アートバーゼル2025をナビゲートするためのAnOtherガイド

Few art fairs carry the cultural cachet of Art Basel’s flagship event. Since 1970, when gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt set up shop, the annual congregation has cemented its status as the most significant pit-stop in the art world’s calendar. And so, for one week only this June, the otherwise easygoing city – situated right at the intersection of Switzerland, Germany and France – is overrun with financially endowed collectors, breathless journos and seasoned curators, such as the inimitably Swiss Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The crown jewel in what is now an international monopoly of fairs – Miami, Paris, Hong Kong, and, now, Qatar – the trade show promises a series of city-specific activations, talks and institutional exhibitions held in tandem to the main exhibition. The numbers for this year? 289 galleries (from 42 territories), 67 large installations and 20 public commissions in the locale. As well as that, there are also 36 newly announced nominees of the inaugural Art Basel Awards, a prize supporting talents from art, fashion, architecture and beyond. 

Attracting celebrities, off-duty fashion designers and loyal clients including Bernard Arnault and François Pinault, the fair is renowned for its blue-chip sales and extravagant spargel dinners, however, it’s also a springboard for new talents breaking into the global market. Here, veteran names – Sprüth Magers, David Zwirner, Sadie Coles, Herald St, Maureen Paley – share the Messeplatz with baby galleries. Careers are catalysed overnight, and fresh perspectives appear along every row. Between the Basquiats and Warhols, you’ll find works from early-career artists and older cult figures dealing with topics – diaspora, ecological tragedy, trans-ness, class – pertinent to a contemporary audience alongside formalist displays. 

Of course, spending ample time in every single booth is nigh on impossible. As such, we’ve drawn together some unmissable galleries and moments you’ll want to see while doing the rounds.

With arguably one of the strongest programmes to come out of London this past ten years, the Cambridge Heath-based gallery – founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, originally, as a small space inside Piccadilly Circus’ tube station – has become a force on the Hackney art circuit. With talents such as JW Anderson favourite Dean Sameshima and avant-garde performance-cum-drag artist Sin Wai Kin, the Soft Opening roster is strong. 

This year, for its sophomore appearance at Art Basel, the gallery shows the cross-temporal, archival practice of Ebun Sodipo, an artist who has quickly risen the ranks with her tender assemblages. Previously, she’s spliced together elements of Yoruba culture, iconic Naomi Campbell moments, Aaliyah references and subtle, blink-and-miss-it details, sealing them beneath resin. For Art Basel, Sodipo airs four unseen works, structured along the vectors of mood and colour. “I was in a very emotional place when I made them, and it’s quite obvious,” she says of the works, which teem with romance, yearning and nostalgia. “Popular culture was almost a focus in previous works, but this new collection is just me entirely in my feels. I don’t think there are many images of Black trans women in love or being loved openly. I think a lot of people imagine our lives as full of struggle and death drops, so perhaps this provides space for people to imagine this.”

In the Statements section, Rhea Dillon – an artist who made waves in the art world with her quietly seismic Tate Britain exhibition, An Alterable Terrain – presents a compelling wall-based installation, Leaning Figures (2024), a series of cabinet glassware popular amongst Afro-Caribbean family homes in tight mahogany vitrines. The encasement serves as both a spectre of the tight conditions experienced by Black bodies in the transatlantic slave trade, while the repose-like positioning expresses rest. “A body at rest post labour deserves to lean and does so here – yet it is also constricted by space and time, creating a haunting of the dual reality that Black bodies have to deal with in society daily,” Dillon says.

Headed up by Ash L’ange and Nicky Verber, Herald St is an east London institution with a strict and elegant curatorial eye. The gallery is showing a sizable group presentation at Basel with artists including Sang Woo Kim, Poppy Jones and Francis Offman. Additionally, Herald St dedicates a whole exhibition to the whimsical, figurative works of late Greek painter Alekos Fassianos, who the gallery first showed in 2023. 

