8 Standout Works from Art Basel 2025
From Leonora Carrington’s painted triptych depicting a Mexican actress’s dreams to Michelangelo’s large-scale installation of mirrors, these were the most buzzed about works
Art Basel in Basel is still considered the best art fair in the world.With 289 prominent international galleries from 42 countries and territories, the fair celebrated its 55th year in the picturesque Swiss city of Basel, beautifully situated along the Rhine River. Attracting 88,000 attendees during its preview and public days, the fair welcomed collectors, curators, and art lovers from around the globe, including representatives from over 250 prestigious museums and foundations.
“Art Basel in Basel ignites the global art world as a vital meeting point,” said Christl Novakovic, Head UBS Global Wealth Management EMEA and Chair of the UBS Art Board. “We can immerse ourselves in dynamic environments, fresh perspectives, and creative forces that shape our world. We need the dialogue, curiosity, and connection that Art Basel provides more than ever.”
Art Basel offered a comprehensive experience and an overview of the contemporary art scene, showcasing high-quality works from established artists and emerging talents in the gallery booths, as well as large-scale installations and performances in the Unlimited section. Additionally, public projects were displayed throughout the city streets leading to the fair, and engaging talks took place in the auditorium.
From Leonora Carrington’s painted triptych depicting a Mexican actress’s dreams as a siren at Di Donna Galleries to Michelangelo’s large-scale installation of mirrors, shattered to reveal the word “Respect” in various languages and shaped like the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by chairs symbolizing the bordering nations in peaceful dialogue, presented by Galleria Continua at Unlimited, these are the must-see artworks at this year’s fair.
1. Leonora Carrington at Di Donna Galleries
A standout in Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition, “Milk of Dreams,” which featured her works and took its title from one of her books, the late Leonora Carrington has recently garnered renewed interest. Commissioned by the celebrated Mexican actress María Félix, the artist’s 1963 painting Sueño de Sirenas (Mermaid Dream) transformed the actress’s recurring dream, in which she envisioned herself as three sirens. In the largest central panel of the painting, Félix appears as a crowned mother-of-pearl mermaid, while in the narrower right panel, she is depicted as a flaming fire mermaid and a hairy ebony mermaid in the equally sized left panel.
Portraying the dreamlike sirens in enchanting undersea realms, surrounded by surreal marine life, Carrington collaborated with sculptor José Horna to create an equally surreal frame featuring hands, eyes, and hidden creatures intricately woven into his woodwork. One of the must-see works at the fair, the captivating painting was the centerpiece of DiDonna’s collection of modernist masterpieces.
2. Maurizio Cattelan at Gagosian
A reworking of Him, Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious 2001 wax model of a boy-sized Hitler in a grey suit kneeling in apparent penitence, the related sculpture No now depicts that figure with a paper bag over its head. When the Chinese authorities denied permission for him to display the original due to the country’s strict political censorship, the provocative artist discovered that it would be allowed if he placed a bag over its head. What started as a problem quickly evolved into a new artwork.
A highlight in Gagosian’s booth, curated by Francesco Bonami—a frequent collaborator of both the gallery and the artist—the sculpture was thematically paired with Rudolf Stingel’s rarely seen painting of a photorealistic figure obscured by an overlay of gestural abstraction.
Seeing No as a way to reveal rather than hide identity, Cattelan—and the insightful curator—encourages us to differentiate between evil and its disguises. The subject of a long-running retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Cattelan’s work was prominent at the fair, with MASSIMODECARLO showcasing a bullet-ridden self-portrait of the artist, titled BACK (perhaps meaning he’s back in the high-stakes art game), and a bottle containing an enclosed crumbling brick labeled EMPIRE—conveying a message that may point to the current state of the world.
3. Huguette Caland at Stephen Friedman Gallery
The daughter of Lebanon’s first post-colonial president, Huguette Caland studied at the American University in Beirut during the 1960s before moving to Paris to launch her creative career. Leaving her husband and children behind, she developed an artistic style that fused a sensual portrayal of the body with a minimal form of abstraction. She infused the erotic content of her work into the design of stitched caftans, which resulted in a celebrated collaboration with French fashion designer Pierre Cardin in 1979. After migrating to Los Angeles in the late ’80s, Caland continued to explore a surreal form of feminist expression while developing her unique style of process art.
The late artist, currently featured in a traveling retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, had a selection of her paintings displayed in the group show booth, continuing the gallery’s recent presentation of her art. Three vibrant figurative paintings from the 1970s, including Visage (Bribes de Corps), which translates to “Face (Body Parts)” from French, were presented alongside her more abstract works from around 2010. Driven by an interest in graphic design, Caland fragmented the human body to explore its sensual possibilities. In this seductive series, every shape creates an abstract body map, showcasing Caland’s distinctive interpretation of feminine desire and freedom.
