FIREFLIES July 06 – August 25 2007Galerie Nicolas Krupp This is an exhibition of four young Basel-based artists one should keep an eye on. Its title evokes the fragile beauty of the very subtle, and it is with just this subtlety, and nominal effort, that the four’s works fill the gallery. In a narrow room, Kilian Rüthemann has heaped salt along the wall between two corners. Meeting the floor along an exact, straight line, the salt forms the shape of a neat ramp with crystalline shimmering surface structure – a gesture of intriguing lightness and accuracy, cheerfully mimicking Beuys’ canonical Fettecke (Fat Corner), 1963, Wolfgang Laib’s pollen or rice formations, and other Minimalist sculpture. Dagmar Heppner also playfully references Minimal and Conceptual art by framing full-page Artforum ads, after carefully cutting out information like gallery addresses and artists’ names to leave only the titles and dates of shows, as with Memento Mori and Deep Silence (both 2007), alongside white blanks. Karin Hueber has erected a constructivist sculpture from a mirror and two black-painted planks, loosely interlocked in a fragile balancing act and reflecting their surroundings, while Emil-Michael Klein’s hybrids blur the lines between painting and object, frame and picture plane. All the works interact beautifully with one another, exploring surface tensions as well as negative space. Eva Scharrer, Artforum Online