Art Basel has long been the fair at which the international art world gathers to encounter the finest works on the market, first-hand and in an unrivalled setting of quality, expertise, and influence. Taking place for more than fifty years in the heart of Basel, the 2026 flagship edition returns with a sharpened focus on what has long distinguished Basel: an unparalleled concentration of museum-quality works, the gathering of the world’s leading galleries, collectors, artists, and institutions, and the singular experience of seeing the most important art of the moment in one place, at one time.
Bringing together 290 galleries from 43 countries and territories, the 2026 edition presents an exceptional range of art spanning rare twentieth-century masterworks, postwar masterpieces, and some of the most closely watched practices of today. Across the halls, visitors will encounter outstanding solo presentations, historically important material, ambitious large-scale installations, and new works by the next generation of artists shaping the future of the field. Long recognized for its culture of connoisseurship, Basel remains a place where discerning collectors and institutions engage with art through close looking, expertise, and dialogue.
A major new initiative for 2026, Basel Exclusive, developed in close dialogue with galleries, reinforces Art Basel in Basel’s defining role as the foremost site of discovery and first encounter. Participating exhibitors will reserve a selection of major works to be unveiled publicly for the first time at the fair’s VIP opening.
Curated for the first time by Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1, Art Basel’s pioneering platform for large-scale artistic production will feature 59 projects presented by 66 international galleries, spanning installation, sculpture, performance, film, and immersive environments that extend beyond the traditional fair booth format.
Further highlights include the return of Parcours, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute (SI), with site-responsive works unfolding across the streets and historic spaces alongside Clarastrasse and up to the Rhine; Kabinett, offering tightly conceived presentations within exhibitors’ main booths; and the fair’s dedicated sectors Premiere, Feature, Statements, and Edition, each foregrounding distinctive positions across contemporary and historical practice.
The week will also see the unveiling of two major new site-specific commissions across Messeplatz and Münsterplatz, realized through the inaugural Art Basel Awards, alongside a dynamic program of conversations, events, and institutional exhibitions across the city.
Maike Cruse, Director, Art Basel in Basel, said:
‘From the launch of Basel Exclusive to Ruba Katrib’s debut as curator of Unlimited and the reveal of two new public commissions, this year’s edition brings together a series of highlights that reflect the breadth and distinctiveness of Art Basel. With Kabinett, Parcours, and a dynamic program of events and major exhibitions across the city, the fair offers multiple ways to encounter exceptional art with depth, focus, and immediacy.‘
Opening in close proximity to the 61st Venice Biennale, Art Basel extends the momentum of the global art calendar. A number of artists representing national pavilions, special presentations, and the Biennale’s main exhibition will also be visible during the show – including Lubaina Himid, Yto Barrada, Sung Tieu, Oriol Vilanova, Chiara Camoni, Dana Awartani, Isabel Nolan, Ei Arakawa-Nash, and others such as Abbas Akhavan, Otobong Nkanga, Wangechi Mutu, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Sara Flores, and Guadalupe Maravilla – underscoring Art Basel’s role as a key platform where the narratives introduced in Venice continue to unfold.
As the pre-eminent annual meeting point of the global art market, Art Basel 2026 once again offers an unrivalled platform for discovery, comparison, and acquisition.
Developed in close dialogue with galleries, Basel Exclusive is a new initiative conceived to strengthen one of Art Basel in Basel’s defining qualities: the opportunity to encounter outstanding works in person, and at the moment they are first brought to market.
Participating exhibitors from Art Basel’s main sector – Galleries – will reserve at least one major work, a focused selection of works, or in some cases an entire presentation from all pre-fair previews, online viewing rooms, and pre-sales activity, unveiling them publicly for the first time at the fair’s VIP opening on Tuesday, June 16, during the First Choice Preview hour. These works will be prominently presented within booths and clearly identified on-site as part of the initiative.
Launching with a first wave of participating leading international galleries, Basel Exclusive reasserts the primacy of the live fair moment at a time when market activity increasingly begins earlier and across multiple channels. By concentrating fresh material at the opening of the show, the initiative heightens anticipation, strengthens the value of first access, and creates renewed momentum for galleries, collectors, and institutions alike.
