12 things not to miss at Art Basel 2025

The art world is descending on Basel once again, and there's lots to see.

Alongside the presentations at the Messeplatz, Art Basel’s new Shop is a destination in itself, featuring a coveted limited edition of 100 porcelain Labubu by artist Kasing Lung, alongside exclusive drops including FC Basel’s artist-designed jersey, a Katharina Grosse capsule collection, Thomas Bayrle’s custom raincoat, a limited edition poster by Sasha Stiles, and rare prints by Daniel Arsham and Amoako Boafo.

Across the city, Jordan Wolfson challenges perception at Fondation Beyeler, while at Kunsthalle Basel, Lebanese-artist Dala Nasser traces the layered history of the Byzantine church of St. Christopher near Kabr Hiram in Qana. At Museum Tinguely, prepare to enter the surreal at Scream Machines, with a ghost train by Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez, created in an anarchic tribute to Jean Tinguely’s Crocrodome, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth. In a modest house at Bannwartweg 39, an ambitious group exhibition titled Maison Clearing, organised by C L E A R I N G (NYC & LA), brings together standout contemporary artists, including Raffaela Naldi Rossano, Nicole Coson, and Supawich Weesapen. For a more contemplative encounter, don’t miss Lenz Geerk’s solo show lautlos at Domushaus, presented by MASSIMODECARLO – a quiet meditation on colour, interiority, and emotional stillness from the Basel-born painter.

12 things to see at Art Basel

Joyce Joumaa – Galerie Eli Kerr, Art Basel Statements

Timed to blink, dim, or fade in and out, the lights in Lebanese-artist Joyce Joumaa mirror’s the rhythm of the power grids — or lack thereof — across cities in Lebanon, where entire cities rely on shared generator schedules, makeshift solar setups, and the collective knowledge of when and where electricity might flow next. She transforms repurposed circuit breaker boxes arranged across the walls, and flickers with light, sometimes dim. Inside each box, hazy inkjet prints on vellum paper flicker in front of LED lights and electronic timers, their soft glow showing intimate glimpses of life — apartment interiors, rooftops, street corners — in Tripoli and Beirut.

The urgency of Joumaa’s work lies in its ability to materialise the invisible: to show us how power shortages don’t just mean living without light, it also reshapes space and autonomy. The installation presented by Eli Kerr at Art Basel Statements builds on themes from Joumaa’s critically acclaimed presentation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and her inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale central exhibition.

Thomas Bayrle – neugerriemschneider, Art Basel Parcours

Known as one of Germany’s most influential pop artists, Thomas Bayrle’s 1960’s installation Coats will take place in the Manor department store in this year's Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director at Swiss Institute New York. Using tools like the Jacquard loom and Xerox copier, Bayrle’s six-decade practice has bridged graphic design, mass production, and political critique.

First conceived in 1967–68, Coats brings together transparent raincoats printed with his iconic repeating patterns, displayed against walls wrapped in his signature superform wallpaper.

The Parcours presentation is part of a triple showing of Bayrle’s work across Basel, including a major new tapestry and painting at neugerriemschneider’s Art Basel booth and Chairman (1972) at Basel Social Club. Bayrle’s Parcours project is a rare opportunity to experience one of his earliest experiments with form, fashion, and the politics of production, ahead of his upcoming retrospective at the Kunstahalle Frankfurt in 2026

Alia Farid – Sfeir-Semler, Art Basel Unlimited

Chisenhale, is an urgent, visually stunning act of cultural memory and resistance. Sixteen large-scale embroidered rugs, made in close collaboration with weavers in Samawa, Iraq, maps Palestinian-owned pharmacies, mosques, Arabic menus and signage in Puerto Rico. Drawn from photographs, interviews, and archival research, Farid makes visible the complex networks of migration between the Middle East and Latin America.

The rugs blend flat weaving techniques with region-specific chain stitching. Textiles become an object that document craftsmanship, and resist erasure; telling stories that institutions often fail to hold. The series of rugs are part of a long-term project tracing Arab and South Asian migration across the Caribbean and Latin America.