Of special note in the gallery’s main booth are the works of German artist and Balenciaga collaborator, Nicole Wermers, who presents Fainter (Mme X) (2025), a clay sculpture depicting a woman in a flurried gown, mid-faint, and the now viral Domestic Tail (Light Brown Spotted) (2025), a hand-sewn cat tail coiled along a hose winder. The latter was initially conceived for an exhibition in an 18th-century grand palais in Moscow. “The entire building – including the grandest rooms and the servants’ quarters – had been converted into exhibition spaces,” says Wermers. “I wanted to produce sculptures that could be in several rooms at the same time, and thought of pets and how easily they are able to traverse architectural class boundaries.”

Another highlight artist is Michael Dean, a Newcastle-Upon-Tyne-born artist who works with concrete and collected junk in a bid to cement his memories. For Basel, he presents his Unfuckingtitled (snake and or ladder) 4 (2025) work – snake-scaled concrete tiling with fire-resistant cladding. Coloured like the Union Jack, the work brings to mind popular concepts like ‘class mobility’ that were touted during Dean’s upbringing under Thatcher. “To say the entirety of my research has been a lone social experiment in constructing a political writing practice in direct opposition to the forces which closed my local library, defunded my community and school … could be described as being something of an overstatement,” adds Dean.

Founded in Munich in 2016, Nir Altman has quickly earned its status as the kind of gallery where hot, young things are found, eschewing traditional, easy-sell practices, embracing process-led artists. One such figure within its programme is the satirically astute Ndayé Kouagou, a Paris-based millennial working across disciplines; he has worked as a DJ, a motion designer in fashion, and now straddles performance and video. In the past, he’s dissected the phenomena of our time, including influencer and vlogger culture, making smart use of costume and cliché text for his wall-based typography.

For this solo presentation, he continues in the vein of internet culture, looking specifically at how people are depicted in the world of ‘online content’, introducing new characters for viewers to engage with. “I cannot wait for everybody to meet and discover them. The idea is to have multiple voices reacting to the same interrogations, to inspect different aspects of our social behaviour,” he explains. “All I can say is, ‘It‘s all fun and games until it‘s not’”.

Walking distance from the Messeplatz, Museum Tinguely has a blockbuster exhibition by French-Swiss filmmaker, Julian Charrière. Departing from the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone – a light-less plain in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii to Mexico where life has thrived – Midnight Zone brings to light the richness of a submerged, deeply hidden world. The result is a show that, according to curator Roland Wetzel, has been more than five years in the making.

Acting less like a documentarian and more like a visual provocateur, the artist immerses viewers with a meticulously assembled sensory experience, encouraging a sense of flow and pause. The thinking behind this slower, watery pace? “I wanted the experience to feel fluid, sequential – for viewers to dissolve into it, to become porous,” he explains. Crucially, he draws attention to a natural wonder that is now under threat due to long-term sea mining. “These environments aren’t just mirrors of crisis. They are conditions of being. And perhaps by inhabiting their rhythms, even briefly, we can begin to feel the deeper stakes of care.”

Set up in 2010 by duo Jeremy Epstein and Charlie Fellowes, Edel Assanti is a Fitzrovia gallery with a curatorial approach that’s anything but typical of its location. Representing artists with extreme or ostensibly non-commercial practices, it’s consistently proven itself to be an exception to the rule with a roster name-checking fetishistic world-builder, Jenkin Van Zyl, and the propulsive painter, Dale Lewis. In fact, Edel Assanti takes the ecosystem of a varied, experimental art world very seriously, a fact exemplified by Epstein’s role in co-founding London Gallery Weekend. The approach for Edel Assanti’s Art Basel outing follows suit, presenting a solo presentation dedicated to Lonnie Holley, a revered Alabaman who is consistently labelled under terms like ‘outsider artist’ despite being, in Epstein’s words, “one of the most influential living American artists.” 

His first solo showing at Art Basel, it features bracing works, such as Holley’s Without Skin (2024) sculpture, a fireman’s hose typical of those used for crowd control during the Civil Rights Movement, delicate wired sculptures and an articulated, cut-out church pew – some of which one might recognise from his critically acclaimed show at Camden Art Centre last year. Fragile and haunting, his work makes smart use of trash he’s collected, working items with his hands in a way that makes them feel lived. “I’ve always cared deeply about the materials I use – where they come from, what they were used for, and who used them before me,” says Holley. “The pieces I’m showing at Basel come directly from what I’ve been seeing happen in America. These issues aren’t new, but they continue to shape the lives of so many people, and that’s something I try to reflect in my work.” 

