ART BASEL

ANDY PIEREN

// Andy is dedicated to improving the health of people by day, and a passionate photographer in his spare time. He loves all kinds of photography, preferring not to be pigeonholed into a particular category. One of the things that are most enjoyable to him is watching and documenting people interact with art. And so he has shared with us a set of images from the Art Basel.

Andy says, “I feel like an ambitious photographer in my leisure time, have been doing this for the past 50 years, but really consciously doing it for the past 8 years. I do not want to fixate myself on one genre. I really love reportage, street, portraits, but I also love the human interaction with arts. One of my goals would be to get opportunities to photograph musicians on stage during live concerts or in theaters with dancers and actors.”

“Art is a mode of truth production.”

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

What draws you to art?

“With art I am often amazed by the endless creativity of humans. Also, I find the emotional responses with art pieces in me and in others intriguing, such as happiness, joy, anger and more. I find the surprises that go with some creations touching me deeply. I do respect very often the thoughts and the creation process behind pieces of art. By watching others or creating my own art, mainly photography, there are many moments of happiness, intellectual challenges, and freedom of creativity that come along with it.”

What do you like best about this photographic project?

“None of the pics were staged. The photos are works of art from me as an observer taking a split second about an observer of art. Often these kind of photos leave stories untold, what I like to express with my kind of photography.”

Art Basel is a globally known and prestigious art fair for contemporary art. Created in the 1970s by Basel gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt, this international art fair already had 16,000 visitors in its beginnings, a number now multiplied by much. From the 1980s onward it also became a venue for thematic art photography exhibitions. An art film theme was added in the 1990s. In the 2000s it expanded its operations to Miami, USA, and a decade later to Hong Kong. Their online platform connects artists and viewers and collectors, nowadays with stories and a podcast. It has gone with the times and created online viewing rooms as well so that now we can visit galleries from the comfort of our devices on specific dates.

Andy loves to photograph the human interaction with arts. He had a chance to do so in some of the exhibitions of previous Art Basel events. “Often I find synchronicity between the movements, postures of the observers and the content of the piece,” he explains. “It may change to another open story. Art is created for humans, so why not capture that moment when the encounter happens? It extends the thought of the artist and hopefully it becomes another work of art. It often creates a dialog between the creation and the observers. Photography allows me to make visible what the observer doesn’t see.”

Click on the photos to see a larger version and the name of the artist whose works you see in the photos. Some images may be cropped for layout.