Your Preview of Art Basel 2025: The Best Galleries, Artists, and Works to Know

Art Basel 2025 feels less like a marketplace than a séance of forms—where the ghosts of art history commune with the urgencies of now. In place of bombast, we find restraint; in place of spectacle, sediment. Whether in Drexler’s syncopated mosaics or Gursky’s retreating ice, the works assembled here do not merely reflect the world—they measure it, straining its surfaces for signs, residues, and ruptures.

Amid this unfolding, Whitewall charts a path through the fair’s most spellbinding coordinates—a handpicked constellation of booths where form becomes frequency and the pulse of contemporary art is unmistakably felt. This year’s fair in Basel is not unified by theme so much as by a condition of threshold: between abstraction and embodiment, between image and aftermath, between the archive and what it fails to hold.

White Cube at Art Basel 2025

White Cube’s booth at Art Basel 2025 is among the fair’s most rigorously curated and atmospherically resonant. Eschewing spectacle in favour of thoughtful juxtaposition, the presentation assembles artists whose practices traverse the conceptual and the tactile, the archival and the ephemeral. From the optical refinement of Robert Irwin to Ibrahim Mahama’s materially loaded interventions, the booth pulses with a calibrated tension between clarity and complexity. Two works, however—Lynne Drexler’s Hovering Sentinels (1963) and Cai Guo-Qiang’s Red Birds (2022)—encapsulate the presentation’s central proposition: abstraction not as aesthetic, but as ontological inquiry.

Rendered through a volatile ballet of combustion and pigment, Cai’s Red Birds harnesses the transience of gunpowder to etch a dreamscape born of grief and memory. Made in homage to the artist’s grandmother and inspired by a vision of cardinal birds, the painting hovers between apparition and imprint. The charred silhouettes recall the atmospheric delicacy of Song dynasty ink painting while evoking the entropic sensibilities of Arte Povera—an act of image-making where fire becomes line, and loss becomes residue. By contrast, Drexler’s Hovering Sentinels radiates structural rigor and musical chromaticism. Her syncopated tesserae and cascading verticals fuse the language of mid-century abstraction with an almost liturgical rhythm. Often sidelined in the annals of the New York School, Drexler emerges here as an artist of orchestral intelligence and compositional conviction. These works, in dialogue, reinforce the booth’s deeper logic: a belief in the transformative potential of form as both vessel and voltage.

Rudolf Stingel and Andreas Gursky at Gagosian

Gagosian’s 30th showing at Art Basel resists the fair’s centrifugal logic with a presentation of exceptional curatorial refinement. Overseen by Francesco Bonami, the booth proposes a subtle reordering of canon and context, pairing modernist anchors with contemporary interventions that feel less like juxtaposition and more like conversation. Picasso, Sze, Avedon, and Fadojutimi appear not as brand markers but as agents in a shared inquiry into time, visibility, and the condition of surface. Bonami’s selections avoid grandiosity, instead opting for nuance: a slow-burn sensibility that rewards extended looking.

Within this tapestry, two works stand apart for their temporal gravity. Rudolf Stingel’s untitled 2012 painting—a reworking of a 1930s photograph of Picasso—layers photorealistic precision with gestural effacement. The result is not a portrait, but a palimpsest: a meditation on authorship, afterimage, and the burdens of inheritance. Stingel’s obscuring drips do not deface so much as mourn, as though modernism itself were slipping beneath the surface. In counterpoint, Andreas Gursky’s Aletschgletscher II (2024) re-engages a site he photographed in 1993, now visibly transformed by climate change. The glacier becomes both subject and measure—a vast, vanishing archive of planetary memory. Together, these works fold biography into geology, portrait into topography, and history into surface, embodying a presentation that is less about statement than sediment.

