BASEL.- Art Basel’s highly anticipated 2025 edition will bring together 290 leading galleries from 42 countries and territories, presenting an extraordinary array of works across all media—from painting and sculpture to photography and digital art. The show will feature an unparalleled lineup of artists, spanning early-twentieth-century Modern pioneers to groundbreaking contemporary talent. As the leading premier event of the global art market, Art Basel in Basel remains the ultimate destination for discovery and connection. Beyond outstanding presentations in its Galleries, Premiere, Feature, Statements, and Edition sectors, the show will once again push boundaries with 67 monumental works and performances in Unlimited, curated by Giovanni Carmine, Director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Meanwhile, the Kabinett sector will return to the Basel show, offering 22 curated highlights within exhibitors’ main booths—further elevating the depth and dialogue of the fair.

A must-see highlight at this year’s show, renowned artist Katharina Grosse will take over the Messeplatz and the surrounding structures, transforming the space into a vivid chromatic environment. Curated by Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large, Architecture and Site-Specific Projects at Serpentine, London, this compelling piece will stand out as a highlight of Art Basel 2025, underscoring the fair’s dedication to showcasing art in powerful and memorable environments.

The fair’s acclaimed Parcours sector will return in 2025, curated for the second consecutive year by Stefanie Hessler, Director of New York’s Swiss Institute (SI). The 2025 edition of Parcours will center on the theme of Second Nature, bringing together artists and works that explore the increasingly blurred boundaries between nature and artifice. This thoughtfully curated public art exhibition will stretch along Clarastrasse towards the Rhine, including the former Hotel Merian on the riverbank of the Rhine, transforming the urban environment into a captivating journey of artistic discovery. A dedicated satellite Parcours work at Münsterplatz will forge a dynamic link between Greater Basel, its esteemed institutions, and Art Basel’s premises.

The fair’s remarkable diversity of artistic perspectives will be complemented by vibrant events and activities across the city, engaging Basel’s most renowned cultural institutions. This dynamic program will highlight the city’s distinctive appeal, underscoring the profound impact Art Basel has on its hometown and reinforcing Basel’s position as a unique cultural destination.

Art Basel this year launched the Art Basel Awards - the first awards program of their kind in the industry celebrating trailblazing artists, curators, museums, patrons, cross-disciplinary creators, and cultural innovators shaping the future of contemporary art presented in partnership with BOSS. In May, the Awards’ international jury of experts will award 36 medals to individuals and organizations worldwide, selected for their vanguard vision, skill, and transformative potential and influence. Following their announcement next month, this year’s 36 Medalists will be honored at a premier reception in June during Art Basel in Basel. Medalists will also headline the first Art Basel Awards Summit convening the most influential voices in the global art world, set to take place at Messe Basel on Friday, June 20, and freely accessible to the public. Further details on the Art Basel Awards Summit, which will be supported by the Canton of Basel-Stadt, will be released in the coming weeks.

Art Basel launched The Art Basel Shop during Art Basel in Basel last year, and it returns in 2025 with a curated selection of bespoke lifestyle products that celebrate the contemporary art world. The shop features exclusive and limited-edition art, design, and fashion, available to fair visitors and the public for a limited time. This marks a continued expansion of Art Basel’s venture into product design and retail, further enhancing its world-class platform and deepening its engagement with the global community of art professionals and enthusiasts.

Maike Cruse, Director of Art Basel in Basel, said: “The 2025 edition of Art Basel will showcase not only the extraordinary works within our Galleries, Premiere, Feature, and Statements sectors, but also a dynamic public art program that makes this fair truly unique. Katharina Grosse’s bold transformation of Messeplatz will create a vivid, immersive experience. Meanwhile in Parcours, art will spill out into the urban environment, engaging with the city in a profound and evocative way. With the Art Basel Awards Summit, we’re expanding the dialogue around innovation, fostering global connections, and honoring those whose work is redefining the art world. This is Art Basel’s commitment to pushing boundaries, not only within the fair but across the city and the cultural landscape.”

Messeplatz

Renowned artist Katharina Grosse will take over the Messeplatz and the surrounding structures with her signature spray gun, transforming the space into a vivid chromatic and shifting environment. Curated by Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large for Architecture and Site-Specific Projects at Serpentine, London, this thought-provoking work will be one of the standout features of the fair, reflecting a dynamic dialogue between color, architecture, and public space.