On the launch of Basel Exclusive, Vincenzo de Bellis, Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs, said:‘Basel has always set the benchmark for quality, ambition, and market leadership. Basel Exclusive builds on those strengths in a way that reflects how collecting habits and sales cycles are evolving today. By creating a concentrated moment of first access at the opening of the fair, the initiative supports our galleries in presenting works with maximum impact, strengthens the experience for collectors and institutions, and reinforces Basel’s position at the center of global art market.’
A first selection of participating galleries in Basel Exclusive includes a distinguished group of leading international galleries, including Galerie Chantal Crousel, Gomide & Co, Massimodecarlo, Van de Weghe, Sadie Coles HQ, Galleria Continua, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Mennour, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, and Xavier Hufkens, with additional presentations to be announced in the lead-up to the fair.
Unlimited is Art Basel’s pioneering platform for works that transcend the traditional art fair booth and remains one of the defining experiences of the Basel show. Since its inception, the sector has provided galleries and artists with an unrivalled stage for works of exceptional scale, complexity, and ambition.
The 2026 edition brings together 59 major projects presented by 66 international galleries. Curated for the first time by Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1, this year’s edition foregrounds artists whose practices engage urgently with the political, social, ecological, and spatial conditions of the present. The presentation re-examines conventional understandings of scale by considering how major sculptural and spatial works can be encountered more directly, intentionally, and with less mediation than in other settings.
Ruba Katrib, Curator of Unlimited, said:
‘This year’s Unlimited brings together art historical heavyweights alongside new works, some created specifically for the section. Spanning the postwar period to the present, the artists respond, across varied aesthetic registers, to political and social upheavals. Their works reveal the canny ways artists attune to details, subtleties, and conditions that often become legible only in retrospect. The resulting dialogues are revealing and, at times, unexpected.’
Art Basel’s Unlimited Night will return on Thursday, June 18, providing visitors the chance to experience the sector alongside a special performance during extended opening hours.
Spanning monumental sculpture, immersive installation, moving image, performance, and large-scale environments, Unlimited offers visitors a rare opportunity to encounter some of the most ambitious artistic production of our time.
Isa Genzken’s Untitled (2018), presented by Galerie Buchholz, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, a large-scale installation of airplane windows and abandoned passenger seats that inverts the logic of observation, turning viewers into the viewed while reflecting on mobility, surveillance, and the fragility of contemporary global life.
Helen Marten’s Writing A Play (dark blue orchard) (2023), presented by Sadie Coles and Greene Naftali, a CGI film voiced by actor Gwendoline Christie in which recurring non-human characters inhabit a psychologically charged world shaped by language, image, and unease.
Ed Ruscha’s A, B, C (1987), presented by Gagosian, rare monumental work originally conceived for the Miami-Dade Public Library and long held in the artist’s private collection, extending Ruscha’s enduring exploration of language as image.
Bruce Nauman’s Dead End Tunnel Folded into Four Arms with Common Walls (1980), presented by Hauser & Wirth, one of the artist’s landmark environments, confronting viewers with disorientation, frustration, and psychological tension through a maze-like architectural form.
Goshka Macuga’s Exhibition M: A Re-enactment (2023-2026), presented by Kate MacGarry and Rüdiger Schöttle, in collaboration with Vistamare, a tapestry and live performance project inspired by André Malraux’s Le Musée Imaginaire, activating historical imagery through sculpture, choreography, and institutional critique.
Oskar Schlemmer’s Homo, Composition in Metal (1930-1931), presented by Leandro Navarro and Thaddaeus Ropac, reduces the human figure influenced by ideals of proportion, creating a rhythmic arrangement that introduces a choreographed sense of movement between body and space.
Theaster Gates’s A libation in Uncertain Times (2024), presented by White Cube, a monumental installation of more than 1,000 sake bottles arranged on traditional wooden shelving, transforming craft, ritual, and material memory into a contemplative sculptural environment.
Tracey Emin’s Knowing My Enemy (2002), presented by White Cube, centered on a salvaged beach hut from Margate set atop a wooden pier structure, accompanied by documents relating to the artist’s father and exploring memory, inheritance, vulnerability, and loss.
Alfredo Jaar’s The Power of Words (1984/2021), presented by Jean-Kenta Gauthier, Goodman Gallery, Lelong, Lia Rumma and Thomas Schulte, an early and prescient installation combining projected press imagery, neon light, and found objects to examine media representation and the politics of images.
For the full list of presenting artists and galleries in Unlimited, visit this link.
