Art Basel | Unlimited
Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel
Curated by: Commissariat : Giovanni Carmine

Antenna Space | Jan Kaps | Loevenbruck present

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel
Stone triptych with snails, body fragments and sewing machine, 2025

Collaborating as a duo since 1997, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel have spent nearly three decades exploring and experimenting with an encyclopaedic range of industrial and craft techniques, tools, and materials. Through this singular approach, their practice continually interrogates the role of the artist—and, more broadly, humankind’s relationship to labour and production. In recent years, the duo has expanded this line of inquiry to evoke the complex interdependence between living beings and the constructed world, bringing together representations of flora, fauna, and inanimate objects in unexpected juxtapositions of species, realms, and registers.

For Art Basel Unlimited, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel present a triptych of pink marble sculptures, each hand-carved in their workshops in Brittany. Displayed as a group, the blocks of marble stand at human height, recalling megalithic arrangements or a hallucinated geological landscape.

Stone triptych with snails, body fragments and sewing machine acts as a surrealist and erotic meeting point between living creatures and machinery. Improbable scenes emerge from the carved pink marble: molluscs sit atop mammalian body parts, gliding over intestines, human torsos, and a piece of industrial-grade equipment. The sculpture creates an incongruous diorama, founded upon a key idea that permeates the duo’s recent works: a new hierarchy, challenging human exceptionalism and engaging with the ecological concerns of interspecies cohabitation and codependency.

Indeed, the unexpected proximity of disparate elements reveals a series of analogies: the tip of a mammalian nipple mirrors the peak of a snail’s shell; the pink, veiny texture of Rosa Aurora marble recalls human flesh; the rendering of intestines in stone conjure up images of coral or other prehistoric life forms. These parallels, as well as the use of a stone created over millennia from geological concretions of mineral sediments and organic matter, evoke the Aristotelian idea that all things are born of the same substance.

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