Freddie Powell, the spunky art dealer behind Ginny on Frederick, opened his fiendishly followed gallery in 2020 in a converted sandwich shop. Now, round the corner in a larger Faringdon space, Powell has successfully catapulted careers of young, singular-vision artists, not least Jack O’Brien – the 2023 winner of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze – and Alex Margo Arden, the theatrically obsessed RA graduate who showed a standout exhibition at Auto Italia earlier this year.

At Art Basel, the endearingly nicknamed ‘Ginny’ is showing another of its folk stars, Alexandra Metcalf, whose solo booth in the Statements section comprises four, imposing grandfather clocks – sourced in a long, laborious hunt through antique shops, estate sales and online auctions. Each clock has been pricked with giant quilt pins. It’s moving for a number of reasons; first and foremost, it’s a major, full-circle moment for the artist, who first met Powell when they were both studying at Rhode Island School of Design a decade ago. “In the lead-up to Basel, a lot of our conversations were about holding onto the emotional integrity of Alexandra’s work while embracing the scale and context of a fair booth,” says Powell. “We wanted to resist the temptation to make it overly polished or monumental for the sake of spectacle.”

Indeed, characteristic of Metcalf’s work (which mixes autofiction, heavy-handed workmanship and, conversely, domestic softness), the installation reads like a breathable commentary on memory and tradition, following neatly on from the quasi-Victorian sunloungers that line her current solo show at The Perimeter in London. Why the clocks? “They’re almost sentient objects that measure not just time, but the emotional weight of experience,” says Metcalf. “It’s about that push and pull between comfort and constraint.”

Starting life as an artist-run space in 2009, the Guatemala City-based gallery consistently pushes confrontational work, embracing artists from across the globe with socio-political practices. Shepherds Bush-raised medic-turned-artist Abbas Zahedi’s solo presentation for Basel fits the bill, acting like an extension of his ongoing project at Tate Modern, Begin Again, a circuit of instruments set up inside the building that receive and give out sounds based on the space. The idea is that with every stop-start in playback, an opportunity for rebirth arises. As part of this, Zahedi has organised a public support group to run every first Saturday at Tate Modern, complete with professional therapists and open, reflective sessions designed for grappling with loss and grief. 

For his Basel display – another set of sonic and sculptural works – this process continues, offering a porous and non-traditional site for encounters. “It’s not just a static display but a proposition – a sincere invitation to the Basel audience to redirect their attention toward one of the few genuinely public and open spaces for art that we still have in the UK,” says Zahedi. “It’s not about disruption or intervention for its own sake; it’s about careful redirection, attunement, and building a different kind of public.”

The Art Basel Awards

The first of its kind, the new scheme is being touted as the Oscars of the art world. Medallists have been chosen across categories, with the likes of David Hammons, Lubaina Himid and Joan Jonas coming under the ‘Icon’ category; Ibrahim Mahama and Cao Fei under ‘Established’; and Saidiya Hartman, Prada collaborator Formafantasma and Grace Wales Bonner under ‘Cross-Disciplinary Creators’. 

Organised in partnership with Boss, the 36 medallists will together shortlist 12 gold medallists among themselves to be announced in December in Miami. The goal? To build bonds across artistic practices, usher in impressive commissions and to financially support artists in reaching the next stage of their career. It’s an exciting moment for the art world, and one that feels aligned with the past decade’s shifts in institutional programming. Ours is a time when figures, such as Grace Wales Bonner – who collaborated with Mahama on her S/S23 collection, published Hammons works in her Dream in the Rhythm (2023) book and joined Himid in conversation for her 2022 Tate Britain show – are showing academic and artistic range, pushing the limits of fashion and art in way that goes beyond institutional tradition. In that sense, these awards are just the start.

Art Basel takes place at Messe Basel in Switzerland from 19 – 22 June 2025.