Sabine Moritz and More at Pilar Corrias

Pilar Corrias’s booth at Art Basel 2025 is animated by a commitment to figuration as a mode of resistance—resistance to erasure, to amnesia, to formal closure. The presentation spans works by Ragna Bley, Rachel Rose, and Tschabalala Self, artists whose practices interrogate embodiment as both subject and surface. But the clearest statement comes through the friction between Sabine Moritz’s The Weimar Republic II and Tala Madani’s Disco Balls (both 2025), which together confront the psychic residues of political history and the grotesque theatre of the everyday.

Moritz’s The Weimar Republic II is a chromatic storm: brushwork bordering on the feverish, colour deployed less as ornament than as affective charge. Drawing from archival images and historical research, the painting conjures the fragility of interwar Germany not through iconography, but atmosphere. Its unstable composition is itself a metaphor for civic unraveling. Madani, in contrast, delivers her critique through absurdist theatre. Disco Balls is at once comedic and menacing—a fractured mise-en-scène of shattered reflections and exaggerated gesture. Her figures, often infantilised or grotesque, stage masculinity as both tragicomic and terminal. The works operate on different frequencies, but their synchronicity is acute: history as both echo and rupture.

The Best of Thaddaeus Ropac

Thaddaeus Ropac’s booth at Art Basel 2025 asserts a curatorial vision that privileges visual intelligence over spectacle. With works by Yan Pei-Ming, Sean Scully, and Zadie Xa among others, the presentation reads as a set of dialogues about the politics of form—each artist negotiating memory, monumentality, and material presence in distinctive ways. But the most resonant hinge of the presentation comes from the encounter between Robert Rauschenberg’s Lipstick (Spread) (1981) and Oskar Schlemmer’s Graue Frauen (1936), whose shared investment in formal rupture and spatial tension anchors the booth’s rhythm.

Rauschenberg’s Lipstick (Spread) stands as an exemplar of his post-Combine phase: a spatially complex work in which printed imagery, fabric fragments, and a three-dimensional parasol converge into a matrix of sensory dissonance. The assemblage flattens cultural ephemera into architecture, aligning mass media with art historical residue. It is a canvas as archive, in which language, consumerism, and the erotic jostle without hierarchy. In stark contrast, Schlemmer’s Graue Frauen, composed during his final years under political duress, distills figuration to archetype. The women, faceless and rhythmically arrayed, occupy a pictorial space that feels simultaneously stage-set and devotional frieze. With its reduced palette and choreographic cadence, the work operates less as a portrait than as an elegy for modernism itself. Taken together, the works are more than historical footnotes; they are propositions on how art absorbs, resists, and outlasts its moment.

Flora Yukhnovich at Hauser & Wirth

At Art Basel 2025, Hauser & Wirth presents a tightly composed booth that stages a dialogue between landmark voices and emergent inflections in figuration and abstraction. From Cindy Sherman’s early 1980s film still to Nicole Eisenman’s psychological satire in Coping (2008), the booth begins with artists who dismantle conventions of selfhood and spectacle. The narrative extends to new works by Flora Yukhnovich and Nicolas Party, each of whom recodes historical aesthetics through a contemporary lens.

In Tarantella (2025), Yukhnovich riffs on the sensual excess of Rococo and late Baroque painting with brushwork that is both baroque and barbed. Her high-key palette and swirling surfaces echo Boucher and Fragonard, yet her pictorial opulence is freighted with feminist critique—a destabilisation of taste that sits somewhere between seduction and satire. Party’s Landscape (2025), by contrast, offers a contemplative counterpoint. Executed in soft pastel, his vertical trees glow in lapidary blues and jades, drawing from the Symbolist atmospheres of Ferdinand Hodler and the tonalist restraint of Milton Avery. The chromatic restraint belies a complex emotional register, shifting from stillness to reverie. Positioned side by side, these works speak across time and tone, embodying the gallery’s enduring ethos: formal innovation grounded in historical consciousness.

