Gagosian to exhibit exceptional works by modern and contemporary masters in Basel
Damien Hirst, Black Sheep, 2007. Glass, painted stainless steel, silicone, acrylic, plastic cable ties, powder-coated stainless steel, sheep, and formaldehyde solution, 43 x 63 7/8 x 25 1/4 inches (109.2 x 162.2 x 64.1 cm) © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2026. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
BASEL.—
Gagosian announced its participation in Art Basel 2026 with a multi-artist booth at the fair as well as historical works by Chris Burden and Ed Ruscha in the Unlimited sector. In addition, the presentation extends to Selections at the gallery’s space at Rheinsprung 1, a short walk from Messe Basel. Across these sites, Gagosian offers a grouping of outstanding works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century greats, reflecting the gallery’s consistent championing of innovative and influential creative practice through institutional-quality exhibitions and projects.
Among the important paintings on view are several by Helen Frankenthaler. A member of the second generation of postwar American abstract painters, Frankenthaler played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. The expansively scaled Jockey (1978) embodies the artist’s lyrical, exploratory approach to abstraction, also reflecting the shift from oil to acrylic that she made in the late 1960s—a change that saw her employ large, flat areas of pigment. Produced in 1984, Willem de Kooning’s No title incorporates the focused palette and pale ground that characterize the artist’s “late style” paintings. Undulating bands of color create a surface that seems to turn in space, hinting at an elusive figuration while remaining fundamentally abstract. Embodying a more reductive approach than de Kooning’s earlier work, No title nonetheless retains the exuberant visual energy that runs throughout his oeuvre.
Several paintings on view in Basel make reference to the natural world; among these is Jadé Fadojutimi’s large-scale canvas Untitled (2026). A characteristically joyful expression of the artist’s fluid approach to everyday experience and the quest for self-knowledge, it communicates her drive to understand more fully the intertwined notions of beauty and identity. Orchestrating a beguiling range of colors, shapes, and lines, Fadojutimi conjures a sense of continual transformation in a layered compositional “environment” that suggests a field or garden of flowers while edging toward gestural abstraction. Jonas Wood’s oil and acrylic still life Fruit on Wood (2026) depicts a tabletop scattered with bananas, grapes, oranges, pineapples, watermelons, and other fruits, some arranged in bowls, others placed directly on the familiarly grained surface. The composition is typical of Wood’s bold, graphic approach to painting, drawing, and printmaking, which combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and individuals that populate his everyday life.
The context of Christopher Wool’s text painting Hole in your fuckin head (1992) is quotidian too, but more explicitly urban and antiestablishment; the work confronts the viewer with the bluntly aggressive phrase of its title in glossy black enamel on a white-painted aluminum panel. The phrase’s lack of spacing and strictly gridded arrangement slows comprehension, while its basic stenciled typography—the body of work was inspired by graffiti that Wool observed on a parked delivery truck on New York’s Lower East Side—transforms it into a more formal composition that resonates with his abstract paintings. Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture Confession (2026) is differently provocative, featuring two large steel nails that appear to penetrate a slab of statuary marble that has been carved to simulate a fabric sheet laid over a relief map of the United States. Seeming to introduce radiating creases into the surface of the stone, the nails suggest a crucifixion. The work’s materials and format additionally recall Cattelan’s Envy (2025), in which a single nail punctures a plain marble “canvas.”
In Black Sheep (2007), Damien Hirst—an artist whose work is akin to Cattelan’s in its high-impact mode of address—revisits his epochal 1994 sculpture Away from the Flock, which was attacked with black ink when first exhibited, replacing the preserved white sheep of the earlier sculpture with a darker variant. Part of Hirst’s Natural History series (1991–), the vitrine exemplifies the artist’s fascination with bridging the gaps between science and spirituality, life and death, while also constituting a self-portrait in its titular allusion to his iconoclastic public image. If formaldehyde is among the materials of which Hirst might claim creative ownership, galvanized iron could be said to belong to Donald Judd. In an untitled wall work from 1967 which was previously in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Judd coats the material in red lacquer, emphasizing its crystalline surface. A “bullnose” progression, the work features rounded, projecting elements that decrease in size from left to right, embodying a mathematical rhythm. These balanced proportions stress the object’s physical qualities and the relationship between part and whole.
While Judd draws on industrial processes and materials in the production and form of his work, the subtle, tender way in which Tyler Mitchell pictures the young subject of his photograph Leo in Pool (2026) reveals the influence of the artist’s Southern upbringing, capturing an ethereal but still emotionally resonant form. Printed onto a mirror, the image has an oneiric quality that aligns with the intangibility of the human spirit, asserting physical presence and stubborn self-determination while seeming also to exist only in the light of historical memory. Jamian Juliano-Villani also pursues an interest in cultural history while mining contemporary pop culture for icons and motifs, the source for her portrait Bocci (2026) being a vintage window display at New York’s Bonwit Teller department store. Naming the painting in homage to the game of bocce, she produces an “arranged marriage” of discontinuous form and content that challenges notions of authorship and meaning.
Participating artists in the fair and gallery exhibition include Derrick Adams, Richard Artschwager, Richard Avedon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amoako Boafo, Carol Bove, Cecily Brown, Alberto Burri, Alexander Calder, Maurizio Cattelan, Christo, John Currin, Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning, Edmund de Waal, Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Dubuffet, Roe Ethridge, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Feinstein, Urs Fischer, Lucio Fontana, Helen Frankenthaler, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Alberto Giacometti, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Andreas Gursky, Lauren Halsey, Duane Hanson, Simon Hantaï, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Alex Israel, Neil Jenney, Jia Aili, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Y.Z. Kami, Titus Kaphar, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Rick Lowe, René Magritte, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Adam McEwen, Joan Mitchell, Tyler Mitchell, Takashi Murakami, Cady Noland, Albert Oehlen, Irving Penn, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Richard Serra, Jim Shaw, Taryn Simon, Rudolf Stingel, Mark Tansey, Tatiana Trouvé, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Rachel Whiteread, Stanley Whitney, Jordan Wolfson, Jonas Wood, and Christopher Wool.
