June 19 to 22, 2025, the 56th edition of Art Basel presents a redefinition of global artistic dialogue. With 289 top-tier galleries from 42 countries and territories, this year’s edition weaves a rich narrative across modern masterpieces and cutting-edge contemporary voices.
Anchoring the fair’s signature sectors – Galleries, Feature, Statements, and Edition are two curatorial powerhouses: Unlimited, returning with 67 monumental installations under the curatorship of Giovanni Carmine, and Kabinett, bringing 24 curated micro-exhibitions within the booths.
Art Basel Awards, a landmark celebration of creative pioneers across disciplines, from artists and curators to institutions and cultural catalysts. In partnership with BOSS, the awards will culminate in a public Awards Summit on June 20, convening a global braintrust of voices shaping the future of contemporary art. As Maike Cruse, Director of Art Basel in Basel, puts it, this year’s edition showcases a “vivid, immersive experience” that extends far beyond booth walls.
Painting as Spatial Performance: Katharina Grosse’s CHOIR
One of the most visually striking interventions this year is Grosse’s massive environmental painting titled CHOIR. With sweeping strokes of white and magenta spray paint, she collapses the boundary between painting and architecture, transforming Messeplatz into an all-encompassing spectacle.
Eschewing traditional brushwork, Grosse takes cues from Renaissance frescoes and theatrical staging, reasserting painting as an immersive, sensorial, ecological act. The result: a kinetic, spatial greenhouse of color, where spectators walk into the painting as an extension of her Berlin‑studio choreography.
Innovation + Sustainability: Alvaro Barrington with BMW iX5 Hydrogen
At the intersection of performance, sustainability, and design lies Simply, 2025, Alvaro Barrington’s Art Car built on BMW’s iX5 Hydrogen. Barrington’s vibrant chromatic palette is angiotated with nods to Hockney, Turner, and Matisse, wraps around hydrogen-powered technology, reframing the art car lineage in a climate-conscious era. This project symbolizes a cultural reimagining: vehicles as canvases, powered by clean energy, splashed with identity, activism, and color.
Reimagining the Fair: Premiere, Kabinett, Unlimited, Parcours
This year, Art Basel recalibrated its format with four defining platforms: Premiere, Kabinett, Unlimited, and Parcours, each offering a distinct experience rooted in artistic intentionality.
Premiere is perhaps the boldest shift. Aimed at showcasing work by mid-career artists engaged with global and ecological urgencies, the section allows galleries to spotlight up to three artists per booth. This democratized curatorial move stands out in an often mono-focused fair model.
Exhibitors such as Edel Assanti and Jacky Strenz presented emotionally resonant installations, including Lonnie Holley’s “Without Skin” and Lin May Saeed’s work, which addressed themes of vulnerability, memory, and interspecies harmony.
Kabinett delivers tightly curated highlights within main booths, micro-exhibitions within macro-commercial spaces, allowing galleries to present archival, conceptual, or lesser-known works in focused dialogues. With an impressive 67 large-scale installations, it continues its tradition of monumental spectacle. From immersive architectural interventions to performative hybrids, this platform foregrounds work that defies both constraints.
Meanwhile, Parcours, the fair’s city-spanning initiative, breathes life into the urban landscape. Set under the thematic lens of “Second Nature,” it disperses site-specific works throughout Basel’s historic and public spaces, reimagining how audiences encounter contemporary art.
Basel Art Week 2025: 10 Must-See Shows
Art Basel’s “10 Must-See Shows” spotlights exhibitions that ground the week’s buzz in deeper historical and conceptual roots.
At Hauser & Wirth, a solo retrospective on Meret Oppenheim revisits her surrealist ingenuity and fluid creative identity. Known for her fur-lined teacups and shapeshifting symbolism, Oppenheim’s work feels particularly relevant today in its resistance to rigid categories.
The Kunstmuseum Basel, a stunning survey of Medardo Rosso, reframes the Italian sculptor as a proto-modernist who sculpted with light and fragility. His wax and plaster figures like Sick Child and Bookmaker eschew permanence in favor of transience, influencing later giants like Brancusi and Giacometti. His delicate works remind viewers that monumentality can exist in vulnerability.
Basel Art Week 2025: 10 Best Booths
“10 Best Booths” feature, some of the strongest gallery presentations merged formal innovation with emotive power. Gallery Hyundai showcased Seung-taek Lee’s taut rope sculptures, materials binding books, bronze, and sickles in a meditation on tension and release.
At Lisson Gallery, Lee Ufan’s sand-infused meditations in the Unlimited sector offered a zen-like counterbalance to the surrounding visual cacophony.
Major names like White Cube, MASSIMODECARLO, and GRIMM displayed bold, cross-media experimentation, demonstrating that even as markets shift, ambition and risk are still rewarded. Notably, pre-VIP day sales saw a reported $13–17 million for David Hockney’s Mid-November Tunnel, reinforcing Basel’s enduring commercial gravity.
Basel Art Week 2025 is the quality of work and sensibility behind its staging. There’s a visible pivot away from spectacle for its own sake and toward thoughtful, often engaging with place, material, and identity.
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