Liste Art Fair Basel 2025
JUBG presents Georg Gatsas
June 2025
Installation Views
Works
Cat, 2006/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Ira / Poetry at Gunpoint, 2006/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Stephonik Youth, 2006/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 135 x 90 cm, Edition of 2/5 + 2 AP
Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer at Glass House, 2006/2025, C-Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer, 2006/2025, C-Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Rita Ackermann, 2007/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 135 x 90 cm, Edition of 5/5 + 2 AP
Lorenzo Senni, 2019/2025, C-Print, 90 x 60 cm, Edition of 2/5 + 2 AP
Caterina Barbieri, 2019/2025, C-Print, 90 x 60 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Graffiti (albedo), 2022/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Graffiti (finestro), 2022/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Graffiti (Gesù / Via San Vitale), 2022/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Graffiti (Via San Vitale), 2022/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
Graffiti (materasso / Via Paradiso), 2022/2025, Gelatin Silver Print, 60 x 40 cm, Edition of 1/5 + 2 AP
The mugshot—the photographic portrait of an individual arrested on suspicion of breaking the law—emerged in the aftermath of the 1871 Paris Commune. This progressive, independent, anti-religious utopia established by the Communards terrified the French government, who killed thousands in their harsh and bloody response. 40,000 were arrested, and La Préfecture de Police de Paris hired a photographer to document the faces of these revolutionaries, establishing a permanent record of disobedience. Within a decade, this photographic capture was standardized and adopted internationally. It remains a fundamental police practice today.
There’s a certain type of mugshot—Jane Fonda in Cleveland, David Bowie in Rochester, Rosa Parks in Montgomery—in which the subject projects a negation, a gravity that says “You think you have caught me but you are wrong.” This is the gravity found in the work of Georg Gatsas.
Gatsas has spent his life unveiling the connections that bind artists across genre, generation, and identity. His photographs are documents of rules broken: small ones like vandalism and trespass, big ones like conspiracy and unlawful assembly. Why are there so many laws against gathering, against sharing? Gatsas guides us to the margins where this unrest plays out. The decayed concrete, rust stains and bad air that backdrop his portraits speak to the continued selection of wrong paths, of subjects who turn away from complacency and comfort. Who disobey. They can appear tired, sun-starved, or worn, but never defeated, never captured.
For the artists seen in these photographs—Rita Ackermann, Lorenzo Senni, Breyer P-Orridge—this means negation, this means hard choices, this means precariousness. For Gatsas too; his part in this struggle lends a sense of understanding and camaraderie to the pictures. It also gives Gatsas clarity around such choices. He knows the boundlessness of taking this path, that it’s not limited to certain strains of creativity, or fixed in a specific era or city. He demonstrates that the negation of Ira Cohen (born 1935) is the negation of Caterina Barbieri (born 1990). That independence is just as possible in Johannesburg and Athens as it is in Berlin or New York. That a painter or a DJ or a poet or a drummer is able to stake their resistance. And that this choice is a serious one, but doesn’t make it dour or penitent. The gleeful tangle of Lady Jaye Breyer and Genesis P-Orridge declares the unbounded space for warmth and connection held within this negation. The wild freedom of lawlessness.
The presentation of Gatsas’s work at Liste coincides with the announcement of The Process, the third monograph by Georg Gatsas, to be released in the autumn of 2025. The Process was Georg’s first major series, establishing the concerns and dedication that have defined his decades-long career. The Process is the first book issued by light-years, the independent label founded by Caterina Barbieri in 2021. Light-years is known best for densely-crafted, labyrinthine compositions, and The Process is no exception. Alongside the large format reproductions of photographs, the book presents a vast collection of record covers, garments, correspondence, and ephemera from Georg’s personal archive.
One of the earliest photos seen in The Process is a live shot of His Hero is Gone, taken by a teenaged Gatsas in 1997. The Tennessee-based hardcore band had just released their LP Monument to Thieves, which opens with the song “Like Weeds.” The first half of the song is pure atmosphere: slow growl, naked guitar notes, empty space. This mood is broken by a quick slaughterhouse blow of sound; a force that, once it emerges, is incapable of subsiding. In just four lines the song articulates the brutal, broken-concrete path offered by priests and politicians, bosses and banks. Once defined, this path is utterly rejected by the band in both sound and lyric. It mirrors the immediate, unblinking force of Gatsas’s work: the unmitigated refusal embedded in the clear acknowledgment of the offerings, the control, and the isolation being refused. As promised by His Hero is Gone in the closing words of the song: “Like weeds we will grow/grow.”
Ethan Swan, May 2025