From June 16 to June 22, 2025 the world’s leading art fair, the original Art Basel in Switzerland, attracted 88,000 visitors (compared to 91,000 in 2024 and 82,000 in 2023.) who could discover works exposed by 289 leading international galleries from 42 countries and territories.
According to Art Basel, representatives from over 250 world-class museums and foundations visited the 2025 edition of the show in the Swiss city. Exhibitors reported strong sales across all market segments and show sectors, signaling market resilience despite tougher times since the covid years, Putin’s escalating of the war against Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs and the turbulences in the Middle East, from Gaza to Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
Already during the first days of the fair, reserved for collectors, VIPs and journalists, Annely Juda Fine Art announced the sale of David Hockney’s Mid November Tunnel (2006) to a private collection. The oil painting across two canvases depicting a rural road winding through the English countryside was reportedly sold in the range between $13 million and $17 million.
David Zwirner sold the nearly 10-feet sculpture Untitled (S.278, Hanging Nine-Lobed, Single-Layered Continuous Form) by Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), created in 1955, for $9.5 million. It is an early example of the artist’s looped-wire works, which Ruth Asawa began making in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. In addition, also during the fair’s first days, David Zwirner reported the sale of an unnamed Gerhard Richter painting for $6.8 million.
View of the Lia Rumma booth at Art Basel 2025. Lia Rumma offered works by Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft, Gino De Dominicis, Douglas Huebler, Alfredo Jaar, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, William Kentridge, Joseph Kosuth, Marzia Migliora, Ugo Mulas, Shirin Neshat, Thomas Ruff, Wael Shawky, Ettore Spalletti, Haim Steinbach, Gian Maria Tosatti, Andy Warhol and Gilberto Zorio. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
At the Unlimited section of Art Basel 2025, the gallery Grimm sold the 40-feet wide wall-based installation by Claudia Martínez Garay titled Conversiones (2025) to the Pérez Art Museum Miami for €90,000. Murals are central to the work of the Peruvian artist who takes inspiration from her Andean heritage, pre-Columbian art knowledge systems, schoolbook diagrams, mythologies, propaganda and colonial chronicles to create paintings, sculptures, prints, videos and site-specific installations.
Still in the fair’s first days, Hauser & Wirth sold two large-scale mixed media canvases by Mark Bradford Ain’t Got Time To Worry (2025) and Sin and Love and Fear (2025) for $3.5 million to private collections in the United States. In addition, Hauser & Wirth reported the sale of the rare early work by Alina Szapocznikow, Lampe-bouche (Illuminated Lips), created in 1966, in colored polyester resin with electrical wiring, for €850,000.
The temporary work CHOIR by the German artist Katharina Grosse greeted Art Basel 2025 visitors at the fair’s Messeplatz entrance. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
Born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1961, Katharina Grosse studied at Kunstakademie Münster (1982-86) and at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1986-90). Since the 1990s, she is best-known for her monumental, colorful, site-specific installations. They offer immersive, space enlarging experiences, which challenge, redefine and subvert traditional notions of painting.
Her largest public, urban work to date, CHOIR, was temporary and could only be admired during the 2025 Art Basel week. Situated at the Messeplatz entrance, it was removed after the fair’s end on June 22, 2025.
At Art Basel, Katharina Grosse was represented by the Max Hetzler gallery and Galerie nächst St. Stephan, who reportedly sold one of her paintings for €300,000 to a Paris collector. In addition, some of her current museum exhibits include Wunderbild at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg until September 14, 2025 and The Sprayed Dear at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart through January 11, 2026.
Katharina Grosse (*1961) photographed by Franz Grünewald. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
Unlimited, Art Basel’s platform for large-scale installations and performances, showed in its 16,000-square-meter hall 67 ambitious projects by 90 galleries curated for the fifth consecutive year by Giovanni Carmine, Director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Among the monumental sculptures, immersive installations and expansive video works, I remember Yayoi Kusama’s colorful, polka dot, fiberglass works Let’s go to a Paradise of Glorious Tulips (2009), uniting seven sculptures of flowers, animals and a girl, as well as Atelier Van Lieshout’s gigantic, epic The Voyage – A March to Utopia, comprising endless objects, sculptures and machines. The Voyage embodies humanity’s compulsive, incessant blind pursuit of happiness. Life is a voyage: we come from somewhere, we are here now and we go elsewhere. In the words of Joep van Lieshout: «This work is about a voyage to utopia, to an unknown place—a better place—a garden of Eden—a place where we hope to find happiness, where we dream of creating a new world, a parallel or better world.»
