During one of the hot weeks of June, the quiet Swiss city of Basel turns into a boiling cauldron of contemporary art, which is, quite literally, crammed into every alley of this small town.
Numerous gallerists, collectors, artists, and simply lovers of beauty occupy hotels and Airbnb apartments to the brim. During the day, this entire crowd moves between museums, satellite fairs, street sculptures, and installations… And at night, they party relentlessly at both private and public gatherings, raves, and the open-to-all space of the Basel Social Club. There, among works by young artists and Aperol Spritzes priced at 14 euros, everyone involved in the art world is desperately networking.
For the city of Basel, the fair and its accompanying events are probably a natural disaster. But for those interested in contemporary art—and even for those who despise its commercial side—I strongly recommend visiting the Great and Terrible Art Basel at least once in your life.
First and foremost, Art Basel is, of course, the main fair, where the world’s most successful galleries sell their artists across endless stretches of exhibition space. Younger and more modest galleries take booths at the satellite fairs Liste, Volta, and June. Local museums and art spaces try to showcase the best of the year’s stocked exhibitions. And public art projects place works in the city’s hidden corners—even under bridges. So there’s more than enough to take in, whether you’re staying for three days or an entire week.
So, let’s talk about the main trends of Art Basel 2025.
It’s worth noting that most of the artists’ names are English or American. Fewer are German or French, and then come all the rest. And it doesn’t matter where a gallery is based—Miami, Paris, or Hong Kong—these “all the rest” make up at most 10%. Among them, you’ll find post-Soviet artists—Moldovans, Ukrainians, Russians, Georgians—who take up a microscopic fraction.
So, if you want to achieve commercial success, you’d better be born in the USA or Germany—or at least not in the former USSR. At the same time, it’s precisely the rare galleries from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or South America that often stand out with a thoughtful approach to booth design.
For example, the Georgian gallery Art Beat’s solo presentation of Nika Kutateladze featured a stylized raised dark wooden floor (reminiscent of a traditional village house), creating an ambivalent feeling: are you allowed to step onto it, or is it part of the artwork? And the viewer, rushing frantically through the fair, is forced to stop in front of Kutateladze’s somber paintings of animals, which evoke the style of Pirosmani.
I counted three artists of Russian origin there. Of course, this is not conclusive—the fair is huge, and it’s impossible to see everyone—but it’s clear that Russians are very few. Two of them are the recognized classics Kabakov and Bulatov.
The presence of Asian (Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese) artists and gallerists is noticeably growing. Although they are still counted among the “all the rest” category, they make up the majority within this group. Asian art is mainly represented by graduates of British and American universities and does not differ much aesthetically from the works of their classmates. But sometimes you come across completely different pieces, with references and connotations that are unclear to Europeans.
For example, at the Shanghai gallery Antenna Space, you can see works by Cui Jie, one of China’s most famous artists, who is also represented by London’s Pillar Coreas. In her works, Cui Jie uses a striped geometric background, painted over with many layers of acrylic in cool tones—the translucent stripes create a certain ripple, a pulsation. The piece presented depicts a porcelain deer against this background, which refers to the Chinese tradition of souvenirs and carries many complex historical connotations. The image seems to be affected by digital distortion, glitch, or optical inconsistency, causing the already shimmering, flickering image to completely evade full visual grasp by the viewer.
The largest blue-chip galleries have the dullest booths: white walls plastered with “look, we have everything.” The most interesting ones are solo presentations. For example, the beautiful Grimm gallery booth showcasing paintings and objects by Arturo Kameya, focused on the artist’s personal local experience—the everyday life in Peru with a special emphasis on physical exercise. The muted colors, seemingly peeling textures, frozen figures—an extremely unusual painting technique for modern trends, somewhat referencing the legacy of Siqueiros and Rivera. But instead of political propaganda, there are fluid nostalgic scenes, as if embedded inside installations made of boards and household objects.
It’s very rare to see an artist successfully and effortlessly combine painting and installation. Often, it feels forced, like “I’m not just hanging paintings here, I’m making it stylish and trendy,” which devalues the paintings themselves. But in Grimm’s booth, that feeling doesn’t arise; everything feels organic, and the installation elements unify and support the paintings.
God bless solo curated booths at fairs—without them, all this blue-chip turns into a giant supermarket with items priced at a million euros. Meanwhile, huge high-street galleries could definitely afford to sell less in favor of a more elegant and thoughtful presentation. Like the Georgian Art Beat, which most likely sacrificed profit for beauty.
Another obvious artistic tendency in painting is not to show skill. Whether you have it or not doesn’t really matter; however, boneless people and horses without knees make up the majority of figurative works.
Painting in recent years has generally moved far away from displaying obvious skill. And even when something particularly masterful appears, it looks a bit like bad manners. As if in a contemporary dance theater, where dancers slowly walk back and forth to rhythmless music, suddenly a circus acrobat bursts in, glittering, with hoops and shouting “alle-op,” throwing a leg over a shoulder, provoking everyone to think only: “Oh, I definitely couldn’t do that.”
