For any contemporary art enthusiast, visiting Art Basel for the first time cannot but be a revelation: the “mother of all fairs” presents itself immediately as monumental, starting with the iconic architectural breakthrough of the exhibition complex called Messe Basel, designed by Herzog & de Meuron studio, which constitutes its external antechamber. This covered public area is the entrance to the exhibition pavilions and its evocative central opening, christened by the architects as the “window to the sky”, has become one of the symbols of the Swiss city. Very scenic, this year, was also the intervention by Katharina Grosse (1961, Friburgo in Brisgovia), German visual artist known for her site-specific environmental installations, who on the occasion of the 55th edition of the fair transformed the entire Messeplatz, including the fountain and the facade of Pavilion 2, into a colorful urban cloud of magenta spray paint, applied with industrial spray guns in the days preceding the opening. Art Basel is, without doubt, the main fair of the international art market and once again has brought together almost three hundred galleries among the most renowned (and powerful) in the world, which for a week have turned the fair into a sumptuous museum of 20th and 21st century art.
Katharina Grosse, “Choir”, 2025, site-specific installation in Messeplatz, courtesy of Art Basel
In the stands, spacious as living rooms, works of art have found their place that compete in quality, dimensions and importance of their authors for museum destinations or perhaps, even better, for entry into some mega-collection, capable of orienting institutional acquisitions with its influence. From the crucial days of the VIP preview, mind-boggling transactions have been recorded. To cite some of the most striking cases, the mirror-polished stainless steel lobster by Jeff Koons (York, Pennsylvania, 1955), Lobster, 2007-12, constantly watched by dedicated personnel throughout the entire event, was sold for “seven figures” by Gagosian (New York, United States / London, United Kingdom / Paris, France / Rome, Italy / Geneva, Switzerland / Hong Kong), the painting Mid November Tunnel (2006) by David Hockney (Bradford, Yorkshire, England, 1937) was sold by Annely Juda Fine Art gallery (London, United Kingdom) for a figure between 13 and 17 million dollars to a private collection (the most expensive work sold), while Hauser & Wirth (Zurich, Switzerland / London, United Kingdom / New York, United States / Los Angeles, United States / Somerset, United Kingdom / Hong Kong / St. Moritz, Switzerland) declared to be in negotiation with an institution for Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Guáimaro, Cuba, 1957 – Miami, Florida, 1996) present in the Unlimited section and valued at 16 million dollars. And many other sales were in the millions.
Gagosian booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
These data are made even more intriguing by their capillary but almost under-the-radar leaking in a context where it would certainly be nouveau riche to expect to find some work prices displayed prominently. All those who matter gather there, to negotiate the destinies of contemporary art or, at least, not to miss a parade in which the system shows off in its most opulent guise. Worldly notations aside, at the origin of this prestige there is, as we mentioned at the beginning, the extraordinary quality of the exhibited works, both in stands specializing in great masters from the early twentieth century, and in those where impeccable works by established mid-career artists prevail. This fair is the habitat where trends are consolidated: not, therefore, a laboratory of experimentation but the link between research and its consecration selected by the converging ideas of institutions and mega-collectors. Here one has the opportunity to see for sale what we will then only have access to by visiting a museum of good reputation or some exceptional private residence. Compared to this fair, the others, which we are accustomed to following with interest, seem like a retail declination of trends candidates to predominate (even ephemerally) in the medium term, no longer depowered by more crowded and reduced-scale presentations. The unassailable quality of most of the exhibited works suddenly makes the aesthetic motivations for which certain authors achieve widespread success intelligible here, excellence that is much less evident when more ordinary works by the same artists represent them in less ambitious commercial events. What is called into question, albeit in a generic sense and closer to market reasons than to the original reflections on technical reproducibility, is the well-known question of the aura of the artwork, inevitably put in crisis by an artistic production targeted (or ghettoized) for different collecting brackets, according to a mechanism that recalls the logic of prêt-à-porter.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform)”, 1991, Art Basel Unlimited 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