Parcours, Art Basel’s acclaimed public art sector, returns in 2026 under the curatorship of Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute (SI), New York. Dedicated to site-specific installations, sculptures, interventions, and performances situated in public spaces and historic locations within the close vicinity of Art Basel, the 2026 edition will bring together 22 projects presented by 31 galleries.
Through installations, interventions in public space, and site-responsive commissions unfolding across outdoor venues, empty apartments, shops, and historic sites., Parcours augments the city-wide engagement of Art Basel in Basel and the fair’s longstanding commitment to presenting contemporary art beyond the conventional exhibition format.
Stefanie Hessler, Curator of Parcours, said:
‘Public space – from the commons to architectures of civic life – is central to conversations around how we live together. This year’s presentation explores the promise and complexity of “conviviality” through artistic interventions that extend into the fabric of the city of Basel. Bringing together a majority of new and recent works with key historic positions, the sector addresses ecology and labor, artistic community and intergenerational transmission, mythologies and systems of valuation underpinning economic and political formations through a multifaceted urban choreography.’
Highlights include:
Kader Attia’s Untitled (Rainsticks) (2024/2025), presented by Galerie Nagel Draxler and Regen Projects, a large-scale installation of mechanized rainsticks in the atrium of UBS Aeschenvorstadt. The movement-induced sounds alternate between a soft trickle and a thunderous storm, evoking water as a source of spiritual and ecological transformation.
Haegue Yang’s installations from her Intermediates (ongoing) series presented by Kukje Gallery and neugerriemschneider, comprising a sculptural intervention draped over the Mittlere Brücke and the equipment of an artisanal distillery, inspired by the Korean myth of the imoogi, a proto-dragon associated with water. A Matter of Fact (from Dan) (2024) in turn draws on industrial materials such as aluminum Venetian blinds in a nod to minimalism, negotiating the boundaries between private and public space.
Sarah Crowner’s newly developed series of posters distributed across the city including the tram, presented by Galerie Max Hetzler and Galerie Nordenhake in collaboration with Luhring Augustine, translating her cut-and-sewn exploration of the expanded language of painting into a rhythmic visual choreography.
Amol K Patil’s Burning Speeches (2025), presented by Galerie Peter Kilchmann, examining social housing architectures, labor movements, political activism, and Dalit identity through a multisensory installation combining charcoal drawings, sculpture, and video.
Pélagie Gbaguidi’s Fragmentation (2023–2024), presented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Goodman Gallery and Tim Van Laere Gallery, comprising a series of paintings on bread bags revisiting the fourteenth-century Apocalypse Tapestry. Layering fragmented imagery – from organic forms to digital symbols – the work offers a panoramic meditation on social rupture, discontinuities, and the possibility of collective reimagining.
For the full list of presentations, please visit this link.
Spanning early modern masters to newly produced contemporary works, the presentations reflect Basel’s distinctive ability to bring together historical depth, curatorial rigor, and market relevance in a single setting.
AVANT-GARDE & POST-WAR
From avant-garde material to postwar landmarks, a number of galleries present tightly curated selections of historically significant works, including:
Applicat-Prazan (Paris) presents a museum-quality, tightly curated presentation dedicated to André Masson, bringing together a group of significant works from the 1930s and 1940s that highlight the artist’s central role in Surrealism and modern European painting.
Galerie 1900–2000 (Paris) presents a focused selection of works by key figures of the Dada and Surrealist avant-gardes, including Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp, Hannah Höch, and Francis Picabia. Highlights include Duchamp’s ready-made Échiquier de poche (1944) and Suzanne Duchamp’s Fabrique de joie (1920), complemented by works from William Copley and Yves Laloy.
Galerie Le Minotaure (Paris) presents ‘From the Section d’Or to Dimensionism’, a curated exhibition tracing the evolution of the European avant-garde from early Cubist experiments toward multidimensional conceptions of art, bringing together artists including László Moholy-Nagy, Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, and Fernand Léger.
Galerie Michael Werner (Berlin) presents a curated selection spanning key positions of postwar and modern European painting, foregrounding Jörg Immendorff’s monumental Es gibt keine Hölle (1985), in dialogue with works by Markus Lüpertz, Francis Picabia, and Per Kirkeby.
Yares Art (New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe) presents works by Helen Frankenthaler, whose pioneering use of pouring and staining techniques led to the development of Color Field painting and played a pivotal role in shaping the Washington Color School, marking a significant moment in the rise of American modern art on the global stage.
