LVH Art Guide to Art Basel Week
To make the most of your experience during Art Basel week, LVH Art has curated a guide of the best institutional exhibitions and gallery shows taking place this week.
The highlight, and what brings everyone to Basel of course is Art Basel, where you’ll be welcomed at Messeplatz by Katharina Grosse’s vibrant installation (featured on the cover image of this article), which transforms the plaza with bold sprays of colour in her iconic spray paint style. For the Art Basel fair, we have selected our highlights from the gallery previews.
About this commission the artist has said, “It’s the first time that a painter has been invited to take over the 53,800-square-foot Messeplatz. The challenge with that piece is that I have to be up to that scale. My movement determines how the place is being perceived. The spray gun will help me expand my reach. With this tool, I can paint endlessly… Fair-goers are transient. Once they step into the Messeplatz, they will become part of the work. I really want to create a painting that is almost like a threshold between reality and fiction. It is a membrane: you can walk through it, step out of it at any time, or stay in it as much as you want.”
When you are at Art Basel make sure not to miss the Unlimited section. Unlimited is Art Basel’s platform for large-scale projects that defy the limits of standard art fair booths. Spanning 16,000 square meters, it features monumental installations, immersive video works, large sculptures, performances, and site-specific creations. Curated by Giovanni Carmine and selected by the Basel Selection Committee.
We also recommend Liste Art Fair, founded in 1996 as “The Young Art Fair in Basel.” It is a premier international platform for discovering new voices in contemporary art, showcasing emerging galleries and artists at the forefront of current artistic trends.
Julian Charrière : Midnight Zone
At Museum Tinguely
11 June – 2 November 2025
The comprehensive solo exhibition at Museum Tinguely showcases photographs, sculptures, installations, and new video works that explore our relationship with Earth as a watery world—a vast liquidity that envelops much of the planet through seas, lakes, and ice. These waters serve as habitats for countless organisms and sustain circulatory systems essential to climate stability. Spanning three floors, Midnight Zone delves into underwater ecologies, from the locally significant Rhine to distant oceans, examining the intricate dynamics of water as a vital element increasingly impacted by human activity.
“Water is not a landscape—it is the condition of all life, the first skin of the Earth, the medium of our becoming.” – Julian Charrière
Jordan Wolfson : Little Room
At Fondation Beyeler
1 June – 3 August 2025
The Fondation Beyeler is proud to present Little Room, a new virtual reality (VR) installation by American artist Jordan Wolfson, premiering for the first time at the museum. This immersive work invites visitors into an experimental environment where they actively participate in the evolving experience. Upon entering, visitors are paired either with a companion of their choice or a stranger. Following an individual 3D full-body scan, they are transported into a virtual space where each participant perceives themselves through the body of the other, resulting in progressively surreal and disorienting physical and spatial distortions.
Presentation of the Collection
At Fondation Beyeler
25 May – 31 August 2025
Fondation Beyeler will show a presentation of its collection focussing exclusively on painting. Rooms devoted to individual artists feature works that have left a distinct imprint on this traditional medium and opened up new perspectives. A special highlight is the museum debut of Gerhard Richter’s digital projection Moving Picture (946-3), Kyoto Version, 2019–2024. This year’s Daros room at the Fondation Beyeler is devoted to Mark Bradford. The display further features Andy Warhol’s monumental painting Sixty Last Suppers, 1986, on loan from the Nicola Erni Collection. Another focus is placed on Pablo Picasso, with a comprehensive gathering of more than 30 paintings and sculpture.
Vija Celmins
At Fondation Beyeler
15 June – 21 September 2025
The Fondation Beyeler will present a comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to the artist Vija Celmins. Celmins’ visual language is both nuanced and compelling. Early in her career, she focused on everyday objects as well as scenes depicting disaster and war. Over time, her attention shifted to the intricate surfaces of spider webs, oceans, and deserts, and more recently to the night sky and distant galaxies. Her works resist a fleeting glance, revealing a captivating beauty that balances intimacy with detachment upon closer engagement. This exhibition marks the most significant presentation of Celmins’ work in Europe in nearly two decades.
Steve McQueen : Bass
At Schaulager
15 June – 16 November 2025
At The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager will present Bass (2024), one of Steve McQueen’s most recent and notably his most abstract work to date. Created in close dialogue with Schaulager’s architecture, Bass draws inspiration from McQueen’s deep exploration of how light, color, and sound influence our physical perception of space and time.