Known for her cross-disciplinary practice spanning film, sculpture, and textiles, Farid’s work insists on visibility and on remembering what some histories choose to forget, revealing how stories erased by the Global North endure in everyday rituals, architecture, and material culture.

Bijoux Solaires – Suns.works, Basel Social Club

Held, as it usually is, in an unlikely venue, this year's Basel Social Club takes place in a Swiss bank vault on one of the oldest streets in historic Grossbasel. In one of the vaults, Suns.works orchestrates a glittering, transhistorical assembly of artists who have worked with jewellery as a sculptural form. Bijoux Solaires brings together rare pieces by Cinzia Ruggeri, BillyBoy*Zoé Mohm, Meret Oppenheim, and Fausto Melotti, treating jewellery not as adornment but as narrative device, aesthetic experiment, and political metaphor. BillyBoy*’s Surreal Bijoux, once worn by Warhol and embedded with televisual and occult motifs, gleams alongside Ruggeri’s wearable and ornate earrings and necklaces, and Oppenheim’s mytho-feminist objects. By framing these works within the context of postmodernism, esotericism, and countercultural fashion, Suns.works proposes jewellery as a form of micro-sculpture: portable, subversive, and intimate.

Alekos Fassianos – Herald St., Art Basel

Alekos Fassianos’s figures are often likened to demigods, nearly always caught in the banal rituals of urban modernity, his characters wear suits, ride bicycles, and smoke cigarettes with the languor of epic heroes. His paintings bridge ancient iconography and contemporary life, as their flat bodies, delineated by bold lines and patterns, are stylised in a manner that it is clear to see his work from theatre sets and ceramics to furniture and poetry. Painted in vivid blues and bright reds, Fassianos is a seminal figure of postwar Greek modernism, and don't miss his paintings will be presented by Herald St in Art Basel, following the 2022 opening of the Alekos Fassianos Museum in Athens, housed in a building the artist designed, and the establishment of his estate, a significant international reassessment is underway.

Katharina Grosse: CHOIR – Messeplatz Project

It will be impossible to miss the sweeping fields of pink that overtake Basel’s Messeplatz this Art Basel. A bold new commission by Katharina Grosse transforms the spacious area at the heart of what’s known as Kleinbasel in little Basel into an chromatic colour field landscape. Titled CHOIR and curated by Natalia Grabowska, curator at Serpentine in London, the project continues Grosse’s rethinking of scale, gesture, and public space, extending her ambition to, in her own words, 'paint the world.' Her tool of choice is an industrial spray gun that floods colour pigment to architecture, ground, and atmosphere alike. 'Colour becomes anarchic,' she explains. 'It allows me to fight categorisations... to turn reality into something entirely liquid.'

In CHOIR, colour becomes not merely a surface treatment but a performative act: as Grosse’s work positions colour as a carrier of sensory and spiritual intensity. Unlike her artist predecessors such as Rothko, or af Klimt who explored expansive colour fields in their work, Grosse’s colour doesn’t transcend the world, rather it overruns it. Her pink pigment seeps into the architecture of the city, refusing containment and redefining the Messeplatz as a living, liquid space to encounter. In a time when public space is increasingly commodified and surveilled, Grosse’s chromatic intervention stages an abstract but pointed reimagination of the commons, becoming a porous threshold where pigment reclaims territory.

Alexandra Metcalf – Ginny on Frederick, Art Basel Statements

Elif Saydam – Franz Kaka, Art Basel Statements

Opulently decorated doors — two authentic Art Deco toilet stall doors and one illusionistic trompe-l’oeil painting — are central to Elif Saydam’s dissonant installation with Franz Kaka at Art Basel Statements. Drawing from the visual language of Persian miniature painting and referencing texts like Jami’s Haft Awrang, the doors are framed as an allegory of capitalism’s bait-and-switch logic. Aiming to collapse the ornamental with the conceptual, Saydam is interested in Lauren Berlant’s theory of 'cruel optimism' to unmask the toxic allure of the so-called 'good life.' The doors, poised between Camp and devotional craftsmanship, are portals to nowhere, evoking both absurdist game shows and the architecture of gendered categorisation. Exit signs flicker with iconographies, erotic fragments, and veiled citations. Saydam studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule and Montreal’s Concordia, an artistic education that has informed a practice that is as theoretically robust as it is formally seductive.

