Diogo Pinto at der TANK / Basel

Artist(s): Diogo Pinto
Curator: Roman Kurzmeyer
Art space: der TANK
Address: FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland Basel Academy of Art and Design Institute Art Gender Nature Freilager-Platz 1, Postfach 4002 Basel
Duration: 06/12/2024 - 15/12/2024
Credits: Finn Curry

Exhibition projects by artist and curator Diogo Pinto, who studied Fine Arts in the master’s program at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW from 2019 to 2021, are case studies that enable him as an artist to pursue questions that art criticism and art studies usually leave unanswered or do not even ask in the first place. These are questions about the real production conditions of art, which are decisive for the identity of an artwork. Diogo Pinto is a meticulously researching artist who is interested in micro-historical phenomena and the associated forms of artistic expression, which he takes up in his own painting and develops in exhibitions. His project for der TANK deals with the interplay between business and culture in Basel during the heyday of the chemical industry in the second half of the 20th century, in particular the resulting impulses for design and art as well as the effects on local artists and their position in urban society. In addition to new works by Diogo Pinto, which can be understood as a group of works like a cartographic representation of the mental and public space of Basel, the exhibition at der TANK also includes a series of six advertising brochures designed by Gérard Ifert, a student of the graphic artist Armin Hofmann, for the chemical company J. R. Geigy in 1952, as well as the painting Nachtfalter (1944–1945) by Peter Birkhäuser. 

The exhibition by Diogo Pinto is the fourteenth project of a series of exhibitions initiated in 2017 that presents commissions of former students and lecturers of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.