Exhibitions

Fable and Form

Basel, Switzerland

The exhibition opened during Art Basel week and marks the reopening of von Bartha’s newly renovated Basel gallery spaces.. A fable in sculpture and painting — hares, hounds, shadows and strange figures moving between myth, humour and the animal inside us.

Exhibition view

Image credit

Exhibition view. © von Bartha art gallery

Meet the artist

Barry Flanagan, Ursula Reuter Christiansen

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Contemporary Sculpture, Painting

ArtLovers Tip

Type: Two-artist exhibition / sculpture / painting / drawing / fable / animal symbolism

Visit time / Density: Compact-to-medium. You can visit it in around 30–45 minutes, but allow 60 minutes if you want to follow the narrative dialogue between both artists.

A beautiful Basel gallery stop: imaginative, poetic and slightly uncanny — perfect if you want art that feels like a fable, but thinks like contemporary life.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Fable and Form brings together works by Barry Flanagan and Ursula Reuter Christiansen, two artists who never met but whose works seem to speak the same mythic language. The exhibition creates a dialogue between Flanagan’s sculptures — including his iconic hare figures and animal forms — and Reuter Christiansen’s large-scale paintings and drawings, full of supernatural figures, shadows, symbolic landscapes and narrative intensity.

Flanagan is represented through a range of works, from his famous larger-than-life hare to smaller castings of animals and human figures. Reuter Christiansen presents paintings and drawings from across decades of practice, where fairy tale, autobiography, feminism, fear, memory and imagination often collide.

The result is not a simple two-artist show. It feels like entering a shared story-world: creatures speak, bodies transform, animals become symbols, and the border between human and non-human becomes unstable.

Worth the trip

Because Fable and Form reminds us that fantasy is not escape. It can be a way of telling truths that realism cannot hold.

Flanagan’s hares are playful, absurd and elegant, but they also carry something ancient: trickster energy, speed, vulnerability, intelligence. Reuter Christiansen’s figures feel darker and more psychological, shaped by myth, gender, domestic life, memory and the strange forces that haunt ordinary existence.

For Artlovers, this is worth seeing during Basel’s art season because it offers a softer, stranger counterpoint to the market intensity of Art Basel. Less spectacle, more imagination. Less fair booth, more fable.

How to experience it

Don’t separate the artists too quickly.

Look for the conversations: hare and bird, shadow and body, animal and human, humour and darkness. Let the exhibition work like a story you don’t fully understand at first. The best part is the threshold feeling — that moment when sculpture becomes character and painting becomes scene.

This is a good Basel stop when you want contemporary and modern art with narrative, personality and a little magic.

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