Arturo Kameya – GRIMM, Art Basel Statements

Peruvian artist, Arturo Kameya work revolves around the narratives and myths that comprise different versions of socio-political history of Peru, and at Statements, Kameya examines the use of physical education in 20th century Peru as a tool of assimilation and control, designed by elites to instill bourgeois values under the guise of national progress. The walls are painted in institutional greens and dusty ochres, evoking the worn surfaces of mid-century educational buildings. Objects, from bleachers, gym equipment, faded murals, form a kind of theatrical mise-en-scène that draws heavily on the visual codes of state-run schools across Peru: with weathered linoleum floors, peeling paint, didactic posters, and surveillance-like repetition of nationalist motifs.

In Kameya’s richly layered paintings, figures appear spectral, blurred at the edges or flattened into diagrammatic forms, and always on the verge of disappearing. Iconography drawn from personal and public archives sits alongside images of indigenous rituals and colonial allegories.

Evangeline Turner – a.SQUIRE, Liste

One of the most compelling emerging artists in London’s art scene, Evangeline Turner has quickly made a name for herself since graduating from the Slade just a few years ago. Her paintings, presented by a.SQUIRE at Liste, splice the English pictorial tradition with surreal domestic tableaux that bristle with quiet unease. Her canvases fracture space and time; in one painting, dismembered heads hang like pendulums from a door lock. Turner’s paintings call upon a lineage stretching from early 20th-century abstraction to post-Brexit psycho-geography. Referencing Mondrian-like compositional rigidity, her work plays with perspective and moral allegory. Turner’s paintings feel haunted by their own ancestry – entangled in post-imperial disillusionment, droll humour, and theological motifs. A musician as well as a painter, she plays in a rock band, a detail that echoes the performative flair in her work. Her fusion of dandyism, absurdity, and sincerity marks her as a singular voice in the resurgence of figurative oil painting.

Rhea Dillon – Soft Opening, Art Basel Statements

Corroded and fragile, Rhea Dillon’s sculptural installation at Art Basel Statements, presented by Soft Opening, confronts the lingering aftershocks of colonialism through disfigured glassware boxed in sapele mahogany vitrines. The vitrines don’t just frame the objects, they evoke the aesthetics of museum cabinets while destabilising their authority. The result is a powerful meditation on preservation, erasure, and resistance.

Dillon is an artist, poet, and writer and builds upon a language of absence in her practice. Her sculptural forms appear weathered yet beautifully preserved, revered as a semi-reliquary in their cabinets. They are part of a history that refuses to be silenced and settled.

Rooted in Black feminist thought and Caribbean material culture, Dillon’s practice abstracts diasporic histories into minimalist, affective forms. In her acclaimed 2023 solo exhibition at Tate Britain, An Alterable Terrain, she examined how the Black female body has been encoded, commodified, and staged throughout history. In Basel, that inquiry intensified, crystallising around materials loaded with colonial memory, from glass, soil, and molasses, each a residue of trade, extraction, and displacement. Dillon’s work invites a slow, embodied encounter with the objects before you. It’s a study in how violence inscribes itself into the material world, and how that material world might still speak back.

Sacha Kanah – Clima, Liste

In Until Soon, Italian artist Sacha Kanah has created seemingly transparent forms that you might miss on first glance. Looking more closely, these are a living mold from which all life originates. The quietly immersive installation of nearly transparent sculptures that seem to float, flicker, and dissolve into space. Some are suspended mid-air, tracing invisible currents with their weightless forms; others rest on scattered children's toys.

The sculptures are made from kelp membranes shaped by the chemical and physical properties of water. This ongoing project explores how organic matter might evolve and occupy space beyond traditional ideas of permanence.

Presented at the height of their growth process, these delicate forms blur the line between material and immaterial, echoing themes of transformation, memory, and the ephemeral nature of bodies in space. Originally shown at Clima in Milan (2024) for Kanah’s solo exhibition Sleep Starts, the work continues to evolve as a meditation on the origins and future of life itself.

Art Basel runs from 19 - 22 June 2025.