Ortuzar is pleased to present a selection of paintings and sculptures by Lynda Benglis, Matt Connors, Donna Huddleston, Suzanne Jackson, Akinsanya Kambon, Joan Semmel, Sylvia Sleigh and Takako Yamaguchi, among others, for Art Basel Paris 2025. Spanning from the mid-twentieth century to the present, the presentation foregrounds works that explore tensions between figure and ground, women and landscape, abstraction and representation—dialogues that run throughout these artists’ practices and across generations.

Reclining female figures form a central motif in works by Sylvia Sleigh, Joan Semmel and Takako Yamaguchi. While Sleigh paints a classic nude portrait of her friend Eleanor Antin on a velvet blue couch, in Through the Object's Eye (1975), Semmel portrays the female erotic experience from her point of view. By depicting her body from her own vantage point—looking down at herself—Semmel disrupted the conventional dynamics of figurative painting and its spectators. In Victoria & Whiskey (1995), part of Yamaguchi’s celebrated Smoking Women series, the artist frames a languid protagonist and her cat against a patterned metal-leaf backdrop. Drawing on the visual pleasures of Art Nouveau ornamentation, her flat, illustrative style emphasizes surface and pleasure.

Donna Huddleston’s Sylvia (2024) introduces another spectral figure: a blue nude who recurs throughout the artist’s canvases. Drawing on her background in film and theater, Huddleston stages the painted scene with a director’s eye for posture, set and scenario. Though said by the artist to be loosely based on American film star Gena Rowlands, the figure evokes less a portrait than a cinematic memory, hovering between image and recollection.

Abstraction appears in dialogue with these figural works through works by Lynda Benglis, Matt Connors and Suzanne Jackson. Benglis’s Bravo (1973-74), one of her iconic knot sculptures, begins with a tube of wire mesh, cotton bunting and gesso looped and tied into a taut configuration. While rooted in minimalism’s interest in material and form, these works loosen its rigid structures, embracing organic curves and energy instead. Connors contributes a new small-scale painting that advances his investigations into abstraction as a mode of translation, fragmenting and accumulating images from the world around him into shifting constellations of color, perspective and scale. Jackson’s VEIN (2022) expands her series of “environmental abstractions”—paintings that spill off the wall and activate the surrounding space—composed of acrylic gel medium, wicker, netting, string and other found materials

This presentation also features figurative glazed ceramic sculptures by Akinsanya Kambon, an artist whose work illuminates African histories, spiritual traditions and narratives of resistance. His vessels depict figures from African cosmologies, slave revolts and revolutionary movements, focusing on underrepresented or erased histories. To create these works, Kambon employs a Western adaptation of the Japanese raku technique, a volatile process in which glazed bisqueware is heated and rapidly cooled, and the variables of heat, smoke and timing produce spontaneous and unique surface effects.