Natalia Grabowska, Curator at Large for Architecture and Site-Specific Projects at Serpentine, London, explains: “For this year’s Messeplatz Project, Katharina Grosse will use the urban surfaces and existing architectural structures to transform the familiar square. Painting at scale and speed, she will disrupt this space of everyday passage and conviviality, using color to momentarily shift our experience of reality.
Unconstrained by the built environment, Grosse perceives painting as an ally of architecture, enabling her to create states of disorder, instability, and uncertainty. Her bold large-scale works propose a direct bodily experience, jolting the viewer towards a new understanding of our relationship to place and to each other.”

Katharina Grosse adds: “I want to paint the world. I swing my gun and everything it comes into contact with changes color. Color becomes anarchic. It allows me to fight categorizations. It can appear everywhere and pass over borders to turn reality into something entirely liquid. I want to show that possibilities are capable of interpenetrating each other everywhere.”

Unlimited

Art Basel’s unique sector for large-scale projects, Unlimited provides exhibitors the opportunity to present monumental installations, colossal sculptures, boundless wall paintings, comprehensive photo series, and expansive video projections. Unlimited will be curated for the fifth time by Giovanni Carmine, Director of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.

Highlights from Unlimited include:

• Andrea Büttner’s Shame Punishments (2022-2025), an extension of her ongoing exploration of shame and visual culture, expanded in scale for this occasion presented by Hollybush Gardens, David Kordansky Gallery, Jan Mot, and Galerie Tschudi.

• Caroline Achaintre presents a new textile piece, one of her largest works to date, which she describes as a persona, monster, or character. The work titled Gobbler (2025) will be presented by Art : Concept and von Bartha. Interpreted as a supersized biomorphic mask, the installation highlights Achaintre’s signature ghostly, mystical, and animalistic qualities.

• Cosima von Bonin presents a series of six new Daffy Duck motifs on black velvet, depicting the character’s struggle against an all-consuming canvas. Initially humorous, the work—shown by Gaga, Galerie Neu, and Petzel—reveals deeper themes of exhaustion, performance, and existential tension.

• Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ 'Untitled' (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) presented by Hauser & Wirth offers fleeting moments of joy, desire, and courageous exhibitionism while encapsulating his key aesthetic and political concerns. Once a day, a go-go dancer in a silver lamé bathing suit ascends a light blue platform, dances for five minutes to the music of his choosing, then disappears.

• Martin Kippenberger’s METRO-Net World Connection series envisioned a global subway system through fake entrances and ventilation shafts. METRO-Net Transportabler U-Bahn Eingang [METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance] (1997) presented by Gagosian, exemplifies this concept, featuring a stairway leading to a locked gate—an illusion of access denied.

• Atelier Van Lieshout will present The Voyage – A March to Utopia (2025), a large-scale installation that traces humanity’s pursuit of happiness and freedom, juxtaposing utopia and dystopia through a surreal procession of interconnected objects, symbolizing the cycle of life. The installation has been created over the past four years and will be completed in 2025 and presented by Galerie Krinzinger and OMR, in collaboration with Galerie Jousse Entreprise and Galerie Ron Mandos.

• Mira Schor’s Sexual Pleasure (1998) is a key manifesto in her career and the most ambitious of her word paintings series. This multi-panel oil painting, part of a six-year exploration of Scrabble and crossword-inspired installations will be presented by Marcelle Alix, in collaboration with Lyles & King.

• The Cairo-based dance collective nasa4nasa showcases Sham3dan (Candelabra) (2024), a 28- minute performance premiering internationally presented by Gypsum. Drawing from a 19th- century belly dance tradition, the piece explores labor, control, and physical limits as dancers balance ornamented brass candelabras on their heads, invoking the ghosts of past performers.

Giovanni Carmine, Curator of Unlimited says: "It is this simultaneity—of poetry and politics, of history and the present, of hope and critique—that defines Unlimited. Here, there is no teaching, but experiencing. Not closed, but open. It is not the size of the works that makes Unlimited special, but the way it stimulates the possibility to stretch our thinking."

Art Basel’s Unlimited Night will return on Thursday, June 19, providing visitors the chance to experience the sector alongside special performances during extended opening hours.

Parcours

Curated for the second time by Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute (SI) in New York, Art Basel's acclaimed Parcours sector will return in 2025, centered on the theme Second Nature, exploring the increasingly blurred lines between nature and artifice. This thoughtfully curated public art exhibition will stretch along Clarastrasse towards the Rhine, including the Merian, transforming the urban environment into an immersive journey of artistic discovery. Many of the site-specific and newly produced works will delve into questions of what is perceived as natural, with several artists examining apparently unchangeable, repeating patterns in incessantly proliferating loops of images and information. Others explore the supernatural, algorithmically powered narratives shaping both nature and culture, and sensory perceptions beyond the visual. Additionally, a dedicated satellite Parcours work at Münsterplatz will feature an expansive installation by Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin G David Soin Tappeser).

