Jun 10, 2024
Jürgen Drescher at Basel Social Club - Art Basel 2024
Jürgen Drescher - Kleines Dromedar (am Bein der Mutter lehnend), 2023
Basel Social Club returns June 9–16, 2024, for its third edition in a new location and new format: a week-long event in the open air on farmland fields behind the residential neighborhood of Bruderholz, extending across approximately 50 hectares of land into Baselland – from the city border to the edge of the forest.
Jürgen Drescher has always addressed the vicious circle of overpopulation and our exploitation of resources – and, with that, the absurdly excessive urge of the human species to produce, consume and reproduce. Provocations highlight media anachronisms through the creation of realistic animal sculptures as aluminum cast, which are essentially hyperbolic sculptural metaphors.
Generating empathy with animals – which we are too – that we have, to a great extent, either extinguished or industrialized. Only 3% of terrestrial vertebrates today live in the wild. The rest are 65% farm animals and 32% humans. In this sense, the Basel Social Club on the terrain of Basel-Land offers the perfect venue for Jürgen Drescher’s sculpture Kleines Dromedar.
Is it about the meaning ‘mother animal’? There is a spontaneous association of injury or destruction. The young leans on an illusion of partial stability, but the mother as a whole has already been slaughtered. Or is there supposed to be a living, stable VERTICAL axis to help the little one stand on his own? Does the work unconsciously show the ambivalent view of the early mother figure that Melanie Klein describes? Good-helping-nurturing-lov- ing vs. evil-not-present-denying and torn-apart and eaten-by-the-infant.
