Art Basel: Standouts and Flops
Recap and photo dump
Reporting and photos by Bryan Munguia
Of all the fairs on the annual art world circuit, none are as prestigious or as large as Art Basel. Hosted in Basel, Switzerland, the fair gathers over 290 galleries into a single art industrial complex of stark-white exhibitor booths in modern convention halls, and more than doubles the size of fairs like Frieze.
For those not in the art world, “Art Basel” might evoke popular associations with Miami Beach, and the marketing circus that surrounds it. The Swiss fair, though, is the original Basel. Consider it a European upgrade to its Floridian sister: more oysters and champagne, less Miami art Epcot.
The colossal scale and prestige of this fair means world-class artists, famous artworks, and humbling sums of money changing hands. (A Pablo Picasso painting is reported to have sold for $35 million over the weekend.)
Basel and its Swiss luxury caters well to elite art word persons, as well as art-conscious celebrities. This year, Jared Leto and the living performance-art couple Bianca Censori and Ye were all spotted previewing artworks on the fairgrounds.
Like most major art fairs, the official event is only part of the festivities. Nearby, other international fairs run simultaneously, each offering a distinct alternative to the main event.
Liste hosts the emerging tastemakers, while Basel Social Club hosts debauchery, converting a former office building into a temporary site for exhibitors, performances, and unorthodox public activities that ranges from a pop-up gym, cold plunge, spray tan salon, and even Botox clinic. Across the city, local institutions and museums get their own face-lift, hosting top-tier programming.
The fair’s presence is everywhere in Basel. Even on the branded BMWs transporting the upper echelon.
Sorting through this embarrassment of riches can feel impossible for the lay person. But if my overpriced MFA in Curatorial Studies is good for anything, it’s to make sense of a global art fair. Unlike the Swiss, I will not remain neutral. Here is my round-up of standout presentations, the works that fell flat, and a curated photo dump of the contemporary art I saw across Basel, for your reading and viewing pleasure.
STANDOUTS
ART BASEL
VARIOUS ARTISTS, GAGA, MEXICO CITY
Few galleries capture our culture’s absurdity quite as well as Gaga. Their booth first greets me with Nicolas Ceccaldi’s pastels of cropped feet displayed alongside a historical figure identified by the gallery label as Dolphin III.
The rendered feet are lifted from a famous painting and, without any further context, send me into a spiral. Are these the Dolphin’s feet? Is he smiling at them? Or at me for looking at them? How does he know I’m a foot fetishist? The pastels’ whimsical distortions muddle my search for the truth.
Just behind Ceccaldi’s wall works, I stare down at a blinged-out, cheetah-print dachshund plushie on roller skates.
This work by Cosima von Bonin embodies the sense of humor she is known for. Excessive and funny, the Frankensteinian dog’s kitschness feels, in our culture of overconsumption, almost more genuine than something more serious ever could.
Further into the booth, the animal motif reappears in Heji Shin’s photographs. On the right, Lonely Girl 5 (2026) shows a monkey orally fixated on a vibrator, while on the left, You Are Fired (2026) presents the same animal with a pistol in its mouth.
Sex and Death seem to be mutually cathartic for the monkeys. The animal is transformed into a distorted self-portrait, revealing human desire as comic, violent, and embarrassingly primal. Together with Ceccaldi and von Bonin, Shin makes the contemporary feel poetically absurd.
DANNY MCDONALD & MARC KOKOPELI, GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI, BERLIN
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi presents a compelling program of artists acutely aware of the commercial environment surrounding them. This booth understands that capitalism is not outside of an artwork, but already embedded in the images and devices through which we encounter its culture.
I first come across white plinths holding Danny McDonald’s miniature scenographies, where pop-cultural figurines are reimagined as tragicomic actors caught in various states of crisis.
In Heartbreaker (2019), McDonald distorts the Tin Man’s quest for a heart, recasting the sentimental Wizard of Oz character as a witness to environmental ruin and emotional failure.
What comes off initially as slapstick becomes a meditation on how mass-produced images circulate parallel to the acceleration and exploitation of capital. It’s humor with a critical punch.
Neighboring McDonald, Marc Kokopeli offers what I believe is the only Augmented Reality work at the fair. A curious exclamation mark foregrounds a graphite-like digital print depicting the communist sickle and hammer.
The attending gallerist brings over a tablet and scans the print with an AR app, which commences a five-minute scripted drama superimposed over the image. This is Kokopeli’s technique at its best, collapsing the physical object into a digital performance and letting the artwork bleed between material and virtual time.
