designboom's guide to basel art week 2025: what to do in and out of the fairs

DESIGNBOOM’S GUIDE TO basel ART WEEK 2025

From June 16th to June 22nd, 2025, Basel Art Week 2025 unfolds as a city-wide constellation of art and culture, bringing together an array of established and emerging fairs, museum exhibitions, outdoor installations, and conferences. Anchored by Art Basel’s flagship fair, with 289 participating galleries and a riotous takeover of Messeplatz by Katharina Grosse, the week extends into alternative spaces, historic buildings, and the urban fabric itself.

From Liste Art Fair’s pulse on emerging talent to the site-specific programming of Basel Social Club, the return of Digital Art Mile, and MAZE’s inaugural design salon, there’s something for all kinds of creative professionals and enthusiasts alike. Meanwhile, new exhibitions and activations are taking place across the Swiss city’s major art institutions, from Fondation Beyeler, to Kunsthalle Basel and the Schaulager. To help you navigate Basel’s busiest week, designboom’s guide charts the layers of exhibitions, interventions, and events, in and out of the fairs – see all the highlights below.

image courtesy of Art Basel

THE FAIRS

art basel 2025

Art Basel unveils its 2025 edition with a program that expands beyond the fair halls. From June 19 to 22, the city of Basel transforms into a vibrant, multilayered exhibition space with 289 leading galleries from 42 countries and territories presenting works across every medium. Renowned German artist Katharina Grosse leads this year’s standout interventions by turning the Messeplatz into a swirling chromatic environment, curated by Natalia Grabowska of Serpentine. Meanwhile, Unlimited returns under the direction of Giovanni Carmine with 67 monumental projects pushing scale, subject, and format, making it the largest edition of the sector to date.

The Premiere sector debuts this year, offering a focused look at recent works that capture urgent themes and fresh artistic voices. The show also marks the return of Kabinett, featuring 24 curated highlights within gallery booths, and introduce the Art Basel Awards Summit, which celebrates 36 visionaries shaping the art world. The Parcours public art sector, curated once again by Stefanie Hessler, animates the city with over 20 site-specific works responding to the theme of Second Nature. Stretching from Clarastrasse to the Rhine, including interventions at the historic Hotel Merian and Münsterplatz, Parcours transforms Basel’s architecture into a narrative of nature, artifice, and hybridity. 

Basel Art Week 2025 unfolds as a city-wide constellation of creativity | image courtesy of Art Basel

messeplatz

Katharina Grosse brings her radical approach to painting into the heart of Basel as she takes over Messeplatz with CHOIR, a monumental site-specific intervention. Armed with her signature spray gun, the artist drenches the urban square and its surrounding structures in layers of vivid pigment, creating an immersive environment that disrupts the routine flow of public space. Curated by Natalia Grabowska, curator at large for architecture and site-specific projects at Serpentine, London, the work stands as one of the fair’s most anticipated highlights.

Katharina Grosse CHOIR, 2025 Messeplatz project, Art Basel Courtesy of the artist (c) VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025 Photography by Jens Ziehe

BMW presents Simply, 2025 by Alvaro Barrington

Alvaro Barrington collaborates with BMW for Art Basel 2025 to present Simply, 2025, a fusion of cutting-edge technology and cultural storytelling. Marking BMW’s 50 years of Art Cars, this latest project reimagines the BMW iX5 Hydrogen through Barrington’s signature colorful lens. Guided by insights from BMW’s hydrogen engineers and inspired by trailblazers like Richard Hamilton, Henri Matisse, David Hockney, and Tina Turner, the artist’s concept bridges past, present, and future, redefining what an Art Car can be in an era of sustainability and cultural reinvention.

image via @bmwgroupculture

liste art fair basel 2025

Liste Art Fair Basel is back for its landmark 30th edition from June 16–22, 2025, a launchpad for fresh voices in contemporary art. Founded in 1996 by a group of young gallerists, Liste has grown into a global hotspot where 99 galleries from 31 countries, with nearly half of them debutants, gather to spotlight emerging talents. Under the leadership of Nikola Dietrich, known for her sharp curatorial eye at Portikus and Kunstmuseum Basel, Liste returns as a platform for critical conversations through its program of performances, talks, workshops, and exhibitions. This year, the fair’s commitment to supporting pioneering practices is amplified by targeted production grants for 11 galleries.

What makes Liste pulse with energy is its embrace of diversity – from galleries presenting playful cultural mashups and political installations to sculptural works that weave sound and history, the fair reads like a global map of artistic exploration. Returning favorites like Cologne’s Drei and Zurich’s Blue Velvet share space with newcomers from Seoul, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and beyond, each offering fresh perspectives on identity, urban life, myth, and ecology.