Measuring 80 meters in length, the textile installation titled namak halal / namak haram (2025) references the Inland Customs Line, a 2,500-mile-long plant hedge installed by the British during the colonial era in India to intercept smugglers and enforce salt taxation. The cotton textiles are imprinted with natural dyes from plants that composed the original hedge—one side with an orderly grid of botanical drawings, and the other with disorderly termite motifs. The installation addresses the multiple layers of nature and its exploitation—in salt extraction and its use as a barrier—whereas the double-sided nature of the hedge is highlighted as both architecture of colonial rule and site of resistance. namak halal / namak haram was originally commissioned by Somerset House Trust, London, and is now being presented as part of Art Basel Parcours in Basel.

• Selma Selman’s commemorative installation of painted salvaged car hoods, accompanied by a smell and soundscape, presented by ChertLüdde and acb inside the St. Clara Church.

• Sturtevant’s monumental video of a frantically running dog, which repeats every nine seconds, installed in the underpass beneath the Merian, presented by Thaddaeus Ropac.

• Marianna Simnett’s sculptures inspired by concession stands featuring videos of a vendor singing melancholically to herself while squirting condiments on hot dogs in simultaneously tactile and abject imagery, presented by Société.

• Shahryar Nashat’s fiberglass installation continuously pumping fluid through an array reminiscent of a fragmented body in a reflection on the symbolism of life and death, presented by Sylvia Kouvali.

• Thomas Bayrle’s functional shop inside the Manor department store selling transparent raincoats adorned with the artist’s signature style of serialized, endlessly repeating “superforms,” presented by neugerriemschneider.

• Yu Ji’s site-responsive intervention, featuring sculptures inspired by organic forms and made from cement, coral, and wax, which is activated daily with offerings of freshly baked bread created by the artist at the Rheinfelderhof Hotel, presented by Sadie Coles HQ and Kiang Malingue.

Stefanie Hessler, Curator of Parcours says: “Second Nature is a multivalent term that encompasses questions concerning nature and artificiality as well as deeply engrained habits, customs, and rituals. In this year’s multigenerational Parcours, the artists question what is perceived as natural, or common, in Basel’s everyday spaces, examining perceptions, attitudes, and desires across ecosystems, bodies, and technologies.”

Kabinett

The sector dedicated to curated and thematic presentations featured in a separate section within galleries’ main booths, Kabinett will present 22 projects for the second year.

Highlights from Kabinett include:

• Beijing Commune presents Hu Xiaoyuan’s solo project I Am Rooted, But I Flow (2025), showcasing her exploration of time, materiality, and existence through diverse mediums, including discarded remnants, fictional manuscripts, and light. The work reflects Hu’s focus on fragility and impermanence, weaving together layers of meaning.

• Galleria Franco Noero will present a new series of black paintings by Pier Paolo Calzolari, featuring works created using salt, a signature element of his exploration of materiality and light.

• Galerie 1900-2000 will present multiple artist exhibitions exploring the provocative history of appropriation art, tracing its evolution from Marcel Duchamp’s pioneering works to contemporary artists like Jonathan Monk and Sherrie Levine. The display examines how artists borrow, recontextualize, and transform existing images and objects, challenging authorship and redefining the boundaries of artistic originality.

• Herald St will present rare and unseen paintings by Alekos Fassianos, uncovering large-scale works that capture iconic subjects, alongside smaller, powerful pieces that evoke the mystical reverence of everyday life. These works, rich in symbolic motifs like doves, bees, and wheat, blend mythology with modernity, showcasing Fassianos’s unique fusion of vibrant color and dynamic movement.

• Annely Juda Fine Art will showcase works by the renowned Brazilian artist Lucia Nogueira (1950– 1998), whose multidisciplinary practice—spanning installation, sculpture, video, and drawing— explores the interplay of objects, space, and language.

• Nagel Draxler will showcase Martha Rosler’s iconic Diaper Pattern (1973), a powerful commentary on feminism, antiwar sentiment, and economic issues. Using stitched cloth diapers, Rosler exposes the racism and xenophobia in U.S. rhetoric while highlighting the politicization of domestic labor, often performed by women.