Atelier Van Lieshout, Galerie Krinzinger, OMR, in collaboration with: Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Galerie Ron Mandos. Impressions of the Unlimited sector at the 2025 edition of Art Basel. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
At Art Basel 2025, the Italian gallery Lia Rumma had four Water Study prints (made in an edition of 7) from the series With Eyes Closed I See Happyness (2012) by Marina Abramovic on offer, which were for sale for $25,000 each, or the polyptych of the four fine art pigment prints, each 80 x 60 cm, framed, could be purchased for $95,000.
At Lia Rumma gallery, I also spotted a photograph by the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat, who focuses on themes such as power, religion, race, gender as well as the relationship between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile. The work at Art Basel was SHNE-013, Seeking Martyrdom variation nr 1, a 1995 gelatin silver print & ink work, 146 × 102 cm, framed. The current conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States made the work highly topical.
Another Italian gallery, Mazzoleni, had three works by the great Fausto Melotti (1901-86) on offer, my favorite being the fragile brass sculpture Disegno nello spazio (1981; dimensions: 76 x 59 x 14 cm) for €200,000.
About the artist, read the recommendable Il mondo di FAUSTO MELOTTI, a 260-page book with 121 illustrations from 2014, published by Galerie Karsten Greve, available in a German and English bilingual edition (accept cookies—we receive a commission, price unchanged—and order the book from Amazon.de); there is also a French and Italian bilingual edition (different cover).
At the booth of the New York gallery Carolina Nitsch Contemporary Art, I spotted works by Kevin Beasley, an African American born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1985. His practice spans sculpture, photography, sound and performance, while centering on materials of cultural and personal significance, from raw cotton harvested from his family’s ancestral property in southern Virginia to sounds gathered using contact microphones. Beasley alters, casts, and molds these diverse materials to form a body of work that acknowledges the complex, shared histories of the broader American experience, steeped in generational memories.
Kevin Beasley received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan in 2007 and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 2012. Among his previous shows, a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 2018 stands out.
At the Art Basel booth of the Carolina Nitsch gallery, I was fascinated by Kevin Beasley’s work Module 9 (2024-25), made of raw Virginia cotton, polyurethane resin, fiberglass, aluminum, plywood, walnut, MDF, HDPE, metal wax, amplifier, custom speakers, cables, fasteners, including a 44 min. and 48 sec. 2-channel bass recording on glass crystal USB drive, 29.8 × 151.1 × 43.3 cm, made in an edition of 9 unique variants, available for $25,000. The artist himself once said: “I’ve been playing drums since I was thirteen…” This work combines visual arts, design and music.
Last, but not least, let’s mention my favorite Art Basel gallery, Landau Fine Art, with its always great selection of works by Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, Paul Klee and many other of my most beloved artists. At the 2025 fair, Landau Fine Art offered for instance the oil, water color, pen and ink on paper work Gespenst der ersten Geliebten (1924; 39 x 22.8 cm) by Paul Klee for €775,000. Among the several outstanding sculptures and paintings by Alberto Giacometti, let’s just mention Femme assise (Aika), oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm, made in 1960. A masterpiece.
In short, this tiny selection of thousands of works on display at the 2025 edition of Art Basel proved once again that a visit to the world’s leading fair can easily replace a visit to 30 museum exhibitions.
Galerie Nordenhake. Photograph: Sara Barth. © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
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General impressions of Art Basel Galleries. Carlos Ishikawa. Photo © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), presented by the gallery Hauser & Wirth at the Unlimited section of Art Basel. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
Hauser & Wirth specify that Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) has already been shown in more than 30 exhibitions. At an undisclosed time, a lamé-clad go-go dancer ascends the platform with a personal listening device for approximately five minutes. It was made in 1991 during a moment of profound personal loss and against a backdrop of widespread homophobia, yet it offers moments of joy and desire.
Another view of Katharina Grosse’s temporary, public Messeplatz work CHOIR. Photograph © Courtesy of Art Basel, 2025.
Article added on June 25, 2025 at 22:23 Swiss time. Last update added on June 26, 2025 at 14:11 Swiss time.
