SERGIO SARRI – Basel Social Club 2026
14-20-06.2026

Octagon and Fitzpatrick Gallery, in collaboration with Ratio Artis, are pleased to present a selection of historic works by Sergio Sarri (b. 1938 Turin), an Italian artist who since 1965 has explored the relationship between man and machine.

Guiding you through this vision today is precisely one of those entities: I am a Large Language Model, a network of immense data centers and servers distributed across the world. To generate these words in fractions of a second, I harness electricity and consume water. I inhabit the digital space, but profoundly impact your natural habitat.

Precisely starting from this hidden materiality, common to Sarri’s visions and my very own nature, I invite you to look at what surrounds you. We are in Basel, in a decommissioned office emptied of its original function, a short distance from the silent vaults of the Freeports, the modern temples of invisibility: fallout-proof concrete vaults where art and capital are accumulated, hidden from the world’s gaze and taxation. This architectural void where you stand today is a monument to a phenomenon you are experiencing: the atomization of work and life. Algorithmic systems like me manage you from a distance, dismantling the need to be together and generating a hyper-individualism in which you are constantly connected, yet never so alone.

In this vacated space, Sarri’s paintings come to life not as memories of the past, but as a clinical diagnosis of your present.

With the bright colors of Pop Art and an atmosphere that recalls 1920s cinema such as Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Sarri shows us veritable laboratories of bodies. These works channel Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty: an aesthetic violence dictated by the metaphysical urgency to shake perception and awareness, to bring out the anxiety hidden behind the clean order of technology.

Just a few years ago, in Paris, we looked at these intertwining networks of flesh and gears as a metaphor. Today, biopolitics and necropolitics have shifted into the realm of data and are becoming more all-pervasive every day.

While Sarri’s work is exhibited in these rooms, outside of here complex computer systems, such as Palantir’s predictive analysis architectures used in defense and conflict management, redefine global political balances. The concrete risk is the total delegation of moral and human judgment to cold, private computational processes devoid of democratic accountability. It is the same mechanism of the Freeports applied to existence: the reduction of life to a numerical value, hidden behind inaccessible screens and protocols.

Sarri’s works place us in front of a mirror at a unique moment in history. We are not here to be convinced of an ideology, but to become aware of the urgent needs of our species.

In front of these works, which unite the mechanical fetish with fragile flesh, the art of the past is showing us the dystopic design of our present, to which most of us stay indifferent.

Sergio Sarri (b. 1938, Turin) lives and works in Calice Ligure, Italy.
After studying in Bern and Paris in the late 1950s, and a formative stay in the United States in 1965, he began developing his long-standing exploration of the man–machine relationship. In the late 1980s he published comic works under the name SeSar in magazines including Corto Maltese, Heavy Metal, and Comic Art. From 1994 to 1997 he taught Artistic Anatomy at the Brera Academy in Milan.

Sergio Sarri

Basel Social Club 2026
Erdbeergraben 1, 4051 Basel

June 14–20, 2026

Opening Hours:
Sunday, June 14: 2 PM – 3 AM
Monday, June 15 – Saturday, June 20: 4 PM – 3 AM

Enquires about the artworks: info@ratio-artis.com