“What I love about light and sound is that they are both created through movement and fluidity. They can be molded into any shape, like vapor or a scent; they can sneak into any nook and cranny. I also love the beginning point where something isn’t a form as much as it is all-encompassing.” – Steve McQueen, 2025
Dala Nasser Xíloma. MCCCLXXXVI
At Kunsthalle Basel
16 May – 10 August 2025
Dala Nasser’s practice explores abstraction and alternative modes of image-making. While integrating sound, performance, and film, she remains fundamentally a painter, engaging deeply with the medium’s essential materials—fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, and lines. Her indexical paintings of land, created through direct contact on site, contrast sharply with the expansive vistas typical of traditional landscape painting. For her debut exhibition in Switzerland at Kunsthalle Basel, Nasser envisions a reconstruction of the Byzantine church of Kabr Hiram in Qana, Lebanon—a site that no longer exists within an inaccessible landscape. As part of this project, she experiments for the first time with cyanotype-treated fabrics, bringing lost spaces into tangible form.
Medardo Rosso : Inventing Modern Sculpture
At Kunstmuseum Basel
20 March – 10 August 2025
Sculptor, photographer, and master of artistic staging, rival to Auguste Rodin and a role model for numerous artists: around 1900, Medardo Rosso (1858 in Turin, Italy–1928 in Milan, Italy) revolutionized sculpture. The exhibition, which was produced in cooperation with the mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic, helps visitors understand Rosso’s radical explorations of form (and its undoing), material, and technique across media. The extraordinary and lasting impact of his œuvre is revealed by encounters with works by over sixty artists from the past one hundred years including Lynda Benglis, Constantin Brâncuși, Edgar Degas, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Meret Oppenheim, Auguste Rodin, and Alina Szapocznikow.
Meret Oppenheim
At Hauser & Wirth
4 June – 19 July 2025
An artist of powerful originality and singular vision, the German-born Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913 – 1985) remains one of the most dynamic figures of 20th-century art. Despite being affiliated with some of the most influential art movements of the 20th Century, including Surrealism and Dada, Oppenheim defied categorization. Her wide-ranging, boundary-breaking practice will be showcased this June in an exhibition spanning painting, drawing, sculpture and design.
“I simply always did what I felt like doing, anything else wouldn’t agree with the way I work, committing to a particular style would’ve bored me to death.” – Meret Oppenheim
Ella Kruglyanskaya : Backgrounds
At Contemporary Fine Arts
17 June – 2 August 2025
Ella Kruglyanskaya is a contemporary Latvian painter recognized for her bold, stylized portrayals of female figures engaged in dynamic, often theatrical scenes. Her work critically engages with historical tropes of Western painting, particularly the representation of the female form, reinterpreting and updating these conventions through a distinctly contemporary lens. Drawing influence from a range of sources—including Philip Guston as well as mid-20th century fashion and film posters—Kruglyanskaya integrates humor as a central element in her practice.
Humor is really important in my work. Also humor is a very modern feature of art,” Kruglyanskaya has explained. “There is something quite modern in this attitude that we don’t take ourselves so seriously.”
Ian Hamilton Finlay : Fragments
At Stampa Gallery
08 May – 16 August 2025
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of IAN HAMILTON FINLAY’s birth (1925–2006), STAMPA presents FRAGMENTS, an exhibition dedicated to the renowned Scottish artist, poet, and founder of the iconic artists’ garden Little Sparta. A leading figure in British Concrete Poetry, Finlay revitalized classical traditions through a multidisciplinary practice that explored poetry, history, and natural philosophy. His work celebrated the enduring power of language by giving it both artistic dimension and tangible form—poetically embedding words into the fabric of the world.
The original Signale exhibition, held 60 years ago, was dedicated to a form of painting often referred to as “hard-edged”—primarily large-format, geometric abstraction. It brought together works by prominent American artists such as Kenneth Noland, Al Held, Jules Olitski, and Ellsworth Kelly, alongside those of lesser-known European painters like Hansjörg Mattmüller, Georg Karl Pfahler, John Plumb, and William Turnbull. This curatorial strategy—placing celebrated figures in dialogue with less familiar counterparts—was one also employed by Harald Szeemann, the protégé and eventual successor of curator Arnold Rüdlinger in Bern.
Now, in 2025, Galerie Mueller revisits this influential moment in art history with Signals, marking the 60th anniversary of the original exhibition. The new show brings together works by Swiss artists Theodor Bally and Luigi Lurati, German painter Georg Karl Pfahler, and American artists Al Held, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. Through Signals, Galerie Mueller continues its investigation into the transatlantic dialogue in postwar abstraction, shedding new light on the artistic conversations that shaped modern art.
The exhibition is set within Basel’s private airport, Air Service Basel, and extends throughout the entire facility. Artworks are thoughtfully integrated into the airport’s existing spaces—including hangars, offices, waiting rooms, private lounges, and even the basement—creating a dynamic dialogue between the environment and the art on display.
LVH Art speaks with Tastemaker and Art Patron Giancarlo Giammetti on PM23, Valentino and the Art of Legacy