VARIOUS ARTISTS, SADIE COLES HQ, LONDON
For Contemporary Art with a capital C, Sadie Coles HQ’s roster of art stars continues to make them a dependable platform for discovering the artistic zeitgeist.
This booth features a notable intergenerational trio of image appropriators: Martine Syms, Arthur Jafa, and Richard Prince. For those unaware of these artists, they cover a legacy of practices interested in remixing the mass-produced image.
I quickly found myself transfixed before Syms’s Steven or Act II installation, where a custom circular monitor displays a fragmented filmic collage made up of surveillance footage, found clips, voiceover, and music.
The work opens up like a lucid portal into hyperreality. Sym’s editing techniques remain productive in capturing reality’s simulated texture.
This particular installation also makes me recall the montage works I’ve previously seen by Arthur Jafa, who similarly edits online-images to create his own remixed visual compositions. They both understand the psychic grip our image culture has on the collective subconscious, and how remixing this media may make their influence on culture visible.
Jafa presented an oil and silkscreen painting that pairs rock icons Sid Vicious and Syd Barrett on a single canvas. This gritty composition rhymes with Richard Prince’s Girlfriends (1993) that hangs nearby. It features a topless model posing alongside a motorbike, restaging an archival photograph from an American biker magazine.
Their pairing is an extension of their recent duo exhibition, Helter Skelter, in Fondizone Prada, which might be one of my favorite exhibitions of all time. Equally, Jafa, Prince, and Syms see the American spirit as something formed through media circulation. By manipulating that circulation, they allow the buried truths inside distorted American fantasy to leak through.
PAUL THEK & PETER HUJAR, MAI 36 GALERIE, ZURICH
It’s no secret that the main priority of a commercial art fair is sales, yet moments of artistic discovery often emerge unexpectedly. This was true for me at MAI 36 Galerie’s booth, where I found one section pairing the works of New York avant-garde artists Paul Thek and Peter Hujar.
What makes this presentation exceptional is the intense history shared between these two artists. They met in the 1950s and entered into an intense union that mutually shaped their artistic careers. They were lovers, collaborators, confidantes, and, later, estranged rivals.
Thek’s works often deal with religious symbolism and the rejection of institutional order. In Pink Cross and Green Buds (1975–1980), he turns a small, almost childlike religious image into a devotional encounter.
Placed before a chair and lit like an altar, the work becomes a strange site for ironic contemplation.
Nearby, Peter Hujar’s photographs offer a masterclass in capturing delicate vulnerability.
Palermo Catacombs #12 (1963) returns to Thek and Hujar’s pivotal trip to the Capuchin Catacombs. This specific encounter with death in the catacombs became a central reference point for their fatalist aesthetic that would later define both their artistic practices.
By the late 1980s, both artists had died of AIDS-related complications, Hujar in 1987 and Thek the following year.
LISTE
JULIETTE LENA HAGER, 243 LUZ, LONDON
Just down the road from Art Basel, I descended upon Liste and first paused on 243 LUZ’s booth that seemed to show an installation frozen in-progress.
For the untrained eye, you might believe this gallery is delayed in setting up their booth, but a vitrine of government memorabilia hints that everything here is intentional. I read the UN documents and stare closely at the clothing trapped under the glass while searching for additional context.
The artist, Juliette Lena Hager, later reveals to me that the booth is a tribute to the 2022 rehanging of Picasso’s Guernica tapestry at the UN headquarters, when the tapestry was covered in 2003 following the invasion of Iraq. It’s a frozen historical and political moment, and reveals how history is itself staged.
Hager’s scenography, along with the gallery’s ambition to view the booth not merely as a commercial space but as a conceptual exhibition area, speaks to the ingenuity of these emerging exhibitors.
JOHN BOSKOVICH, LARRY JOHNSON, & JOE MAMA NITZBERG, O-TOWN HOUSE, LOS ANGELES
The Los Angeles-based gallery O-Town House has transformed a modest wall space into a mini-survey of the conceptual art practices by legacy gay artists John Boskovich, Larry Johnson, and Joe Mama Nitzberg. My attention was immediately drawn to the center of the display, where a vibrant, creamsicle-striped print by Larry Johnson boldly features the campy and loaded phrase “SUPERCALIFORNIAFAGGOTEXPIALIDOCIOUS.”
Set against giant ampersands and the nearby text-based works of Boskovich and Nitzberg, Johnson’s print crystallizes the wit and coded language running through the presentation shared by these queer artists.