This trend is as noticeable as the widespread reflections on post-digital and post-social media imagery. But at the same time, there are many references to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, both compositional and thematic.
Among the unimaginable number of paintings, I especially liked Maia Cruz Palileo at the David Kordansky gallery — neither quite landscapes, nor falling stones, or a non-narrative abstraction of cold tones. All with rather Renaissance drama in composition, even seemingly with religious connotations.
Also memorable was the very young Vietnamese artist Minh Lan Tran at Paris’s Balice Hertling — a huge abstract canvas of stunningly beautiful color, where very gestural and tactile elements coexist with independently and spontaneously flowing layers of quite different paints, and geometric and organic elements coexist in compositional harmony. The expressive impact of the work is huge, probably on the level of Rothko. And it’s hard to grasp exactly what it is realized in? Perhaps in the dark form that seems to hang above the viewer’s head and is about to fall, overwhelm, like some divine force, or in the gentle iridescence inviting you to enter inside the painting?
There is almost nothing political or heavily conceptual at the fair, although, one might think, the time would lend itself to that. Lots of 2D painting, various kinds of printmaking, works on fabric. But sculptures, objects, photography are clearly not trending.
Although one of the most beautiful things in the Unlimited section is a sculpture by British artist Nicola Turner made of textile materials, resembling some kind of black monster, completely taking over the space. It slowly but inexorably spreads a frightening presence into the corners of the room, pressing against the floor with sharp crutch-like legs.
The number of installations and objects in the main space compared to paintings can be counted on one hand. And yet, as the “old-timers” say, Frieze five to seven years ago told a very different story.
Among the rare sculptures and objects in the main section, the work of David Douard at the Greek-British gallery Sylvia Kouvali stood out. On one hand, it recalls the 2020-2021 trend for fandom and various claws combined with post-digital aesthetics. But on the other hand — the introduction of diverse materials, the aesthetic balance of a mystical mood, the sense of industrial indifference in bent sticks, chain link fence, neon watercolor stains, a descending shape, balancing on several shaky stools… All of it simultaneously pulls the work away from the clichés of the early twenties that everyone is thoroughly tired of.
But, again, 2D works clearly outweigh 3D.
Overall, watching the art market through the years, the feeling is:
– 12 years ago, collectors were expected to at least pretend to distinguish Deleuze’s connotations from Foucaut’s ones;
– 7 years ago, collectors were supposed to be tolerant and politically correct, to care (or pretend to care) about politics, minority rights, etc., and with a guilty look over their privilege, buy the very art criticizing them for crazy millions;
– nowadays, collectors are required neither of those things, only a wallet — or rather a platinum card.
It’s a bit sad when you think how much kitsch and outright commercial profanity makes its way to the top because of this trend.But the inclusion of new groups into the collector community is probably a useful thing in the long run. The art market has always been a form of elite entertainment, let’s not pretend we didn’t know that, and the rotation of buyers might bring interesting results.
In its time, the arrival of the bourgeoisie into the narrow circle of art buyers and patrons, the gradual decline of the clergy and aristocracy’s role, gave us powerful and rich Baroque art, whose bodies are so dear to art historians’ hearts. Maybe now something fun, bold, shiny, and pink will appear, not aiming for subtle aestheticization and refined taste? And in 500 years this new something will look no worse than Rubens and Snijders do today.
The Public Art Parkour project deserves special mention. Just imagine: people walk around with maps in their hands, searching among bridges, courtyards, numerous bathers in the blue waters of the Rhine, and neat Swiss trash bins for pink plaques indicating nearby art. Sometimes openings are immediately noticeable, but sometimes it’s not obvious at all.
One of the charming works is located in a passage under a bridge. It is a video projection of running dogs by the artist Sturtevant — and it seems either the dogs are chasing passersby, or the passersby are trying to catch them.
In Marianna Simnett’s project, sculptures imitate hot dog stands and video projections inside them: a woman with bright makeup speaks long and insistently, then slams the metal shutter of the stand with a crash, leaving the unlucky viewer utterly confused and without a hot dog.
Artist Urs Fischer added a gracefully curved skeleton, extremely organically integrated, into a small fountain on the market square. Nearby is a small exhibition of sculptures with skeletons in everyday poses and a life-size figure of a drinking man suspiciously resembling Trump, made from candle wax and gradually burning away (a typical technique for this artist, fascinated by the theme of memento mori).
Foundation Beuerel shows a retrospective of the American artist of Latvian origin Vija Celmins. She initially depicted moments of everyday life, then worked on plastic reinterpretations of images from the media and reflections on the perception of catastrophe — making very detached graphite drawings of airplanes, creating paintings of starry skies and natural textures. A certain feeling of detachment and coldness characterizes all her works, from the earliest to the latest.
