Art Basel 2025: 7 artists for you radar

Art Basel 2025 once again turned the modest Swiss city into the nucleus of the international art world. Since its founding in 1970, the fair has consistently drawn artists, collectors, curators, and cultural admirers to the city. This year’s edition drew over 88,000 visitors through its halls during preview and public days, attracted by the sheer breadth and ambition of the fair’s offering. With more than 280 galleries from every continent, the fair presented thousands of works spanning from canonical masterpieces to radical, politically charged contemporary and experimental artworks.
                        
The Parcours sector, curated by Stefanie Hessler (Director of the Swiss Institute, New York), expanded the fair’s reach into the city itself, under the theme ‘Second Nature’. Through a series of newly commissioned, site-specific installations, artists interrogated the porous boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the human and the machine. Public spaces, including car parks, tunnels, shop windows, were used as the backdrop to many works, including Sturtevant’s projection of a black dog running endlessly in a tunnel in a ghostly loop of motion and memory; Thomas Bayrle’s graphic interventions animated on mannequins and raincoats in shop windows in Basel’s high street; while Yu Ji’s transforms the historic banquet room of the Hotel Rheinfelderhof.
                        
At the fair’s central meeting point on the Messeplatz, German artist Katharina Grosse presented CHOIR (2025): her most expansive urban project to date, which covered over 5,000 square metres of the tarmac, fountains, building walls and windows, in her signature sprayed pigment. Beyond the fair, Basel’s cultural institutions opened exhibitions that extended and deepened the conversations happening at the Messe. The Fondation Beyeler is showing a meditative survey of Vija Celmins’ intricately detailed paintings alongside the disorienting technological provocations of Jordan Wolfson. Meanwhile, the fourth edition of Basel Social Club brought a more experimental sensibility to the week. Housed in a former private bank, it offered a platform for emerging galleries and artist-run spaces, in a labyrinthine, multi-room experience that mirrored the heterogeneity and energy of today’s art world.

Tucked away on Basel’s main shopping street near Messeplatz, a modest clothing shop window displayed four collages by London-based artist Ebun Sodipo (represented by Soft Opening). Using reflective Mylar and resin, Sodipo’s layered works blend found digital images to create shimmering, cinematic assemblages that honour Black transfeminine histories that have often been erased or overlooked.

The work explores the idea of embracing opacity as a powerful metaphor for the complex layering of past, present, and future, as the work resists easy visibility in the shop window. In her wider artistic practice, Sodipo works with video, sculpture, performance, and collage, excavating archives and reclaiming stories, crafting what she calls “archival pleasure for Black trans people”. Overlooking the high street, the works which were on display at Parcours, curated by Stephanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute, aim to challenge historical erasure while imagining bold new narratives and futures for Black trans identities.

At this year’s Art Basel Features section, Klaudia Schifferle is in the spotlight, jointly presented by galleries Weiss Falk (new to the fair) and Galerie Mueller. A pioneering figure in both punk and contemporary art, Schifferle’s early work as a visual artist is finally getting the attention it deserves. Before turning to painting, Schifferle was a founding member of the all-female Swiss punk bands Kleenex and LiLiPUT, performing bass and vocals from 1977 to 1983. At the same time, she began transitioning from photography to large-scale enamel paintings, creating bold, emotionally charged works that defied the political leanings of the era in favour of raw personal expression.

By 1982, Schifferle had become the youngest female artist invited to Documenta, and two years later, she had her first solo show at Kunsthalle Winterthur. Her work blurred the lines between visual art and performance, echoing the art-music crossover seen in New York and other cultural city centres of the time. Now, a selection of her works from this formative period is on view at Art Basel, celebrating a radical voice that helped shape the Swiss art scene and inspired a new generation along the way.

Monumental sculptures and large-scale paintings dominated Art Basel’s Unlimited warehouse. Don’t miss the surprise appearance of a lamé-clad go-go dancer performing Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s iconic piece. Performed twice daily without warning, the act – which has been shown in over 30 major exhibitions worldwide – lasts just five minutes. Created in 1991 amid personal loss and homophobia, the work brings together fleeting joy and desire with deep themes of absence and presence. The empty platform lined with light bulbs speaks as loudly as the dancer’s brief, highly energetic appearance as they dance with headphones in their ears, capturing Gonzalez-Torres’s exploration of performativity and the fragility of life.