Few art fairs carry the cultural cachet of Art Basel’s flagship event. Since 1970, when gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudl Bruckner and Balz Hilt set up shop, the annual congregation has cemented its status as the most significant pit-stop in the art world’s calendar. And so, for one week only this June, the otherwise easygoing city – situated right at the intersection of Switzerland, Germany and France – is overrun with financially endowed collectors, breathless journos and seasoned curators, such as the inimitably Swiss Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The crown jewel in what is now an international monopoly of fairs – Miami, Paris, Hong Kong, and, now, Qatar – the trade show promises a series of city-specific activations, talks and institutional exhibitions held in tandem to the main exhibition. The numbers for this year? 289 galleries (from 42 territories), 67 large installations and 20 public commissions in the locale. As well as that, there are also 36 newly announced nominees of the inaugural Art Basel Awards, a prize supporting talents from art, fashion, architecture and beyond. 

Attracting celebrities, off-duty fashion designers and loyal clients including Bernard Arnault and François Pinault, the fair is renowned for its blue-chip sales and extravagant spargel dinners, however, it’s also a springboard for new talents breaking into the global market. Here, veteran names – Sprüth Magers, David Zwirner, Sadie Coles, Herald St, Maureen Paley – share the Messeplatz with baby galleries. Careers are catalysed overnight, and fresh perspectives appear along every row. Between the Basquiats and Warhols, you’ll find works from early-career artists and older cult figures dealing with topics – diaspora, ecological tragedy, trans-ness, class – pertinent to a contemporary audience alongside formalist displays. 

Of course, spending ample time in every single booth is nigh on impossible. As such, we’ve drawn together some unmissable galleries and moments you’ll want to see while doing the rounds.

With arguably one of the strongest programmes to come out of London this past ten years, the Cambridge Heath-based gallery – founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, originally, as a small space inside Piccadilly Circus’ tube station – has become a force on the Hackney art circuit. With talents such as JW Anderson favourite Dean Sameshima and avant-garde performance-cum-drag artist Sin Wai Kin, the Soft Opening roster is strong. 

This year, for its sophomore appearance at Art Basel, the gallery shows the cross-temporal, archival practice of Ebun Sodipo, an artist who has quickly risen the ranks with her tender assemblages. Previously, she’s spliced together elements of Yoruba culture, iconic Naomi Campbell moments, Aaliyah references and subtle, blink-and-miss-it details, sealing them beneath resin. For Art Basel, Sodipo airs four unseen works, structured along the vectors of mood and colour. “I was in a very emotional place when I made them, and it’s quite obvious,” she says of the works, which teem with romance, yearning and nostalgia. “Popular culture was almost a focus in previous works, but this new collection is just me entirely in my feels. I don’t think there are many images of Black trans women in love or being loved openly. I think a lot of people imagine our lives as full of struggle and death drops, so perhaps this provides space for people to imagine this.”

In the Statements section, Rhea Dillon – an artist who made waves in the art world with her quietly seismic Tate Britain exhibition, An Alterable Terrain – presents a compelling wall-based installation, Leaning Figures (2024), a series of cabinet glassware popular amongst Afro-Caribbean family homes in tight mahogany vitrines. The encasement serves as both a spectre of the tight conditions experienced by Black bodies in the transatlantic slave trade, while the repose-like positioning expresses rest. “A body at rest post labour deserves to lean and does so here – yet it is also constricted by space and time, creating a haunting of the dual reality that Black bodies have to deal with in society daily,” Dillon says.

Headed up by Ash L’ange and Nicky Verber, Herald St is an east London institution with a strict and elegant curatorial eye. The gallery is showing a sizable group presentation at Basel with artists including Sang Woo Kim, Poppy Jones and Francis Offman. Additionally, Herald St dedicates a whole exhibition to the whimsical, figurative works of late Greek painter Alekos Fassianos, who the gallery first showed in 2023. 