Innuteq Storch, soon will summer be over, 2023, Wilson Sapplana | image via @liste_art_fair_basel

basel social club

The fourth edition of Basel Social Club, running from June 15th to June 21st, 2025, is moving into the marble-and-vaulted interior of a former private bank in the heart of Grossbasel. More than 100 rooms of the historic Vontobel building will be activated for the first time, opening to the public and marking the launch of FOR ART, Klaus Littmann’s long-term cultural initiative for the site. The 2025 program riffs on the financial legacy of the establishment, reworking its language and architecture to question systems of value, luxury, care, and exchange through a series of site-specific installations, performances, and food encounters.

Inside, expect anything but the typical art fair: a blood bank coexists with wellness suites, jewelry salons, beauty rituals, games, and durational performances. Each room becomes its own world, where spectators turn into participants and conventional hierarchies collapse. 

image via @basel.social.club

the digital art mile

The Digital Art Mile returns to Basel from June 16th to June 22nd, 2025, recharging the city’s art week with digital art as its focal point. Organized by ArtMeta and spread across three distinctive venues, Space25, the 4th Floor, and Kult.Kino Cinema, the fair reclaims Rebgasse as a cultural corridor for digital-native creativity. From generative art and autonomous robots to blockchain-based exhibitions and AI-collaborative works, the week-long programme repositions digital media as an essential thread in contemporary art history. Anchored by the landmark Paintboxed exhibition and a robust two-day conference series, the event bridges past innovation (like the 1980s Quantel Paintbox) with present-day pioneers including Justin Aversano, Ivona Tau, and Simon Denny. Notable sessions include Digital Art in Museums featuring Christiane Paul and Ian Charles Stewart, and Digital Art in Corporations, moderated by designboom, with insights from BMW’s Prof. Dr. Thomas Girst and UBS Digital Art Museum’s Ulrich Schrauth.

image courtesy of ArtMeta

MAZE

MAZE Design Basel, running on June 16th and June 17th, 2025, fills the void left by Design Miami/Basel with an intimate, high-caliber design salon. Set in the neo-Gothic Offene Kirche Elisabethen, the two-day event brings together 11 leading galleries, including Galerie Kreo, Salon 94, and Pierre-Marie Giraud, for a focused showcase of collectible design from the 1950s to today. Historic works by Jacques Adnet and François-Xavier Lalanne appear alongside contemporary pieces by Herzog & de Meuron and the Bouroullec brothers. 

Offene Kirche Elisabethen | image courtesy of MAZE

June Art Fair

Since its launch in 2019, June Art Fair has been carving out a niche as the indie antidote to the usual art fair frenzy. Set inside a raw concrete bunker reimagined by Herzog & de Meuron just a stone’s throw from Messeplatz, June offers a program where community, dialogue, and cross-generational exchange come together.

With a roster including galleries like VI, VII (Oslo), Christian Andersen (Copenhagen), and Galerie Fabian Lang (Zurich), the fair fosters an atmosphere of calm and connection, amplified by its leafy neighbor, the Landhof Community Garden, a green oasis perfectly matching June’s ethos of housing high-caliber art inside a thoughtful space. Special projects like People’s Soup and The Garden Cinema deepen this spirit of collaboration, making June a key chill spot to discover fresh voices during Basel Art Week, running June 16th – 22nd, 2025.

image courtesy of June Art Fair

MUSEUMS, EXHIBITIONS, AND EVENTS

swiss design awards

Running parallel to Art Basel, the Swiss Design Awards take place from June 17th until June 22nd, 2025, spotlighting the most compelling design talent working in and from Switzerland today. Held in Hall 1.1 of Messe Basel, the exhibition showcases 53 finalist projects selected by a jury of the Federal Design Commission and invited experts, culminating in the announcement of 17 prize winners. 

This year’s edition unfolds in a high-stakes, two-round jury process, with a physical exhibition functioning as the final stage of judging. Alongside the finalist presentations, visitors can engage with video portraits and a new publication dedicated to the Swiss Grand Prix Design laureates, offering rare, unpublished insights into their practices. 

chair design by Guy Meldem | image via @swissdesignawards

Schaulager

Twelve years after his landmark exhibition at Schaulager, Steve McQueen returns to the Basel institution with Bass (2024). Known for his powerful films and deeply sensory installations, the Turner Prize–winning artist and Oscar-winning filmmaker now presents his most abstract work to date, a spatial composition of light, color, and sound that stretches perception to its limits. Site-specifically conceived for Schaulager’s unique architecture, Bass invites visitors into an immersive environment where form dissolves and sensation takes over, exploring how immaterial elements can shape our understanding of time and space.

