HONG KONG – Sullivan+Strumpf is set to present at premiere art fair Art Basel Hong Kong 2019, this March, bringing in a selection of works by artists with diverse practices in both two and three dimensions, including Tony Albert, Sydney Ball, Lindy Lee, Sam Leach, I Nyoman Masriadi, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Alex Seton and Yang Yongliang, many of whom have been exhibited at their galleries across Sydney and Singapore over the last year.

The presentation will also include some of the region’s most exciting artists including a large-format painting by Indonesian-based Balinese artist I Nyoman Masriadi, whose practice combines superhuman figures with Indonesian cultural history, offering a biting social commentary on contemporary life and global pop culture. Created especially for ABHK 2019, Sri Lankan-born, Sydney-based artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran will show, Bi-Head a polychrome and polished-bronze head, exploring the politics of sex, the monument, and pointing to the new possibilities to be found in gender fluid realms.

Australian artist Alex Seton will present a pair of large-scale bronze and marble totems from his ‘Cargo’ series, a new body of work in which the artist depicts highly compressed bales of clothing, of the kind found in the second-hand clothes industry, evoking the mesh of needs, concerns, environments and economies through which we are all connected. Similarly, Australian artist Lindy Lee invokes a sense of time with Unnameable 2017, a large-scale bronze ‘Fire Stone’, and works on paper pierced and singed by flame. As each scorched mark stands for an individual moment, so too, the large bronze Fire Stone – borne of the marriage of metal and spontaneous eruptions – speaks to the infinite curve of time inherent to all life.

Australian artist Sam Leach too uncovers concepts of time with his finely executed oil paintings of animals and spacesuits, connecting the legacy of the enlightenment found in the philosophy of Russian Cosmists and the distinctive styles of spacesuits, helmets and associated technology. Chinese artist Yang Yongliang will present video and photographic works exploiting a connection between traditional Chinese painting and the contemporary, implementing ancient oriental aesthetics and literati beliefs with modern language and digital techniques.

Sam Leach, Egrets with Pressure Seal, 2018, oil and resin on wood, 50 x 40 cm

As a counterpoint to all the colour, S+S will also present a selection of work from the estate of the late Sydney Ball. Arguably Australia’s greatest colourist, Ball’s Infinexseries in automotive enamel on aluminium, comprises rigid geometric forms articulated in fields of contrasting colour – crisply chromatic formal assemblages of individual but related planes of colour which appear as if poised mid-motion.

Finally, for Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters, Tony Albert will present a monumental sculptural project in the form of an opened ‘house’ structure supporting two image-texts spelling out the words ‘Native’ and ‘Home’, continuing Albert’s celebrated text-based works in which the artist embellishes black aluminium letters with a collage of objects from his renown collection of ‘Aboriginalia’, a homage and window onto the history of Australian pop-culture’s representation of Aboriginal people.

Art Basel Hong Kong runs from 29th to 31st March 2019 at the Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Tickets available here