Art Basel Unlimited 2025 stages a critical rethinking of monumentality—not as scale alone, but as cultural weight, conceptual tension, and political presence. Drawing on legacies from postwar conceptualism, Mono-ha, Arte Povera, feminist material practices, and image-based critique, this year’s strongest presentations interrogate the structures that shape collective memory and civic space.
Whitewall leads you through the most resonant presentations to witness and experience—those that transfigure Unlimited’s vast architecture into a crucible for thought, feeling, and shared cultural accountability.
Danh Vo’s “In God We Trust”
Danh Vo, “Untitled,” 2020, Thirteen mild steel stars and wood logs, 538 x 1023 cm, © the artist, photo © White Cube (Ollie Hammick).
Danh Vo’s In God We Trust (2020), a sculptural installation probing the fragility of national symbolism, returns to Unlimited 2025 in a charged new context. Originally unveiled at White Cube Bermondsey amid the tensions of the 2020 U.S. election season, the work reconfigures the 1777 American flag with thirteen forged steel stars and beams of firewood in place of stripes. Staged within the museum-scale parameters of Unlimited, this latest iteration heightens the work’s resonance, drawing attention to the uneasy intersections between power, permanence, and collective memory.
Vo—whose practice often turns on acts of historical détournement and poetic rupture—uses the elemental contrast between steel and wood to reflect cycles of construction and collapse. When first shown, the piece was gradually disassembled during the exhibition, with the timber burned in situ—an act of symbolic transformation that rendered the flag both physically and ideologically impermanent. At Art Basel, In God We Trust returns not as a static monument, but as a thoughtful provocation—one that navigates the tension between reverence and inquiry, ruin and renewal. While the piece interrogates how sacred language can be co-opted by systems of power, it does so without diminishing the sincerity of faith itself. It is a quietly radical gesture, affirming Vo’s position as a discerning voice exploring the afterlives of empire, identity, and the complexities of belief in contemporary art.
Piero Golia, Martin Kippenberger, and Jeff Koons
Piero Golia, “Still Life (Rotating device),” 2024, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
At Art Basel Unlimited, Gagosian brings together a triad of conceptually charged works by Piero Golia (U54), Martin Kippenberger (U59), and Jeff Koons (U52)—each engaging in its own way with illusion, repetition, and the structures that define public space and cultural memory. Occupying a space between theatrical mise-en-scène and philosophical meditation, Golia’s Still Life (Rotating device) (2024) immerses the viewer in an uncanny choreography of suspended chance. Visitors pass through lush crimson curtains onto plush carpeting, entering a realm both cinematic and existential. At its center spins a decommissioned roulette wheel, its ball endlessly circling without resolution. In this endless loop, Golia freezes the moment of expectation—the breath held before fate declares itself.
Martin Kippenberger, “METRO-Net Transportabler U-Bahn Eingang [METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance],” 1997, Steel and lacquer, 135 x 295 1/4 x 100 inches, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
This fascination with absurd infrastructure finds a compelling echo in Kippenberger’s METRO-Net Transportabler U-Bahn Eingang (1997), a sculptural fiction of urban mobility and thwarted access. Originally conceived as part of the artist’s visionary METRO-Net series—a conceptual subway system spanning the globe—the piece presents a subway stairway angled awkwardly above ground, leading to a locked gate.
Completing Gagosian’s trio is Koons’s New! New Too! (1983)—a monumental lithograph billboard from The New series, exhibited in Europe for the first time in over a decade. Channeling the strategies of commercial advertising, Koons crystallizes the hyper-aestheticized consumerism of the 1980s. In this context, its presence at Unlimited reads as both a cultural time capsule and a pointed reflection on the economies of attention, artifice, and value in the age of spectacle.
Robert Longo’s “We Are the Monsters”
Robert Longo, “Untitled (Image Storm, July 4, 2024 – June 15, 2025),” 2025, Video, 1250 x 360 cm, © Robert Longo, courtesy of Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
At Booth U42, Thaddaeus Ropac, in collaboration with Pace, presents Robert Longo’s We Are the Monsters (Four Parts) (2025)—a searing four-part installation confronting the fragmentation and overload of contemporary visual culture. Two new Combines—Untitled (Dog) and Untitled (Wolf)—merge drawing, photography, printmaking, and sculpture into visceral reliefs that flank a graphite reinterpretation of Albrecht Dürer’s The Four Avenging Angels (1498), linking past apocalyptic vision to present-day crisis. At its core is Untitled (Image Storm, July 4, 2024 – June 15, 2025: Chapter Two), a looped film composed of a year’s global news footage, disrupted by algorithmic pauses to deny resolution. Together, the components form a charged visual architecture—an immersive constellation of image, memory, and rupture—that confronts the viewer with the moral and emotional toll of living within a world saturated by mediated violence and historical echoes.
Arlene Shechet and Latifa Echakhch
Arlene Shechet, “Midnight,” 2024, courtesy of the artist and Pace.