In typical McQueen fashion, the work bypasses narrative in favor of pure atmospheric impact. ‘Light and sound… can sneak into any nook and cranny,’ he reflects, and Bass does exactly that, filling the building like vapor or scent. 

Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024, LED Light and Sound, Courtesy the artist, Co-commissioned work by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation, 15 June – 16 November 2025, Schaulager® Münchenstein/Basel (Installation view), Photo: Pati Grabowicz, © Steve McQueen

Fondation Beyeler

Fondation Beyeler presents a convergence of three distinct artistic visions under one roof. From June 15th to September 21st, 2025, it hosts the most comprehensive European survey in nearly two decades of Vija Celmins, whose meticulous renderings of night skies, spider webs, and ocean surfaces invite a quiet, immersive gaze. Tracing her journey from war-inflected early works to the spatial poetics of her recent pieces, the show reveals how Celmins’ practice bridges the personal and the cosmic, the intimate and the infinite. Sculptures, which she calls ‘three-dimensional paintings,’ round out a body of work that transforms the act of looking into an act of deep attention.

Running concurrently is ‘There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red’, a rehang of the Beyeler’s painting collection. This bold display draws unexpected parallels between icons like Picasso, Basquiat, Dumas, and Rothko, and introduces the museum debut of Gerhard Richter’s digital projection Moving Picture (946-3), Kyoto Version. Meanwhile, Jordan Wolfson’s Little Room uses VR to dissolve the boundaries between bodies, minds, and identities. In this disorienting, uncanny duet between self and other, Wolfson stretches the emotional and perceptual capacities of virtual space – turning visitors into both subject and mirror in a speculative dance of recognition.

Kunstmuseum Basel

Kunstmuseum Basel NEUBAU shines a long-overdue spotlight on one of sculpture’s most radical innovators with Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture. Co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic in collaboration with mumok Vienna, the retrospective brings together around fifty of Rosso’s fragile, light-sensitive sculptures and an expansive archive of 250 photographs and drawings, illuminating his deeply experimental approach to form, media, and artistic identity. Often cast in wax or plaster and shown under shifting light conditions, Rosso’s works resist fixity, hovering between presence and dissolution.

A contemporary of Rodin and a precursor to artists like Brâncuși and Hesse, Rosso challenged the very definition of sculpture. He photographed his own works obsessively, staged them in carefully curated installations, and blurred boundaries between object, image, and illusion. This exhibition not only traces Rosso’s contributions to the avant-garde circles of turn-of-the-century Milan and Paris, but repositions him as a central figure in the story of modern sculpture.

Dialogues with over sixty artists, including Lynda Benglis, Edgar Degas, David Hammons, Meret Oppenheim, and Alina Szapocznikow, underscore the enduring relevance of Rosso’s practice, which continues to echo across conceptual, feminist, and post-minimalist traditions.

Bambino malato, Medardo Rosso, 1895 Plaster, 17.5 × 20 × 19.3 cm Object ID: 86100 Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio Photo: mumok / Markus Wörgötter

Kunsthalle Basel

At Kunsthalle Basel Marie Matusz’s Canons and Continents transforms the back wall of the institution into a field of mirrored vitrines that both obscure and reflect, exploring the porosity of cultural canons and geopolitical borders through sculptural precision and conceptual opacity. Inside the museum, Dala Nasser’s debut exhibition in Switzerland turns to abstraction as a means of resistance and reclamation, using cyanotype-treated fabrics and earth-indexed surfaces to evoke a landscape marked by erasure, infrastructural decay, and histories left unspoken, most poignantly through the imagined reconstruction of a lost Byzantine church in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Ser Serpas stages a raw convergence of performance, painting, and sculpture, deconstructing corporeal forms and temporalities in collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre. 

Kunsthaus Baselland

At Kunsthaus Baselland, the group exhibition Whispers from Tides and Forests, on view until August 17th 2025, invites viewers into a space of quiet urgency, where delicate gestures echo loud shifts in global ecologies and social narratives. Featuring works by Caroline Bachmann, Johanna Calle, Lena Laguna Diel, Abi Palmer, Nohemí Pérez, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Belén Rodríguez, Ana Silva, Julia Steiner, Surma, and Liu Yujia, the show foregrounds subtle yet potent responses to planetary crisis, forced migration, and the fragility of shared landscapes.

Moving between continents and media, the exhibition resists grand declarations, instead offering tender, tactile stories that reimagine the human relationship to time, space, and nature. From forest canopies to riverbeds, from whispered grief to acts of resilience, these works resonate with what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘the end of the old stories’, leaving space instead for new, uncertain, and care-driven futures.