The painting museum shows all large and impressive, from Mark Rothko to Mark Bradford, with stunning works by Marlene Dumas. The museum itself is excellently organized, surrounded by a magical garden with ponds and water lilies, and is highly recommended.
Liste is the best known among the satellite fairs, representing younger galleries than the main Art Basel does. And it must be said, Liste differs strongly in medium: if Art Basel consists of 2D works and about 90% are paintings, half the works at Liste are objects, sculptures, and strange things of various formats, while the other half is, of course, painting and 2D. It’s almost always solo booths, which makes sense since there is simply not enough space at Liste. And as a result, Liste does not give the impression of a supermarket.
But let’s look closer at Liste. The booth of Tiwani Contemporary, a gallery based in London and Lagos, attracted my attention. It mainly works with African, primarily Nigerian, artists. Here are works by Virginia Chihota from Zimbabwe — her painting, expressive and rich in color, somewhat comical, can be seen in London. In the series What do you see when you look at me ohh God?, the image of a wooden stool is constantly present — a kind of pedestal for the figure of the artist, which spreads across the canvas space and flows in different directions, merging with the surrounding space.
I liked the Sissi Club gallery from Marseille, showing the artist of Tunisian origin Inès Di Folco Jemni. Her works mix the lives of three female historical figures — Mary Magdalene, Circe, and the Sufi poet Rabia al-Adawiyya — in their native landscapes of Baghdad, Greece, the cave of St. Victoria, etc., as well as the artist’s private life, her family and acquaintances, with invented, fantastic elements. At first glance naive, the works prove technically complex with tempera and oil washes giving a certain deep shimmer to the color. The parallels between women’s stories from different cultures, into which the artist seems to weave her body and own story like a ribbon in a braid, make her works multilayered.
The London Nicoletti gallery presented the artist Ana Viktoria Dzinic. In the series titled Romantisch, through a mix of print techniques (a hybrid analog-digital technique imitating C-type print) and painting, the artist searches for a new place for portraiture in post-Instagram visuality. The works seem simultaneously nostalgic, like half-forgotten memories, and clearly address social media aesthetics where certain aspects of life are publicly displayed. The approve-before-post doctrine becomes a kind of slogan changing art and the very perception of the person. The artist subtly and precisely finds ephemeral details of change, which has brought her considerable success in recent years.
Sophie Utikal’s work on fabric at the Ebensberger Gallery (Berlin) are interesting. Semi-transparent images on organza are placed in space, overlapping each other. The artist’s works inherit Colombian traditions of woven panel-installations arpilleras, which she learned from women in her family (though she was born in the USA). The works depict everyday scenes revealing the themes of pregnancy, motherhood, women’s domestic life, as well as physiological images such as fallopian tubes and ovaries. Thus, the viewer enters a woman’s perception, learning her body inside and out.
But perhaps the absolute painting favorite of the fair is the young artist Miruna Radovici at the Romanian gallery Suprainfinit booth. Several artists are presented there, but Radovici’s painting — darkish, minimalist, compositionally flawless — was the most liked. In the painting Man-eater (2024), the image of a person, forest, and flying animal are done completely differently, creating a feeling of an in-between world, a liminal space on the edge of reality, fairy tale, and dreamlike. The dark schematic forest refers to Slavic (possibly Romanian?) fairy tales: a ghostly figure reminiscent of Bacon, neither alive nor dead, either trapped by spreading abstract graphic forms or awaiting a victim. At the same time, the work looks sincere, bold, deep, and absolutely non-illustrative.
The booth of the Palace Enterprise gallery also surprised: at first visually pleasing — semi-abstract, semi-transparent fabric appliqués by Adam Christensen, behind which videos and objects hide. A boudoir aesthetic, perhaps vintage lingerie. But then you notice that the subject of one of the fabric works is a woman in a sexualized pose with bound hands (reminder: the artist is male). Demonstration of this kind of work would probably have caused a scandal three or two years ago, but now it clearly passed on to the Liste art fair without questions. So, the thesis about collectors who are only required to have a wallet is valid.
It’s important to say the following. An untrained viewer covering 50 kilometers on foot over the course of a few days, surrounded by all kinds of art—magnificent, good, bad, very bad, or so bad it’s already good—might get the impression that anyone who cobbles something together from art materials immediately ends up at Art Basel. Because the number of artists on display is incredible —not a legion, not a regiment, but the size of a mid-sized provincial city in China. But it’s crucial to remember: Art Basel, like any major fair of its kind, is the crème-de-la-crème of commercial (and not only commercial) art. One in 500 artists probably makes it here—and if we’re talking about Romania, Hungary, or even Spain, it’s one in 10,000.
And when you keep that in mind, the scale of the art world doesn’t just impress—it blows your imagination wide open. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of artists don’t make money from art, or don’t make money from art alone. That fact alone makes the trip to Art Basel worth it—to witness this strange, mad, astonishing cross-section of human activity. Unkilled by crises, artificial intelligence, or wars.