Julian Charrière’s ambitious, immersive exhibition titled Midnight Zone at Museum Tinguely disorients your sense of space and perception. Taking place over three floors of the exhibition, each room presented photographs, sculptures, installations and new video works by Charrière that deal with our relationship to Earth as a world of water. In one dim, misty room, a circular pond has been carved in the floor, and above it, underwater footage of the sun’s rays flickers, projected as if the sun itself lies beneath the water, shining up from the depths.

The vibe is surreal and meditative: in the near-pitch black final room, vibrating mirrors shake around a spinning lamp, amplifying the sense of cosmic mystery. It’s an exhibition that fully activates all sensory feelings, inviting visitors to rethink our relationship to nature and the cosmos. Charrière’s film work nods to Jacques Cousteau’s underwater films of early explorations funded by oil companies that paradoxically helped spark ocean conservation. His new film, titled Silent World, captures that tension between exploitation and reverence, reminding us that the ocean remains vast, unpredictable, and breathtaking.

Beneath a bridge in a gritty in the Merian Hotel parking lot, Marianna Simnett’s Interlude quietly commanded attention. Housed inside a glowing concession stand — one that you might see in a fairground — the installation looped haunting videos of solitary women singing and preparing food, only to disappear behind shutters again. Painted in rich ochres, crimson reds, and gold hues, the stalls glowed with an eerie inner light, while visceral imagery of sweating hotdogs and chips with mounds of ketchup and mayo, blurred the line between the mundane and the grotesque. The unsettling mix mirrors the tension of containment and release, amplifying the women’s melancholic performances with a dreamlike, almost Lynchian vibe.

Interlude flips the script, turning the overlooked vendor into a figure of haunting prominence, balancing quiet defiance with vulnerability, and exploring themes of invisibility, agency, and survival in unexpected ways.

At 243Luz in Liste, Solomon Garçon transformed the booth into a seductive, unsettling tableau where domestic glamour meets covert observation. The air was thick with Calvin Klein’s 1985 perfume Obsession, as a series of tactile monochrome panels came into view: one scuffed dark suede, another entirely smeared in red lipstick, and another wrapped in glossy plastic black mesh. Surveillance is not just a theme here, it’s an active presence, as microphones live recording behind the painting panels. 

At the centre of the booth, a freestanding sculpture of a pair of high-heeled shoes was sealed inside a clear sandwich bag, caught in a moment of fetishised containment. Nearby, a two-metre-tall pegboard-like structure, filled with blue and gold acetate filters, held more stilettos, bagged and suspended inside like forensic evidence or objects of desire. Drawing from the intertwined histories of fetish, reality television (Desperate Housewives), domestic surveillance and scopophilia, Garçon asks: who’s watching, and why?

In The Evolution of Obedience, Arlette presented a richly staged exploration of worship, performance, and power. Presented with Rose Easton for Liste, the works were shown in different spaces, including a red velvet-lined cabinet displaying jewellery and etched metal works, shimmering like devotional relics. Her handcrafted rings, watches, and icons are intricately detailed. Arlette etches the work herself with phrases like What to Wear to Meet God, which questions whether celebrity has become the new divine.

Known for transmuting abstract ideas into weighty, physical forms, Arlette treats obedience not as moral judgment but as raw material. Throughout the presentation, religion meets pop culture: crucifixes rest on velvet like haute couture accessories, while a Vegas stage etched into steel asks whether celebrity has become the new divine. Amid all of the metal, Arlette’s palette is dominated by blood-red, conjuring notions of Catholic vestments, desire, and danger. Arlette draws on religious aesthetics and personal grief — in particular, the loss of her father — to question how belief, love, and identity are shaped and performed. Arlette’s work speaks of both devotion and doubt, asking, who do we follow when everyone is performing? And what does it mean to worship in a world where belief is broadcast, branded, and bought?

Visit the Art Basel website here for information about upcoming fairs.