Don’t Miss This at Pace

To mark its 65th anniversary, Pace Gallery brings to Art Basel 2025 a presentation that treats abstraction as both legacy and laboratory. The booth spans mid-century titans—Frankenthaler, Rothko, Mitchell—and a dynamic group of contemporary artists extending that lineage through new idioms of surface and gesture. Two works, in particular, invite a generational reading: Helen Frankenthaler’s Ore (1974) and Pam Evelyn‘s Focal Length (2025), placed in visual proximity to trace a through-line of painterly reinvention.

Frankenthaler’s Ore, painted in the mid-70s, finds her expanding the soak-stain technique she pioneered decades earlier. Its translucent fields of tangerine, moss, and rust-red pigment drift across raw canvas with an almost tectonic lightness. The composition feels suspended, not static, punctuated by sketch-like lines in marker that flirt with form but refuse to define it. The effect is one of sedimentation—image as mineral deposit. Evelyn, by contrast, embraces opacity and density. Her oils are worked, scraped, and reapplied into a chromatic surface that feels simultaneously geological and psychological. Focal Length is not about the dissolution of form but its deliberate complication—an excavation of mood through material. Together, the works underscore Pace’s historic role as steward and agitator of abstraction.

Lucas Arruda at David Zwirner

David Zwirner’s presentation at Art Basel 2025 is a study in tempo: works that ask the viewer not for attention, but for duration. Anchored by seminal figures such as Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, On Kawara, and Ruth Asawa, the booth orbits around questions of time, trace, and embodiment. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the conversation staged between Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1987) and Lucas Arruda’s Untitled (2025), drawn from his ongoing Deserto-Modelo series.

Richter’s 1987 canvas is an object of simultaneity—gesture and erasure enacted in the same breath. Dragged pigment disrupts any claim to pictorial coherence, producing a field that pulses between intention and accident. This is abstraction as threshold: image suspended between articulation and dissolution. Facing it, Arruda’s Untitled operates in a lower key. His brushwork is muffled, his palette hushed—an evocation of distance that draws equally on Caspar David Friedrich and Giorgio Morandi. If Richter is all seismic layering, Arruda is a whisper across the void. Their pairing does not seek harmony, but resonance: two modes of abstraction that bracket the image as both presence and vanishing.

Helen Marten and Elizabeth Peyton at Sadie Coles HQ

Sadie Coles HQ’s return to Art Basel is characteristically sharp-edged: a showcase that embraces ambiguity, contradiction, and sensuality in equal measure. Spanning practices from John Currin to Arthur Jafa, the presentation doesn’t so much resolve tensions as hold them in productive suspension. Two works frame this approach with particular clarity: Helen Marten’s The plan was D, for dog, but also others (bed making) (2023) and Elizabeth Peyton’s Die Walküre (2011 MET Opera) (2011–2012).

Marten’s work is a dense system of visual syntax: screen-printed fragments, etched aluminium, and collaged debris arranged with both manic playfulness and forensic logic. The piece resists singular readings—its references ricochet between domesticity, performance, and language itself. It is a tableau as puzzle, as trap, as text. Peyton, by contrast, renders intimacy with clarity and restraint. Her double portrait of Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek, drawn from their performance in Wagner’s Die Walküre, is an act of emotional condensation. Her brushstrokes are swift but charged, capturing not likeness but atmosphere—the shared solitude of operatic grandeur. Marten builds an architecture of excess; Peyton distills an instant. Together, they bracket the booth’s central concern: how surface can hold contradiction, how painting can both reveal and refuse.

To walk Art Basel 2025 is to move through an aesthetic tectonics—quiet shifts, slow detonations, forms poised between collapse and composure. This is not a fair of singular statements, but of deep-seated inquiry: abstraction as ontological drama, figuration as insurgent memory. Artists here do not simply make; they metabolize—time, grief, eros, environment.

The result is a visual lexicon of fragmentation and resolve: painting as palimpsest, installation as proposition, material as metabolite. If a current can be traced through the most vital presentations, it is this: a reclamation of surface as site—of resistance, of resonance, of reassembly. In a world of rapid forgetting, Art Basel 2025 offers art as aftermath—and as anchor.