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 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 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.