This display preserves queer history through fragments of jokes and images.
BASEL SOCIAL CLUB
MAREK WOLFRYD, GENERAL EXPENSES, MEXICO CITY
I’d consider Basel Social Club a conceptual artwork in of itself. There is so much art here that this event would need its own round-up to do it justice, but the work that stayed with me the most was Marek Wolfryd’s Content Creation in the Age of Globalized Reproduction (2026).
Inflated purple letters spelling out fragments from Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction sit perfectly within the Social Club spectacle, where curious visitors turn the installation into an endless photo-op.
Benjamin’s essay famously argues that mechanical reproduction strips away the aura of an artwork. In Wolfryd’s hands, that theory becomes literal. Situated inside an office room, the work embodies the banality of art flattened in a global commercial system. It’s a conceptual work that cleverly speaks to its immediate environment.
MUSEUMS
PIERRE HUYGHE, FOUNDATION BEYELER
Just a train-ride away from the Mezzeplatz hub, I become immersed into the sci-fi world of Pierre Huyghe at Foundation Beyeler. The exhibition makes me feel like I’m in some liminal, backroom planet as I stroll across grey and black carpets. I stared into milky mirror surfaces that gradually became translucent, where I met the gaze of strangers on the other side of the disappearing glass.
The feeling inside this universe is melodramatic, and there’s a presence of technology here that seems to be a catalyst for the dystopian nature of Huyghe’s universe.
The exhibition feels alive. Peep holes in the wall snarl and breathe on you when you get close to them. Large rocks float omnipresently on large aquarium tanks. One of my favorite works is an animatronic worm-like creature that wriggles and stares at you like something straight from Dune.
This is an exhibition that successfully blends fiction with reality, and seeps through a new world in an eerie yet transcendent environment.
SHUANG LI, KUNSTHALLE BASEL
Over in Kunsthalle Basel, a simulated disaster unfolds inside of Shuang Li’s exhibition, Alliance. In the first room, a large display of horizontally-stretched monitors captures storm chasers within a saturated and distorted state.
The metaphor of storm chasing becomes central to this exhibition, using it as a framework for understanding the swirling forces that warps reality within our digital age.
The exhibition reaches a crescendo with a giant twister-like installation that encloses viewers inside of its simulated storm. The film playing on the stretched monitors shows a sex doll protagonist who desires to enter the tempest.
Using the tornado as motif captures a poetic surrender to the digital storm. It’s a collective desire to lose oneself completely within it.
WORST ARTWORKS
MIRRORED OBJECTS, EVERYWHERE
Like most commercial environments, the art fair remains vulnerable to bad taste. I found this especially clear in its fetish for mirrored and shiny objects, which often seem designed to reflect the buyer’s own image back at them, rather than produce any meaningful phenomenal or critical encounter. These works collapse contemplation into self-recognition. Nothing is allowed to exceed the reflection. Reflective surfaces become the bastard aesthetic of capital, a convenient aesthetic for artists and dealers who understand that many wealthy collectors do not want to think much beyond themselves.
If you are going to do the mirror thing, do it critically. Let the object open in the mind rather than settle on a superficial surface. The latter belongs to interior design. The former is what makes a critical encounter in an artwork possible.
An easy target for this condition is Perrotin’s display of Alma Allen’s golden metal sculpture, which looks like scraps of metallic butter frozen mid-collapse. It will certainly look lovely in someone’s massive estate, but let’s not pretend it is more critical than that.
A more obnoxious presentation was Goshka Macuga’s Exhibition M: A Re-enactment (2023–2026), staged in Art Basel’s Unlimited sector dedicated to presenting large-scale works. The performative installation revived a once-relevant style of institutional critique with the confidence of someone who believes it is still the 1990s. Suit-clad female performers berated visitors with fun facts of MoMA’s complicated history. I find it no surprise that the project was originally commissioned by MoMa itself.
Personally, I found the work revealing of the artworld’s masochistic pleasure. Powerful collectors and institutions seem to enjoy this type of scolding, especially when this verbal spanking lets them write off guilt through petty acquisitions and superficial support. In the end, the work fails to escape the spectacle it claims to indict. It is the kind of political performance that begs to be photographed rather than listened to. To critique the institution today means critiquing the entire global infrastructure, not just its most visible players. This requires advanced creativity, of course.
BASEL ART DUMP
Always real shit from Munguia 🙌
great read!