CONTEMPORARY ŒUVRE & CROSS-GENERATIONAL DIALOGUE
Across the halls, galleries present new work and cross-generational dialogues that reflect some of the most closely watched practices today. Highlights include:
Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, Seoul) presents Pierre Huyghe’s Of Ideal (2019-ongoing), an evolving installation that combines real-time image generation, AI-driven reconstructions, and responsive environments of sound, sensors, and screens. The presentation is complemented by works from gallery artists including Tuan Andrew Nguyen, David Claerbout, Ann Veronica Janssens, Saâdane Afif, and Stefan Bertalan.
Galerie Buchholz (Cologne, Berlin, New York) presents a focused selection of works by Wolfgang Tillmans, spanning early and recent production. Highlights include InterRail (1987), an early inkjet print that reflects the artist’s formative engagement with image-making and circulation, alongside the recent work Renovation Rhododendron (2024).
Casey Kaplan (New York) presents a focused group of gallery artists, including new paintings from Caroline Kent and Sydney Cain, and Giorgio Griffa works from the 1970’s. Kevin Beasley will present new work alongside Untitled (2020), in which “aid-to-trade” garments and housedresses are cast in resin. Drawing on materials of personal and cultural significance, Beasley alters and molds these elements into sculptural forms that engage with collective memory and the layered histories of the American experience.
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle (Munich) presents a dialogue between Thomas Struth and Goshka Macuga, juxtaposing Struth’s large-scale photograph Paradise 10, Xi Shuang Banna, Prov. Yunnan, China (1999), from his iconic series of dense, contemplative forest landscapes, with Macuga’s Ark of No (2026), a tapestry that reflects her research-driven engagement with history, politics, and collective memory.
Galerie Thomas Schulte (Berlin) presents works by Katharina Sieverding, whose large-scale photographic practice interrogates identity, power, and political imagery across decades.
Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Somerset, St. Moritz, Gstaad, Basel, Menorca, Chillida Leku, Monaco, Hong Kong) presents a cross-generational selection featuring contemporary artists such as Mark Bradford, Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Pierre Huyghe, and Nairy Baghramian alongside 20th-century masters including Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, and Maria Lassnig, highlighting dialogues between historic and contemporary positions.
Pilar Corrias (London) will present Melancholia, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sabine Moritz. Created especially for the fair, this body of work continues her exploration of abstraction, figuration, and presence. This presentation precedes the artists solo exhibition at The Garden Museum, London, which opens in October 2026.
Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles) presents a rare watercolor by Kara Walker, extending the artist’s exploration of history, race, and representation through a more intimate and materially sensitive medium.
Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, Kyoto, Maebashi) revisits “Between Man and Matter” through artists including Mario García Torres and Tatsuo Kawaguchi. The presentation explores the relationship between human and material through process, time and spatial awareness in a contemporary context.
Opening in close proximity to the 61st Venice Biennale, Art Basel in Basel extends the momentum of the global art calendar, creating a dynamic exchange between institutional discourse and the market.
A number of artists representing national pavilions and special presentations in Venice will be visible across the fair. These include Lubaina Himid (United Kingdom, Hollybush Gardens), Yto Barrada (Morocco, Sfeir-Semler Gallery), Sung Tieu (Germany, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Emalin, Trautwein Herleth), Oriol Vilanova (Spain, Galería Elba Benítez), Chiara Camoni (Italy, Andrew Kreps Gallery; SpazioA), Dana Awartani (Saudi Arabia, Lisson Gallery), Isabel Nolan(Ireland, Kerlin Gallery), and Ei Arakawa-Nash (Japan, Taka Ishii Gallery). Additional overlaps extend to artists such as Abbas Akhavan (Canada, Catriona Jeffries), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria, Lisson Gallery), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya, Gladstone Gallery; Victoria Miro), Nolan Oswald Dennis (South Africa, Goodman Gallery), Maja Malou Lyse (Denmark, Nicolai Wallner), Sara Flores (Peru, White Cube), and Ranti Bam (Nigeria, James Cohan), further reinforcing the strong alignment between institutional presentations in Venice and the gallery landscape in Basel.
