form of abstraction, focusing on non-geometrical shapes and the absence of defined objects, complemented by a bold and spontaneous use of colour to express a freer and more direct visual language.

Separated from the booth presentation, we will be showing a sculpture called Red (2021) by Maria Ceppi (b. 1963, Visp, CH). This Artwork is inspired by everyday life and its inherent inconspicuous morphism. The 3 meter large sculpture consists of three pieces and is part of the Hybrid Shapes series. This art project delves deeper into the genesis and interpretation of the Objets Cultes, the artists’ previous series. The Objets Cultes is a series by Ceppi that began in 1992 and now includes over 300 small “hand sized” art objects. These works are assembled from everyday mass-produced or artisan “products” or items from various professions and objects found in nature. Ceppi assembles them into new inventions creating curious, surreal and maybe absurd wonderings challenging conventional ways of seeing the everyday. They resist clear categorization — they are neither sculptures nor everyday objects, neither familiar nor entirely foreign. In the Hybrid Shapes series, Ceppi expands this vision into a new dimension. She carefully recreates the everyday objects once small with enormous precision and detail to large scale works, transforming the dialogue from something private into something public, from intimate to monumental. The sculptures take on a new meaning and the connotation of element and material plays out on a macro scale. The process goes from being a «hand dialogue» to a «body dialogue». As a result, there is a different kind of estrangement from the strange!