Of special note in the gallery’s main booth are the works of German artist and Balenciaga collaborator, Nicole Wermers, who presents Fainter (Mme X) (2025), a clay sculpture depicting a woman in a flurried gown, mid-faint, and the now viral Domestic Tail (Light Brown Spotted) (2025), a hand-sewn cat tail coiled along a hose winder. The latter was initially conceived for an exhibition in an 18th-century grand palais in Moscow. “The entire building – including the grandest rooms and the servants’ quarters – had been converted into exhibition spaces,” says Wermers. “I wanted to produce sculptures that could be in several rooms at the same time, and thought of pets and how easily they are able to traverse architectural class boundaries.”

Another highlight artist is Michael Dean, a Newcastle-Upon-Tyne-born artist who works with concrete and collected junk in a bid to cement his memories. For Basel, he presents his Unfuckingtitled (snake and or ladder) 4 (2025) work – snake-scaled concrete tiling with fire-resistant cladding. Coloured like the Union Jack, the work brings to mind popular concepts like ‘class mobility’ that were touted during Dean’s upbringing under Thatcher. “To say the entirety of my research has been a lone social experiment in constructing a political writing practice in direct opposition to the forces which closed my local library, defunded my community and school … could be described as being something of an overstatement,” adds Dean.

Founded in Munich in 2016, Nir Altman has quickly earned its status as the kind of gallery where hot, young things are found, eschewing traditional, easy-sell practices, embracing process-led artists. One such figure within its programme is the satirically astute Ndayé Kouagou, a Paris-based millennial working across disciplines; he has worked as a DJ, a motion designer in fashion, and now straddles performance and video. In the past, he’s dissected the phenomena of our time, including influencer and vlogger culture, making smart use of costume and cliché text for his wall-based typography.

For this solo presentation, he continues in the vein of internet culture, looking specifically at how people are depicted in the world of ‘online content’, introducing new characters for viewers to engage with. “I cannot wait for everybody to meet and discover them. The idea is to have multiple voices reacting to the same interrogations, to inspect different aspects of our social behaviour,” he explains. “All I can say is, ‘It‘s all fun and games until it‘s not’”.

Walking distance from the Messeplatz, Museum Tinguely has a blockbuster exhibition by French-Swiss filmmaker, Julian Charrière. Departing from the Clarion-Clipperton fracture zone – a light-less plain in the Pacific ocean between Hawaii to Mexico where life has thrived – Midnight Zone brings to light the richness of a submerged, deeply hidden world. The result is a show that, according to curator Roland Wetzel, has been more than five years in the making.

Acting less like a documentarian and more like a visual provocateur, the artist immerses viewers with a meticulously assembled sensory experience, encouraging a sense of flow and pause. The thinking behind this slower, watery pace? “I wanted the experience to feel fluid, sequential – for viewers to dissolve into it, to become porous,” he explains. Crucially, he draws attention to a natural wonder that is now under threat due to long-term sea mining. “These environments aren’t just mirrors of crisis. They are conditions of being. And perhaps by inhabiting their rhythms, even briefly, we can begin to feel the deeper stakes of care.”

Set up in 2010 by duo Jeremy Epstein and Charlie Fellowes, Edel Assanti is a Fitzrovia gallery with a curatorial approach that’s anything but typical of its location. Representing artists with extreme or ostensibly non-commercial practices, it’s consistently proven itself to be an exception to the rule with a roster name-checking fetishistic world-builder, Jenkin Van Zyl, and the propulsive painter, Dale Lewis. In fact, Edel Assanti takes the ecosystem of a varied, experimental art world very seriously, a fact exemplified by Epstein’s role in co-founding London Gallery Weekend. The approach for Edel Assanti’s Art Basel outing follows suit, presenting a solo presentation dedicated to Lonnie Holley, a revered Alabaman who is consistently labelled under terms like ‘outsider artist’ despite being, in Epstein’s words, “one of the most influential living American artists.” 

His first solo showing at Art Basel, it features bracing works, such as Holley’s Without Skin (2024) sculpture, a fireman’s hose typical of those used for crowd control during the Civil Rights Movement, delicate wired sculptures and an articulated, cut-out church pew – some of which one might recognise from his critically acclaimed show at Camden Art Centre last year. Fragile and haunting, his work makes smart use of trash he’s collected, working items with his hands in a way that makes them feel lived. “I’ve always cared deeply about the materials I use – where they come from, what they were used for, and who used them before me,” says Holley. “The pieces I’m showing at Basel come directly from what I’ve been seeing happen in America. These issues aren’t new, but they continue to shape the lives of so many people, and that’s something I try to reflect in my work.” 