This dialogue is underscored by the presence at Art Basel of numerous artists participating in the Biennale’s main exhibition, including Zoe Leonard, Carrie Yamaoka, Kader Attia, Álvaro Barrington, Nick Cave, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Sohrab Hura, Michael Joo, Dan Lie, Guadalupe Maravilla, Tammy Nguyen, Kaloki Nyamai, Walid Raad, Guadalupe Rosales, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Kennedy Yanko, and Gala Porras-Kim, among others.
Together, these intersections highlight Art Basel’s role as a key platform where the narratives introduced in Venice continue to unfold, offering audiences the opportunity to encounter leading contemporary artists across both institutional and commercial contexts.
For the full list of presenting exhibitors in Galleries, please visit this link.
KABINETT
Kabinett offers exhibitors in the main sector the opportunity to stage curated presentations within their booths, creating focused contexts for individual artists, historical positions, and tightly conceived thematic projects. This year, over 25 exhibitors will present artists spanning modern masters, overlooked historical figures, and cutting-edge contemporary voices, marking the largest edition of the sector to date, and reaffirming its role as a platform for connoisseurship, rediscovery, and concentrated encounters with exceptional works.
Highlights include:
Gray (Chicago) presents a rare suite of works on paper by Roy Lichtenstein, tracing the central role of drawing in the Pop pioneer’s practice. Spanning the early 1960s onward, the presentation foregrounds studies and finished works that reveal Lichtenstein’s sustained engagement with line, reproduction, and visual language.
Jenkins Johnson Gallery (San Francisco) features a focused presentation dedicated to Gordon Parks, centered on the artist’s iconic photographs of Muhammad Ali. Revisiting Parks’ enduring dialogue with one of the defining figures of the twentieth century, the display underscores the photographer’s singular contribution to portraiture, journalism, and American visual culture.
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris) devotes its Kabinett to Marcelle Cahn, offering a museum-quality reassessment of the French modernist through paintings, gouaches, and printed matter spanning Constructivism, lyrical abstraction, and geometric experimentation.
Perrotin (Paris) presents a solo project by Klara Kristalova, bringing together a new body of ceramic and bronze sculptures. Known for psychologically charged figures that merge fairy-tale imagery with subtle unease, Kristalova’s presentation coincides with her representation of the Nordic Countries at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Kadel Willborn (Düsseldorf) stages an immersive installation by Jacolby Satterwhite, combining painting, architecture, wallpaper, neon, and sculpture. Expanding the artist’s acclaimed multimedia practice, the presentation explores identity, desire, and the mythologies of the American dream through a distinctly personal lens.
ChertLüdde (Berlin) presents a solo Kabinett dedicated to Iraqi artist Ali Eyal, whose deeply autobiographical paintings and works on paper examine memory, displacement, and fractured histories. Installed as an intimate environment, the project invites viewers into a psychologically charged space where fiction and lived experience converge.
For the full list of presenting artists and galleries in Kabinett, visit this link.
FEATURE
Feature is Art Basel in Basel’s sector for rigorously conceived historical presentations, offering visitors concentrated encounters with twentieth-century artists whose practices continue to resonate today. Bringing together 16 exhibitors presenting 22 artists, the sector spans canonical figures, overlooked pioneers, and geographically expansive narratives that reflect the fair’s longstanding commitment to scholarship, rediscovery, and exceptional historical works. Five galleries join Art Basel in Basel for the first time in this year’s sector: Galería Guillermo de Osma (Madrid), Galerie Kaléidoscope (Paris), Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Dakar, Paris), ML fine art (Milan), and Kotaro Nukaga (Tokyo).
Highlights include:
Galería Guillermo de Osma (Madrid) presents a major solo presentation of Joaquín Torres-García, one of the most influential Latin American artists of the twentieth century and a central figure of Constructivism. Bringing together paintings, sculptures, drawings, toys, and rare archival material, the booth offers an expansive view of the artist’s enduring dialogue between geometry, craft, and universal form.
Galería Leandro Navarro (Madrid) stages a two-person presentation pairing Kurt Schwitters and Oskar Schlemmer, examining the creative dialogue between two leading protagonists of the European avant-garde. Featuring Schlemmer’s rarely seen mural studies alongside Schwitters’ Merz collages and archival material, the project traces their shared exploration of space, performance, and abstraction.
Giorgio Persano (Turin) brings together landmark works by Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto, two central figures of Arte Povera. Spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, the presentation reveals parallel investigations into materiality, perception, language, and reflection by two artists who helped redefine postwar European art.
Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna) presents a focused survey of rare early works by Marcia Hafif, tracing the decisive transition from her Roman Italian Paintings of the 1960s to the foundational Acrylic Paintings series begun in 1972. The presentation offers a timely reassessment of one of postwar abstraction’s most rigorous voices.
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Dakar, Paris) presents a solo booth dedicated to Souleymane Keita, a pioneering figure of post-independence Senegalese modernism. Bringing renewed attention to a historically underrecognized practice, the presentation highlights Keita’s singular synthesis of abstraction, African visual traditions, and postcolonial identity.
Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi) presents Gulammohammed Sheikh, one of India’s most celebrated modern and contemporary artists. Featuring paintings, drawings, and collage, the booth foregrounds Sheikh’s richly layered visual language, in which personal memory, literature, mythology, and plural histories converge.
Kotaro Nukaga (Tokyo) presents a solo exhibition of Saori Akutagawa,
foregrounding the pioneering postwar Japanese artist’s vibrant dye paintings and abstractions. Long overlooked, Akutagawa’s rediscovery has accelerated in recent years, with the presentation offering a rare opportunity to encounter a foundational female voice in Japanese modernism.
For the full list of presenting artists and galleries in Feature, visit this link.
PREMIERE
Introduced in 2025 and expanded for 2026, Premiere is Art Basel in Basel’s sector dedicated to recent artistic production, offering exhibitors a platform for tightly curated presentations ranging from solo projects to thematic presentations of up to three artists. The sector is designed to give greater visibility to galleries operating in the dynamic middle of the market, enabling them to foreground artists with growing institutional recognition, established mid-career practices, and significant new bodies of work for the fair’s global audience. This year, Premiere grows from 10 to 17 exhibitors, with 34 artists represented, underscoring the sector’s strategic relevance and the strong commercial and institutional traction it has generated since its debut.
Premiere also welcomes three first-time exhibitors to the fair: Magenta Plains (New York), Öktem Aykut (Istanbul), and Galería Ehrhardt Flórez (Madrid). Selma Feriani Gallery (London, Tunis) and Lars Friedrich (Berlin) return to the sector following its participation in the inaugural 2025 edition.
Highlights include:
Magenta Plains (New York), making its Art Basel in Basel debut, presents new works by Jennifer Bolande, Liza Lacroix, and Josephine Meckseper. Bringing together three intergenerational voices, the presentation examines image-making, gender, and the visual language of consumer culture through sculpture, photography, and installation.
Galería Ehrhardt Flórez (Madrid), another first-time participant, stages a solo presentation by June Crespo, one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary sculptors. Centered on a new large-scale wall sculpture, the project continues Crespo’s exploration of material tension, bodily presence, and industrial form.
Öktem Aykut (Istanbul) debuts at the fair with a focused presentation of new works by Koray Ariş, a leading figure in Turkish sculpture. Suspended leather and wood forms create an immersive environment that reflects the artist’s long-standing dialogue between abstraction, sound, and touch.
Laveronica Gallery (Mondica) presents Dora García’s Walter Benjamin Is Dead, an evolving in situ wall drawing that maps personal and collective histories through timelines shaped in collaborative workshops since 2022. Rooted in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, the project explores the fluidity of history and is accompanied by The Bug, a performance that invites audiences to reflect on past and future through collective movement and recitation.
Selma Feriani Gallery (London, Tunis) brings together Monia Ben Hamouda, Nidhal Chamekh, and Mohamed Amine Hamouda in a group presentation examining rupture, continuity, and cultural inheritance through painting, sculpture, and installation.
SpazioA (Pistoia) presents a solo project by Chiara Camoni, whose richly textured sculptural installation combines ceramics, textiles, and organic materials in a poetic environment shaped by mythology, ritual, and feminine knowledge.
Hoffman Donahue (New York) presents an intergenerational three-artist dialogue featuring Susan Cianciolo, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Kate Mosher Hall, tracing connections between craft, technology, memory, and feminist experimentation across decades of practice.
For the full list of presenting galleries and artists in Premiere, visit this link.
STATEMENTS
Statements is Art Basel in Basel’s sector dedicated to bold solo presentations by emerging artists, offering collectors, curators, and institutions concentrated encounters with some of today’s most compelling new practices. Long established as a launchpad for artists at pivotal moments in their careers, it foregrounds ambitious commissions, immersive installations, and sharply defined individual positions. This year, nine of the 18 exhibitors make their Art Basel in Basel debut, reflecting Statements’ continued role as a key point of entry for the next generation of international galleries.