4. Katharina Grosse at Art Basel Messeplatz Project
Celebrated internationally for her explosive spray-painted murals, sculptures, and canvases, Katharina Grosse has taken her mastery of the aerosol technique to new heights with her dynamic Messeplatz Project. Commissioned by Art Basel to create a large-scale, site-responsive installation for the Messeplatz, which connects several of the sprawling convention center’s buildings, Grosse created the biggest urban installation of her career, altering urban surfaces and architectural features to deepen her investigation into the potential of painting.
Transforming the city square and its dynamic fountain, along with the surrounding architecture, into a vibrant, colorful experience, the Berlin-based artist employed her giant industrial spray gun to vividly color the expansive site with shades of red, magenta, and white on a metallic building and a black-padded ground. Titled “CHOIR,” the immersive work resembles a cacophony of voices in various languages coming together for the fair. Like a giant Abstract Expressionist painting, its individual gestures created a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art—one that could be joyfully experienced and repeatedly explored during the time of the fair.
5. Álvaro Urbano at Travesía Cuatro
An architect by training, Álvaro Urbano investigates the stories and surreal atmospheres of mythical spaces in 20th-century architecture. His sculptural installations and environments are crafted with theatrical precision, attending to every detail. He brings the quality of dreaming to life in his exhibitions by juxtaposing the past with its hypothetical counterpart, the present, and the imagined future. Working with a team of architects, artists, and theater set designers, he illustrates what a parallel life for the subject might be, visually narrating a story about its desires, fantasies, and failures.
Fresh from a series of critically acclaimed exhibitions, including a project at New York’s SculptureCenter that focused on public artwork by American sculptor Scott Burton, which was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future, the Berlin-based artist shared a new work that was so realistic in its construction that it seemed startlingly out of place in the gallery’s booth. His sculpture, ironically titled “Under your armpit,” presents a bird’s nest with tiny blue eggs resting on the handle of an old-fashioned radiator. It looks realistic but is entirely fabricated, bringing a touch of nurturing nature and a nostalgic object into the aesthetic realm.
6. Kristina Schuldt at Galerie EIGEN + ART
Born to a Russian mother, whose father was a Social Realist painter and sculptor, and a German father, Kristina Schuldt was raised in Germany from a young age. Attending the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, she studied painting and graphic arts under the esteemed Neo Rauch for four years, graduating with an MFA in 2012. Having exhibited with EIGEN + ART in Leipzig and Berlin since 2013, her work, which blurs the lines between figuration and abstraction, has been featured in solo museum shows in Germany and the Netherlands.
Presenting two new eye-catching paintings on the outer walls of the gallery’s booth at the fair, Schuldt paints over her canvases until the images seem right. Sourcing imagery from the Internet, she has stated that she struggles to determine whether she wants her work to be figurative or abstract, so she does both. With the motto “Nothing has to fit,” she creates paintings like Tochter der Luft (Daughter of the Air). Depicting deconstructed limbs with grasping hands and decorative slippers dangling from their feet, Schuldt fills the remaining space on the canvas with colorful swaths of fabric and lively abstractions, keeping the eye in motion and the mind off-kilter.
7. Frida Orupabo at Galerie Nordenhake
A standout at the 2024 Gwangju Biennale exhibition, which showcased work examining sustainable contemporary spaces to promote discussions about the future of humanity and art, Frida Orupabo is a sociologist and artist based in Oslo. Consisting of digital and physical collages in various forms, her work explores questions related to race, family relations, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity.
In many ways, Orupabo’s works serve as solutions to existing gaps, specifically the absence of specific images that need to be created. Primarily utilizing collage, her art combines fragments of bodies to reconstruct narratives and envision new configurations of subjectivity that colonial legacies have denied. Frequently, the figures portrayed in her images are Black women, and the concepts of gender, race, and family heritage are not only examined but also become central to her explorations. Drawing from mostly online digital archives, Orupabo begins her process on a small scale by collaging images on a screen, which often evolve into larger-than-life characters in the physical space, as seen in her fascinating 2024 photographic installation, Of course everything is real, in the gallery’s booth.
8. Michelangelo Pistoletto at Art Basel Unlimited
One of the leading artists of the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Michelangelo Pistoletto is best known for his remarkable paintings on mirrors, which he first created in 1962 and continues to produce at the age of 92 today. Rispetto (Respect) debuted in 2016 at Paris’s VHN Gallery as part of an exhibition and performance in collaboration with Galleria Continua. The work included 24 gilded mirrors, of which Pistoletto shattered 23 during the performance, uncovering vibrant panels underneath, each bearing the word “Respect” in the world’s most spoken languages.
His symbolic gesture sought to initiate a conversation about respect, a pressing issue then and in today’s society. A mirrored table shaped like the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by chairs representing its bordering countries, accompanies the mirrors. The table is linked to his Love Difference project, which fosters intercultural dialogue to resolve global conflicts. Pistoletto chose to combine these two creations for an engaging Unlimited installation at Art Basel. By connecting the mirrors to the table and chairs, the philosophical artist establishes a lasting venue for dialogue about respect and diversity.