LISTE BASEL 2026

Amid soft greens, luminous reds, and deep blacks, Sarah Bogner reveals her outstanding ability to lend seminal weight to the charm of the airy and light. Her paintings exert an irresistible attraction: within the anticipation of the stories unfolding around her enigmatic pink horse-like figures at play, or in the sheer presence of her magnificently floating bouquets. These arrangements of otherwise conventional flowers possess an almost timeless quality. Bogner frees them from the constraints of the vase, from gravity itself, and, in doing so, from any trace of decorative naïveté.
These palpable tensions of her work arises from the absence of cynical naturalism. Their perceptible lightness stems from Bogner’s equally restrained engagement with melancholy, even though her motifs, namely still lifes and scenes of innocent play, ultimately function as tragicomic emblems of transience and decay.
Following her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2025, the curious occurrences and pictorial dramas found in Henri Matisse’s paintings inspired a new variation on the longstanding game of her pink creatures, transforming their familiar play into a different kind of dance. (Henri Matisse, Le Luxe 1 & 2; Sarah Bogner, Bouquet Paradies grüner Hund). Yet the resonance of French Modernism within Bogner’s work extends beyond animated figures and emphatic brushstrokes. It also recalls the lush peonies of Édouard Manet, which Bogner seems to immortalize in the opulently unfolding leaves of an ordinary white cabbage. (Sarah Bogner, Kohl of Life).
Within Bogner’s oeuvre, these new works represent a significant departure into new territories of composition and, above all, colour. While the paintings depict sharply observed scenes and naturalistic objects, their chromatic language emerges from unexpected contrasts: distinctive greens in the likes of mysterious minerals formed within ancient mountain ranges meet reds one might imagine in the scales of a tropical serpent. Together they pulse across the canvas with remarkable intensity.
The captivating combination of powdery green and a hypnotising signal red evokes those shimmering afterimages that unfold behind closed eyelids after gazing too long into the sun.

Emma Rüther