Highlights include:
Blue Velvet (Zurich, Madrid) presents a new installation by Monica Mays, who reimagines the visual mythology of the Western genre through sculptural assemblages that trace entangled histories of conquest, desire, and cultural appropriation across Europe and the Americas. The project transforms the booth into a theatrical environment where architecture, ornament, and power collide.
Gypsum Gallery (Cairo) presents a solo booth by Egyptian multidisciplinary artist Hana El-Sagini. Through a sculptural landscape of braided bronze forms, wall reliefs, and botanical motifs, the project reflects on resilience, illness, and renewal, transforming personal experience into a richly atmospheric environment.
ROH (Jakarta) presents ikkibawiKrrr, whose multimedia environment draws on research in Indonesia and Korea to explore communal singing, memory, and disappearing village life. Through video, sculpture, and sound, the collective considers how voices, rituals, and shared histories persist across time and geography.
Lodos (Mexico City), participating in the Basel edition for the first time, presents Ramón Saturnino, whose installation the distances (las distancias) transforms border infrastructures into a fractured sculptural landscape. Using wire fencing, plaster, and photography, the project reflects on territorial division, migration, and the lives shaped by systems of separation.
David Peter Francis (New York) presents Emilie Louise Gossiaux, whose new body of work combines tactile balloon reliefs, drawing, and sculpture to explore disability, interdependence, and the artist’s profound bond with her guide dog, London. Coinciding with Gossiaux’s inclusion in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the presentation marks a significant moment for one of New York’s most distinctive emerging artists.
Tarq (Mumbai) presents a solo booth by Rithika Merchant, featuring her latest body of work As The Universe, So The Soul. Through intricate watercolors and a central immersive installation, Merchant explores spirituality, collective consciousness and imagined futures.
Silke Lindner (New York) presents a solo booth by Sylvie Hayes-Wallace, featuring a new body of work exploring the boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Using wire and glass “brain cages” embedded with personal materials, these works form fragmented self-portraits that map psychological states and the traces of everyday life.
For the full list of presenting artists and galleries in Statements, visit this link.
EDITION
Spread across both floors of Hall 2, Edition brings together seven leading international galleries and publishers dedicated to editioned works, prints, and multiples, underscoring the enduring vitality of printmaking as a site of experimentation, collaboration, and access within contemporary art.
This year’s sector spans postwar masters and contemporary practices, with presentations by galleries including knust kunz gallery editions, Cristea Roberts Gallery, STPI, Gemini G.E.L., Carolina Nitsch, Susan Sheehan Gallery, and René Schmitt. Highlights include Gemini G.E.L.’s 60th anniversary presentation, reflecting decades of collaboration with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Julie Mehretu; Carolina Nitsch’s cross-medium program featuring Louise Bourgeois and Simone Leigh; and Susan Sheehan Gallery’s focused selection of rare postwar works on paper by figures including Helen Frankenthaler and Jasper Johns.
For the full list of presenting galleries in Edition, visit this link.
Public Commissions
A celebration of the first Art Basel Award’s Gold Awardees in the Established Artist category
The Art Basel Awards – presented in partnership with BOSS – return to Basel, signaling the Awards’ longer-term ambition to not only recognize excellence but actively shape artistic production and discourse on a global scale. As part of the 2025 class, Gold Awardees Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama will unveil two major new public works in Basel this June, marking the first time that commissions stemming from the Awards program premiere in the very city where their recognition first took shape.
Nairy Baghramian presents an elaborate site-responsive installation, Modèle vivant (S’empilant) (2026), on the Messeplatz. Conceived for the square’s fountain, the work unfolds as a rhythmic assembly of four large-scale sculptural groupings that extend her distinctive artistic language, combining biomorphic forms with geometric support structures. Abstract, yet highly allusive aluminum casts, painted in a soft lavender tone, appear stacked and precariously balanced on polished steel armatures traversing the fountain without interrupting its water features. Next to it stands a bench-like pedestal covered, like one of the armatures, by tiles and swarming with (photographic imprints of) flies. Evoking multipart bodies in a state of respite, suspension, and becoming, Baghramian’s intervention subtly reconsiders the relationship between sculpture, site, self and spectator within the dynamic context of Art Basel in Basel.
