VernissageTV Art TV

At its Box and Cabane spaces at City SALTS, Kunstverein Salts in Birsfelden (Basel, Switzerland) presents a solo exhibition by the artist Pilar Quinteros. Pilar Quinteros, born in 1988, Santiago, Chile, grew up in Chilean Patagonia. She splits her time between Barcelona, Spain, and Basel, Switzerland. With a background in art from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the Institute Art Gender Nature, IAGN, at HGK Basel FHNW. The exhibition at City SALTS is composed of a video recording of the performance performed on December 8, 2024, with a group of collaborators and friends, an installation, and a short fictional advertisement inviting everyone to drink the water from the Swiss fountains. Curated by Samuel Leuenberger and Benedikt Wyss, the exhibition at City SALTS is running until 1 June 2025.

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Quinteros’ work blends drawing, sculpture, performance, and video, focusing on history, reality, and the transformation of environments. Her artistic approach uses simple, delicate materials to create temporary, ephemeral pieces, with the process itself vital to her work. Through video and photography, she documents her hands-on efforts, central to the intellectual development of her creations. Quinteros’ work has been presented internationally, including at the Istanbul Biennial, 2025, Folkestone Triennial, 2021, and the São Paulo Biennial, 2016. As a co-founder of the MICH Collective, 2010-2019, and part of the former Cumbia Collectivo, 2020-2024, she explores how materials and space reshape our understanding of the world.

“The process behind Blood for Blood, the exhibition at City Salts, began last year, after I moved to Basel to study at the HGK. I was living illegally in friends’ studio. Though the building was to be demolished soon, the women there worried about my presence. I felt hatred and affection, as they warned me yet gave me art supplies and laughed at my poor German. Between dodging tram fares and living in the workshop, I created a layer of camouflage or invisibility, useful but emotionally uncomfortable. It made me think about the disguises we use to do what we must, the layers above and below. Basel makes me think about this. So much wonder is hidden. In Chile, generosity comes in crises, like earthquakes or fires, while here they give away bikes and appliances. Why? Experience makes you suspicious. In Chile, strangers seem threatening. Here, most fountains have drinkable water. I haven’t tried it. A Swiss friend said it’s because of the Alps. His story feels incomplete… In Chile, we have the Andes, yet drinking from fountains is risky…

This exhibition doesn’t provide answers. It’s driven by questions and doubts. What must you do to have drinkable water in all your city’s fountains? What do you do once you have it? Help others achieve it? I found Wasser für Wasser, Water for Water, which brings water to African countries, its name suggesting a transaction. An eye for an eye, blood for blood. Nothing is free. NOTHING. Let someone tell me otherwise.”

Pilar Quinteros, 4 April 2025, Birsfelden

Reto Pulfer: Zustand Hand, 2024. Hollybush Gardens, Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Official description: In Zustand Hand swathes of patchwork textiles – repurposed clothes, embroideries, hand-woven and plant-dyed fabrics – are sewn together to form a tent-like ephemeral structure. The floating assemblage creates a hybridized environment situated somewhere between temporary architecture, ancient shelters, and hand-made sculpture. The titular German word ‘Zustand’ which translates into ‘state’ or ‘condition’ not only alludes to the work’s tensile equilibrium but also to the grounding meditations encountered during the artist’s performance using sound and mnemonics. Reto Pulfer’s practice mirrors an artist’s garden where natural forces are at once familiar yet steer the audience towards discovery and mapping of the uncharted.

Reto Pulfer (born 1981 in Bern) is a self-taught artist who creates immersive installations made from fabric that incorporate painting, sculpture, fictional writing, plants, natural dye, weavings, soundscapes, and performance. Pulfer lives and works in the Uckermark region of Germany.

Josef Staub (1931-2006) was a Swiss sculptor, plastic artist and painter. His work includes square and environmental design, art in architecture, chrome and iron sculptures, sculptures, object art, paintings, drawings and collages.

Josef Staub grew up in Baar (Switzerland). Trained as a bricklayer and construction manager. He was primarily self-taught in his artistic training. He has been working as a painter since 1950. He had his first exhibition in Zug in 1956. He received a federal art scholarship in 1957 and 1959, and a scholarship from the Kiefer-Hablitzel Foundation in 1958. He married in 1957 and moved to Dietikon. He had his first exhibition in Zurich at the Galerie Palette in 1959. He won an award at the exhibition of young European paintings in Savona (l) in 1961. He turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s. After experimenting with aluminum and concrete, Staub focused primarily on steel. He took part in sculpture exhibitions at home and abroad. He completed various commissions and competitions for art in buildings in the cantons of Zurich, Zug, Aargau, Solothurn and St. Gallen. He spent long periods studying in Spain, France, Italy and the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975 he received a scholarship from the Canton of Zurich.

Josef Staub Sculpture / Lange + Pult at Art Cologne 2024. November 8, 2024.

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Charles Ross: Spectrum 14 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is an exhibition in the PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. Spectrum 14 is a calibrated array of prisms that cast a dazzling display of luminous color across the Museum’s rotunda. Bands of spectral light traverse the space in relation to the sun, which follow a slightly different arc through the sky every day. Over time, Ross’s work changes in response to Earth’s rotational orbit, connecting us to the premodern experience of astronomical observation and calculation that defined cycles of days, seasons, and rituals. This project was commissioned for PST ART as part of the exhibition Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. This is the second “Rotunda Commission,” a series of art installations inspired by the Getty Museum’s collection, architecture, and site. The exhibition runs until September 13, 2026.

Charles Ross: Spectrum 14 / Getty Center, Los Angeles. October 13, 2024.

Charles Ross is an American contemporary artist born in 1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is renowned for his innovative work that explores natural light, time, and planetary motion, blending art with scientific concepts. His practice spans multiple mediums, including large-scale prism and solar spectrum installations, “solar burns” created by focusing sunlight through lenses, dynamic paintings made with dynamite and powdered pigment, and his monumental earthwork, Star Axis, a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico that he has been constructing since conceiving it in 1971.

Ross emerged in the mid-1960s during the rise of minimalism and is considered a pioneer of “prism art”—a niche within that movement—as well as a key figure in the land art movement. His work often incorporates geometry, seriality, and refined forms to reveal optical, astronomical, and perceptual phenomena, reflecting his background in mathematics (he earned a BA from UC Berkeley in 1960) and sculpture (MA from UC Berkeley in 1962). Notable projects include the Dwan Light Sanctuary (1996), a collaboration with Virginia Dwan featuring prisms that project moving solar spectra, and Sunlight Convergence/Solar Burn: The Equinoctial Year (1971–1972), a series of 366 solar-burned planks documenting a year of sunlight.

His career began in New York, where he was part of the influential artist cooperative at 80 Wooster Street, contributing to the development of SoHo as an art hub. Ross has exhibited at prestigious venues like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and his works are held in collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2011, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Today, he splits his time between SoHo, Manhattan, and New Mexico, where he continues to work on Star Axis, nearing completion after over five decades.