From the proposals presented by galleries in this fifty-fifth edition, it emerged clearly how painting has regained a position of absolute protagonism, confirming a trend already in place for some time. Fortunately, there was almost no trace of that surreal, deforming and approximate figuration that for some years seems to predominate in Italian fairs, demonstrating how painting need not fear appearing nostalgic or quotationist if it returns (finally) to taking care of drawing and color. The challenge, now, is to metabolize the lessons of historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes to develop unprecedented languages, often hybridized with contemporary technologies and ecological sensibilities. The most represented painting in the booths of leading galleries proved to be monumental painting, expression of an amplified gestuality and a conscious claim of the physical presence of the work in space, regardless of abstract or figurative orientation. Emblematic of how contemporary painting has absorbed the lesson of conceptual art without renouncing the material values of the support are, for example, the two works by Mark Bradford (Los Angeles, 1961) Ain’t Got Time to Worry and Sin and Love and Fear (2025) presented by Hauser & Wirth (London, United Kingdom / New York, USA / Zurich, Switzerland). The artist, hybridizing painting with the assemblage of urban recovery materials, explores the social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations with elaborate procedures of formal, material and conceptual stratification. Another strand that emerged strongly is that of new generation abstract painting, which has managed to overcome the dichotomy between warm and cold abstraction by proposing unprecedented syntheses in which experimentation with industrial pigments, fluorescent paints and mixed techniques makes the pictorial tradition dialogue with the visual universe of new media.
David Zwirner booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
At the same time, works like the Abstrakte Bilder from the ʽ80s by Gerhard Richter (Dresden, Germany, 1932) presented by David Zwirner (New York, USA / London, United Kingdom / Paris, France), still extremely current in exploring the way we relate to images, remind us how the masters of the previous generation continue to be a reference point for contemporary research. Equally powerful, albeit more minimal, the works exhibited, in the same stand, by Michaël Borremans (1963, Geraardsbergen), Josh Smith (1976, Okinawa) and Oscar Murillo (1986, La Paila), all united by a gestural but contained pictorial matter, aimed at constructing vibration surfaces rather than impact ones. Xavier Hufkens (Brussels, Belgium) also presented a coherent booth in this direction, focusing on artists like Lesley Vance (1977, Milwaukee) and Nicolas Party (1980, Lausanne), with works in which painting assumes a formal, decorative and almost esoteric role, suspended between abstraction and rarefied figuration. Parallel to the aniconic aspect, there has been a powerful return of figurative painting, declined according to parameters in any case distant from traditional realism. One example among all, the success of Adrian Ghenie (Baia Mare, Romania, 1977), represented by Galeria Plan B (Berlin, Germany) testifies how even artists of the younger generation have found in figurative painting fertile ground to investigate the complexities of contemporary identity. Dominating, in general, is a painting often made with mixed techniques, overlapping glazes, silkscreens, opaque or iridescent pigments. The works of Portia Zvavahera (1985, Harare), presented by Stevenson (Cape Town, South Africa), are an emblematic example: canvases loaded with symbols and dreamlike figures, dense with chromatic overlays that seem to emerge from a ritual dream, also distinguished by immediate commercial success, with sales exceeding 400,000 dollars. In a transversal way, therefore, painting has been elected from anachronistic language to instrument of power: the canvas returns to being the place where contemporary narratives are played out, in a studied combination of tradition and innovation, visual accessibility and theoretical depth. This centrality of painting connects perfectly to Art Basel’s function as a space of consecration, rather than discovery: the pictorial works present are not experiments, but visual statements capable of combining form, content and collecting prestige.
Pace Gallery booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
To keep an eye on as an observatory on the advancing new is the Premiere section, inaugurated in this edition and dedicated to works made in the last five years. Among the proposals that intrigued us, the multimedia photochemical paintings by Antonia Kuo (Taiwan, 1981) and the ceramics by Erin Jane Nelson (Chicago, USA, 1983) in the Chapter NY booth (New York, USA). Magician Space (Beijing, China) instead proposed the conceptual installation Survivors (2025) by Liu Ding (Changzhou, China, 1976), a reflection on human survival in the social and historical upheavals of contemporaneity. At the center of the installation, Waiting for Orders by Liu Ding, a multiple ready-made with a strong symbolic charge, in which a food delivery man is sitting on the ground, leaning against a broken screen that projects in loop the images of a moonlit night. During his brief break between one assignment and another, the character scrolls through short nationalist videos on his phone: the work addresses contemporary themes without sweetening, functioning at the same time as an (anti)monument to our times.