Pace presents two distinct yet resonant installations by Arlene Shechet (U25) and Latifa Echakhch (U50), each exploring movement, materiality, and emotional presence. Shechet’s Midnight (2024), first shown at Storm King Art Center, is a vivid welded aluminum sculpture that seems to lift off the ground while remaining grounded in its physical weight. Painted in hand-mixed orange and pink hues, the work fuses digital precision with intuitive spontaneity, asserting a feminist and corporeal presence within large-scale sculpture.
Latifa Echakhch, “Untitled Tears,” 2023, details, courtesy of the artist.
Echakhch’s Untitled (Tears Fall) (2025), created with kaufmann repetto and Dvir Gallery, cascades from the ceiling in a veil of glass-beaded threads—capturing the suspended instant when water collides with surface. Building on her 2023 transformation of Basel’s Messeplatz, the work affirms Echakhch’s mastery of spatial poetics. Together, these two installations speak to the evolving language of contemporary sculpture—where gravity, presence, and emotion converge in quiet but powerful forms.
Lee Ufan’s “Relatum – Dialogue”
Lee Ufan, “Relatum – Dialogue,” 2005-2023, Steel and natural stone, Plates: 220 x 360 x 2 cm, Plates: 86 5/8 x 141 3/4 x 0 3/4 in, Stones: 100 x 100 cm, Stones: 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in © Rijksmuseum, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
Lee Ufan’s Relatum – Dialogue (2005–2023), on view with Lisson Gallery at Art Basel Unlimited, transforms the exhibition space into a site of contemplative tension. Composed of industrial steel plates and raw natural stones, the work exemplifies Ufan’s sustained inquiry into the relational properties of matter—an approach central to the Mono-ha movement, which emerged in 1960s Japan as a philosophical counterpoint to Western materialism. The juxtaposition of machined steel and untouched stone is not a confrontation but a dialogue, one conducted through silence, gravity, and spatial resonance. Here, form hovers at the edge of disappearance, drawing viewers into heightened attentiveness. In a sector where scale often veers toward spectacle, Lee’s contribution offers something rarer: a quiet proposition for art as attunement rather than assertion.
Oscar Murillo’s Masses
Oscar Murillo, “Masses, disrupted frequencies (Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, Nepal, Malaysia, India, China, Egypt, United States, Morocco, Philippines, Germany, United Kingdom),” 2013-2023, Art Basel Unlimited 2025, © Oscar Murillo, courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
David Zwirner, in collaboration with Taka Ishii, Kurimanzutto, and Carlos/Ishikawa, presents Oscar Murillo’s Masses, disrupted frequencies (2013–2023)—a six-part panoramic installation that envelops the viewer in a sweeping arc of collective expression and fractured connectivity. Built on a metal scaffold, the work incorporates layered canvases from Murillo’s decade-long Frequencies project, which invited students aged ten to sixteen across schools worldwide to inscribe blank canvases with drawings, words, and gestures.
In this iteration, Murillo splices and overpaints the surfaces with moody blue oil stick—gestures he likens to the obliterating force of water—submerging these traces beneath layers of erasure and assertion. First shown at WIELS in Brussels in 2024, the installation functions as both rupture and requiem, interrogating authorship, memory, and the politics of participation. In the context of Unlimited, Murillo offers not just a monumental image but a sociopolitical terrain—one that gathers the world’s frequencies, unresolved and resounding.
Marinella Senatore’s “We Rise by Lifting Others”
Marinella Senatore’s “We Rise by Lifting Others” (2023), courtesy of Mazzoleni.
Mazzoleni presents Marinella Senatore’s We Rise by Lifting Others (2023)—a radiant 34-metre-wide light installation that transforms the fair’s industrial architecture into a luminous stage for civic reflection and collective empowerment. Rooted in the Southern Italian tradition of luminarie, decorative light structures used in public celebrations, the work reimagines Baroque theatricality as a contemporary architecture of solidarity. Originally commissioned for NOOR Riyadh under the curation of Jérôme Sans and reconfigured for Basel with new colors and textual elements, the piece pulses with both visual splendour and social intent.
Across its glowing frame appear two phrases: “We Rise by Lifting Others,” selected by female inmates in Florence, and “I Contain Multitudes,” chosen by residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods in Naples. By transporting these community-sourced messages into the context of an international art fair, Senatore bridges geographies and collapses hierarchies, turning spectacle into a shared platform for visibility and care. As the only living Italian female artist selected by curator Giovanni Carmine for Unlimited this year, Senatore offers not just a monument of light, but a luminous architecture of inclusion.
Unlimited 2025 reasserts the sector not merely as a stage for monumentality, but as a field of inquiry—where material form becomes a vessel for memory, and scale carries ethical and contemplative charge. From Danh Vo’s dismantling of imperial symbols to Robert Longo’s fractured meditation on violence and Marinella Senatore’s beacon of civic solidarity, these installations do not resolve, but remain open—holding us in the space between fracture and faith, gesture and silence, presence and erasure.
Together, they call for a deeper attentiveness: a slowing of perception, a willingness to engage with what remains unresolved. In this, they hint at what art—at its most expansive—might still awaken in us.