Lena Laguna Diel: De quien sembramos las semillas (From whom we sow the seeds), 2025. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view Kunsthaus Baselland 2025 | image by Gina Folly

Museum Tinguely

At Museum Tinguely, three exhibitions explore power, fluidity, and collective memory through radically different lenses. In De tu puño y letra (By Your Own Hand), Suzanne Lacy confronts viewers with a chilling yet crucial spatial encounter: male-presenting participants read letters detailing gender-based violence written by women-identifying survivors. Filmed in a bullfighting arena in Quito, symbolically charged with dominance and violence, the circular projection places visitors at the center of a social reckoning. 

Running concurrently, Midnight Zone dives into the elemental depths with Julian Charrière’s multi-floor solo exhibition. Here, water is not backdrop but protagonist, a living medium of climate, crisis, and collective history. Through film, photography, sculpture, and newly commissioned works, Charrière renders the invisible circulations of the Earth as immersive, affective worlds. Between these two, Scream Machines – Art Ghost Train turns up the surreal with a kinetic homage to Jean Tinguely’s 1977 Crocrodrome. Artists Rebecca Moss and Augustin Rebetez reanimate a vintage ghost train with absurd sculptures, eerie mechanics, and chaotic humor. 

Julian Charrière, The Blue Fossil Entropic Stories III, 2013. Copyright: © 2025 ProLitteris, Zürich; Copyright the Artist

HEK (house of electronic arts)

During Art Basel Week, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) becomes a nucleus of expanded digital vision, presenting a dense program that spans AI, virtual worlds, and pan-Asian perspectives. The current exhibition Other Intelligences investigates how machine learning reshapes concepts of cognition, agency, and empathy, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes intelligence in contemporary culture. 

In parallel, HEK hosts the 6th VH AWARD, a prestigious initiative by Hyundai Motor Group spotlighting emerging digital artists from Asia. From June 16th–22nd, works by finalists Lena Bui, Huda x Mungomery, Tianyi Sun & Fiel Guhit, Wendi Yan, and Inhwa Yeom are shown on a large-scale LED screen on HEK’s outdoor platform, culminating in a panel discussion and award ceremony on June 17th. Expanding beyond the museum walls, the ARTour, curated by HEK director Sabine Himmelsbach—, ctivates public space with augmented reality artworks across Basel, while ArtMeta’s Digital Art Mile along the Kleinbasel Rhine embankment hosts a surge of exhibitions and events that trace the pulse of the global digital art scene.

Vitra Design Museum

The Vitra Design Museum dives into the enduring legacy of the shakers with The Shakers: A World in the Making, an exhibition that brings together a collection of finely crafted shaker furniture, architectural fragments, tools, and commercial objects. Curated alongside fresh commissions by contemporary artists and designers, the show unpacks the complex social, spiritual, and material fabric behind the iconic shaker style, an aesthetic rooted in community values and functionality that still resonates today. 

Installation view, The Shakers: A World in the Making, © Vitra Design Museum | image by Bernhard Strauss

Vitra Schaudepot

Vitra Design Museum explores the evolving dialogue between science fiction and design in Science fiction design: from space age to metaverse, on view at Vitra Schaudepot until May 10th, 2026. Featuring over 100 objects from the collection of the museum, the exhibition traces how science fiction has shaped – and been shaped by – design, from early 20th-century visions and space-age aesthetics to digital objects made for the metaverse.

Staged in a futuristic scenography by Argentine artist and designer Andrés Reisinger, the show brings together iconic pieces by Gae Aulenti, Joe Colombo, Verner Panton, and Joris Laarman alongside furniture from classic sci-fi films and Reisinger’s own NFT-born creations. 

Anouk Wipprecht Audi A4 Dress | image courtesy of Vitra Design Museum

maison CLEARING

As Art Basel 2025 unfolds, CLEARING Gallery marks its 15th anniversary with Maison CLEARING, a distinctive off-site exhibition, housed in a historic four-story villa just steps from Messeplatz and the Rhine. Inside the refined rooms of the villa and throughout its lush 1,000-square-meter garden, over 50 international artists, including Violet Dennison, Kayode Ojo, Tomasz Kowalski, Marina Pinsky, and Sara Flores, present works across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Deliberately slowing the pace of the fair, Maison CLEARING invites visitors to linger, talk, and connect, proposing an alternative to the transactional atmosphere of the main halls. 

image courtesy of CLEARING

project info:

event: Basel Art Week 2025

location: Basel, Switzerland

dates: June 16th – June 22nd, 2025