Ibrahim Mahama will present The God of Small Things (2026), an ambitious sculptural and spatial installation on Münsterplatz. Taking its title from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, the work draws on rubber residues sourced from a factory established in Ghana during the post-independence. Rather than a singular monumental form, the installation unfolds as a constellation of suspended sculptural elements arranged to create an immersive spatial environment, transforming the historic square into a site of material and political reflection. Through its scale and physical presence, the project not only activates the public realm but also situates these histories within a broader global context, offering a powerful and timely intervention.
2026 ART BASEL AWARDS MEDALISTS
The 2026 Art Basel Awards medalists will be celebrated at an event at Basel’s historic town hall, the Rathaus, during Art Basel’s Swiss edition. A selection of medalists will headline a public, artist-led Conversations series, offering audiences direct access to some of the most influential voices shaping contemporary culture today, including Arthur Jafa, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Mercedes Vilardell, and Precious Okoyomon.
For more information about the 2025 Art Basel Awards Gold Medalists, follow this link.
For the full list of recently announced 2026 Art Basel Awards Medalists, please visit this link.
Conversations
Art Basel’s Conversations series presents stimulating panel discussions on topics concerning the global contemporary art scene
Art Basel in Basel 2026 will present a dynamic and artist-led Conversations program, offering unprecedented access to some of the most inspiring voices in visual art and beyond. Centered on direct dialogue and critical exchange, this year’s program foregrounds artists and cultural leaders in intimate and thought-provoking formats.
Highlights include a series of one-on-one interviews with the Art Basel Awards 2026 medalists, featuring Arthur Jafa, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Farah Al Qasimi, Diego Marcon, Kulapat Yantrassast, and Precious Okoyomon. These conversations provide rare insight into the practices and perspectives of some of today’s most influential artists.
The program also features a special Artist Premiere with Nairy Baghramian in conversation with Kunstmuseum Basel Director Elena Filipovic, coinciding with Baghramian’s Messeplatz project. Additional artist dialogues include Lawrence Abu Hamdan in conversation with philanthropist and Art Basel Awards medalist Mercedes Vilardell.
Addressing key industry questions, the panel “What is the secret behind gallery longevity?” brings together leading gallerists Márcia Fortes of Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Claes Nordenhake of Galerie Nordenhake, and Karen Jenkins-Johnson of Jenkins-Johnson. Moderated by Ben Luke, host of The Art Newspaper’s The Week in Art podcast, the discussion will explore how galleries sustain and evolve over time.
For 2026, the Conversations program will take place in a new auditorium located in the Eventhalle, providing an enhanced setting for dialogue and exchange.
Cultural Events in Basel during the Show
On Saturday, 20 June 2026, 10:00-17:00 in Hall 1.1 of the fairgrounds, art.klub presents Warehouse Artefacts, an immersive experience by Thomas Bangalter, Julian Charrière and Rampa, staged as a deconstructed dance floor that brings together transmissions from both political history and underground culture. From 18:00-23:00, the installation unfolds into a rave with a DJ set by Rampa and Special Guest. The night continues from 22:00-06:00 with after.art.klub at Nordstern Basel, with music by Desiree, Jimi Jules, and Yare. Warehouse Artefacts is produced by Nordstern Basel, and presented in cooperation with Art Basel and Fondation Beyeler.
Tickets for the evening program (18:00-23:00) are available now at https://www.artklub.ch/
Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager presents the guest performance Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) based on texts by Dieter Roth, directed by Christoph Marthaler at the Schauspielhaus of Theater Basel from June 17 to 21 (guest performance Schauspielhaus Zurich/Weiterspielen Productions).
The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager presents the guest performance Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) at the Schauspielhaus (Theater Basel) on five successive evenings during Art Basel week, from Wednesday, June 17, to Sunday June 21. In this production, Christoph Marthaler brings texts by the German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930–1998) to life in a pharmacy setting, where they touch the heart, kidneys, stomach, and intestines – even the tear ducts are affected, as Roth wrote what he called a “sea of tears.” Now, in a decidedly unsentimental manner, five fabulous pharmacists and a wondrous customer base in this sea. The prescription they write for life is a poem.
Works by Dieter Roth form a focal point in the collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, which is housed at Schaulager. This includes the chocolate and sugar icing installation Selbstturm; Löwenturm (1969–1998), presented in the artist’s former studio space and maintained by Schaulager.
Venue
Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