Sprüth Magers booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
The panorama described so far in broad strokes (varied enough to arouse the right dose of aesthetic and emotional pleasure, but not really diversified and interested in debate) fits into a power system based on rigid hierarchies, in which international mega-galleries operate as true cultural oligopolies, functioning as arbiters of contemporary aesthetic orientations. This system is based on legitimation mechanisms that go well beyond simple commercial intermediation: mega-galleries operate as cultural institutions de facto, with editorial programs, curatorial projects and communication strategies capable of decisively influencing the critical perception of the artists they represent. Their ability to position works in international museums, to organize institutional exhibitions and to influence specialized criticism makes them fundamental actors in the construction of the contemporary artistic canon. Art Basel thus becomes the privileged theater where this power hierarchy is represented, where aesthetic decisions intertwine with increasingly sophisticated commercial strategies, and where the parameters that will orient the art history of decades to come are defined.
Perrotin booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
In this context, the Italian presence is also inserted, not numerically imposing, but strategically significant, for reflecting in the national microcosm the same system modalities of which Art Basel is the global consecration. Among the twenty Italian galleries present we cite: Mazzoleni (Turin/Milan, Italy), which brought to the fair a rigorous selection of second twentieth century artists, including Agostino Bonalumi (1935, Vimercate, Italy – 2013, Desio, Italy), Alberto Burri (1915, Città di Castello, Italy – 1995, Nice, France), Lucio Fontana (1899, Rosario, Argentina – 1968, Comabbio, Italy), Piero Manzoni (1933, Soncino, Italy – 1963, Milano, Italy) and Fausto Melotti (1901, Rovereto, Italy – 1986, Milano, Italy), with a clean and high-impact setup that reaffirmed the museum value of these works. Cardi Gallery (Milan, Italy / London, United Kingdom) instead chose a more material and installation-based approach, exhibiting among others Mario Merz (1925, Milano, Italy – 2003, Torino, Italy), Mimmo Paladino (1948, Paduli, Italy) and Dadamaino (1930, Milano, Italy – 2004, Milano, Italy), demonstrating how the legacy of Arte Povera and Italian Transavanguardia continues to exert a strong international attraction, both for private collectors and museums. A different but equally significant role was played by M77 (Milan, Italy), which in the Feature section built an intense dialogue between two key figures of Italian visual thought: Grazia Varisco (1937, Milano, Italy – 2024, Milano, Italy) and Nanda Vigo (1936, Milano, Italy – 2020, Milano, Italy), through historical works capable of reflecting on light, structure and perception. Raffaella Cortese (Milan, Italy) instead focused on an intelligent combination of established names and transversal presences, from Anna Maria Maiolino (1942, Scalea, Italy) to Simone Forti (1935, Florence, Italy – 2024, Los Angeles, USA), highlighting research that embraces gesture, body and memory. In this framework, Italian painting has had a precise role, both as historical value (Varisco, Vigo, Bonalumi, Fontana) and as territory of transgenerational reflection, thanks to figures like Valerio Adami (1935, Bologna, Italy), present in the Galleria Continua (San Gimignano, Italy / Paris, France / Beijing, China) booth with recent works with sharp strokes, saturated colors and political reflections, as well as in the Unlimited section.