Freddie Powell, the spunky art dealer behind Ginny on Frederick, opened his fiendishly followed gallery in 2020 in a converted sandwich shop. Now, round the corner in a larger Faringdon space, Powell has successfully catapulted careers of young, singular-vision artists, not least Jack O’Brien – the 2023 winner of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze – and Alex Margo Arden, the theatrically obsessed RA graduate who showed a standout exhibition at Auto Italia earlier this year.

At Art Basel, the endearingly nicknamed ‘Ginny’ is showing another of its folk stars, Alexandra Metcalf, whose solo booth in the Statements section comprises four, imposing grandfather clocks – sourced in a long, laborious hunt through antique shops, estate sales and online auctions. Each clock has been pricked with giant quilt pins. It’s moving for a number of reasons; first and foremost, it’s a major, full-circle moment for the artist, who first met Powell when they were both studying at Rhode Island School of Design a decade ago. “In the lead-up to Basel, a lot of our conversations were about holding onto the emotional integrity of Alexandra’s work while embracing the scale and context of a fair booth,” says Powell. “We wanted to resist the temptation to make it overly polished or monumental for the sake of spectacle.”

Indeed, characteristic of Metcalf’s work (which mixes autofiction, heavy-handed workmanship and, conversely, domestic softness), the installation reads like a breathable commentary on memory and tradition, following neatly on from the quasi-Victorian sunloungers that line her current solo show at The Perimeter in London. Why the clocks? “They’re almost sentient objects that measure not just time, but the emotional weight of experience,” says Metcalf. “It’s about that push and pull between comfort and constraint.”

Starting life as an artist-run space in 2009, the Guatemala City-based gallery consistently pushes confrontational work, embracing artists from across the globe with socio-political practices. Shepherds Bush-raised medic-turned-artist Abbas Zahedi’s solo presentation for Basel fits the bill, acting like an extension of his ongoing project at Tate Modern, Begin Again, a circuit of instruments set up inside the building that receive and give out sounds based on the space. The idea is that with every stop-start in playback, an opportunity for rebirth arises. As part of this, Zahedi has organised a public support group to run every first Saturday at Tate Modern, complete with professional therapists and open, reflective sessions designed for grappling with loss and grief. 

For his Basel display – another set of sonic and sculptural works – this process continues, offering a porous and non-traditional site for encounters. “It’s not just a static display but a proposition – a sincere invitation to the Basel audience to redirect their attention toward one of the few genuinely public and open spaces for art that we still have in the UK,” says Zahedi. “It’s not about disruption or intervention for its own sake; it’s about careful redirection, attunement, and building a different kind of public.”

The Art Basel Awards

The first of its kind, the new scheme is being touted as the Oscars of the art world. Medallists have been chosen across categories, with the likes of David Hammons, Lubaina Himid and Joan Jonas coming under the ‘Icon’ category; Ibrahim Mahama and Cao Fei under ‘Established’; and Saidiya Hartman, Prada collaborator Formafantasma and Grace Wales Bonner under ‘Cross-Disciplinary Creators’. 

Organised in partnership with Boss, the 36 medallists will together shortlist 12 gold medallists among themselves to be announced in December in Miami. The goal? To build bonds across artistic practices, usher in impressive commissions and to financially support artists in reaching the next stage of their career. It’s an exciting moment for the art world, and one that feels aligned with the past decade’s shifts in institutional programming. Ours is a time when figures, such as Grace Wales Bonner – who collaborated with Mahama on her S/S23 collection, published Hammons works in her Dream in the Rhythm (2023) book and joined Himid in conversation for her 2022 Tate Britain show – are showing academic and artistic range, pushing the limits of fashion and art in way that goes beyond institutional tradition. In that sense, these awards are just the start.

Art Basel takes place at Messe Basel in Switzerland from 19 – 22 June 2025.