Canadian artist Erin Shirreff (b. 1975) produces photography, sculpture, and video. Across all media, her work is fundamentally image-based, and her practice is rooted in the studio and in the process: material translations from two to three dimensions, from analog to digital, and vice versa. Returning to Basel, after her celebrated 2016 solo show at Kunsthalle Basel, Shirreff presents in Table Muse a collection of recent works that at first sight seem quite disparate but in fact speak the same language, are of equal monumentality, and share an auratic, durational quality. It is an interrelated body of work that explores the artist’s curiosity about different modes of attention and what happens within the uncertain moments of an aesthetic encounter. For the trained sculptor, scanning, layering, and remixing are part of her wide practice, manifesting in disassociating new images and spacious installations.

For Shirreff, galleries and museums are some of the rare spaces that allow us to think without a script. With her work, she asks visitors to look, and look again. She explains, “I use art as subject matter because art is an object of contemplation, and in the end, that—contemplation, thinking through looking—is what I’m most curious about.”

Erin Shirreff (b.1975) lives and works in Montreal, CA. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA (2025); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA (2024); the Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, USA (2021–22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, USA (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York, USA (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (2015). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut, among others.

Header image: Exhibition view, Erin Shirreff, Table Muse, von Bartha, Basel, 2025