Lia Rumma booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
Lia Rumma (Naples, Italy / Milan, Italy) confirmed its historical leadership in the conceptual art sector, dating back to its foundation in 1971 with the Joseph Kosuth (Toledo, USA, 1945) exhibition. The gallery presented, among other things, four prints from the series With Eyes Closed I See Happiness (2012) by Marina Abramović (Belgrade, Serbia, 1946) and two Murano glass sculptures by Wael Shawky (Alexandria, Egypt, 1971), an artist on whom the gallery, rightly, has been betting for some time, before his acclaimed success at the 2024 Art Biennale. Massimo De Carlo (Milan, Italy / London, United Kingdom / Hong Kong) maintained its sophisticated curatorial approach, ranging from the measured grids of McArthur Binion (Macon, Mississippi, 1946) to the stratified narratives of Alvaro Barrington (Caracas, Venezuela, 1983); from the sculptural wit of Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen: Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961; Ingar Dragset: Trondheim, Norway, 1969) to the disturbing visual lexicon of Jamian Juliano-Villani (Newark, New Jersey, 1987), to the gestural force of Xiyao Wang (1992, Chongqing, China) and the subversion of Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, Italy, 1960). Tornabuoni Arte (Florence, Italy / London, United Kingdom / Paris, France) carried forward its specialization in Italian twentieth century masters, while Alfonso Artiaco (Naples, Italy) proposed a balanced project between contemporary research and historical consolidation, with artists like Jana Schröder (1980, Hannover, Germany), Giulio Paolini (1940, Genoa, Italy), Jannis Kounellis (1936, Piraeus, Greece – 2017, Rome, Italy), Ann Veronica Janssens (1956, Folkestone, United Kingdom). Finally, we cite the essential monographic stand dedicated by Massimo Minini (Brescia, Italy) to Peter Halley (New York, 1953) and that of Franco Noero, with his leading artists: Mark Handforth (1969, Hong Kong), Francesco Vezzoli (1971, Brescia, Italy), Jason Dodge (1969, Newton, Pennsylvania, USA) and Hassan Sharif (1951, Dubai, United Arab Emirates – 2016, Dubai, United Arab Emirates).
Galleria Massimo Minini booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
These galleries operate in an intermediate segment of the global market, positioning themselves between international mega-galleries and local realities and acting as a bridge between the Italian and world systems. Even if Italian galleries do not dominate the scene in quantity, their role is confirmed as crucial in introducing Italian artists to the global circuit and, at the same time, in bringing leading international artists to Italy. However, their influence remains subordinate to the decisions of large Anglo-Saxon commercial institutions, which continue to dictate the main market trends. The most represented Italian artists, such as Mario Merz (1925, Milano, Italy – 2003, Torino, Italy), Grazia Varisco (1937, Milano, Italy – 2024, Milano, Italy), Nanda Vigo (1936, Milano, Italy – 2020, Milano, Italy), Agostino Bonalumi (1935, Vimercate, Italy – 2013, Desio, Italy), Piero Manzoni (1933, Soncino, Italy – 1963, Milano, Italy) or Dadamaino (1930, Milano, Italy – 2004, Milano, Italy), outline a coherent profile: these are authors linked to radical practices, often abstract or spatial, and to reflections on the medium that find in the Art Basel context a framework of legitimation and valorization. The presence in the Unlimited section of the installation Rispetto (2016) by Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, Italy, 1933) with shattered mirrors revealing the word “Respect” in different languages, shaped like the Mediterranean Sea, and the iconic igloo by Mario Merz Evidenza di 987 (1978) confirmed the persistent prestige of Arte Povera, while more or less recent works by other masters belonging to the same current, such as Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, Italy, 1947) and Giulio Paolini (Genoa, Italy, 1940) in international gallery booths, confirms their status as an Italian brand.
Madragoa booth, Art Basel 2025, ph. courtesy of Art Basel
But if these presences attest to an already consolidated recognition, the real stake remains the power system underlying the fair: the exhibition choices of galleries, the arrangement of stands, the management of the market and institutional negotiations outline a silent but stringent hierarchy, in which prestige is built as much with works as with their visibility. It is in this climate, between aesthetic codes and symbolic strategies, that the coordinates of the art system are defined. A production that is never neutral, but modulated on the expectations of collectors, museums, foundations and advisors, and that finds in Art Basel not only the showcase, but the place of staging and negotiation of a shared global taste. Here not only artists are consecrated, but especially the logics that decide who and what is worth seeing, remembering, acquiring.
[i] https://www.ilgiornaledellarte.com/Articolo/Le-opere-piu-costose-vendute-ad-Art-Basel-
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Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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