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- Art Basel in Basel will bring together 290 galleries from 43 countries and territories, including 21 newcomers across all show sectors.
- The 2026 edition reaffirms Basel’s position as the world’s most comprehensive expression of the global art market, presenting its full breadth – from historical foundations to the most progressive contemporary and digital practices.
- Returning for its second edition, the Premiere sector expands to 17 presentations, further strengthening the show’s capacity to accommodate ambitious new production and museum-scale projects created within the past five years.
- Two major public commissions by the inaugural Art Basel Awards Gold Awardees in the Established Artist category will be unveiled in Basel, with new large-scale works by Nairy Baghramian on the Messeplatz and Ibrahim Mahama on the Münsterplatz.
- Additional highlights include Ruba Katrib’s first edition of Unlimited and a newly articulated curatorial vision for Parcours 2026, alongside key presentations spanning historic works and emerging practices in the Feature and Statements sectors.
- Art Basel in Basel will once again activate the city as a whole, unfolding across Messe Basel, public spaces, and leading institutions, and anchoring a major week of exhibitions and cultural events throughout Basel and the wider region.
- Art Basel, whose Global Lead Partner is UBS, will take place from June 18 to 21, 2026, with Preview Days on June 16 and 17, bringing the international art world to Basel for a week of exhibitions, encounters, and cultural events across the city and region.
Art Basel is pleased to unveil the 290 participating galleries – including 21 new joiners – and first highlights of its 2026 flagship show in Basel. This year’s edition welcomes new gallery representation from Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, further broadening the show’s international scope. Bringing together galleries whose programs span historical, modern, postwar, contemporary, and emerging practices, Art Basel in Basel offers a moment-in-time view of the global art world, where different generations, geographies, and artistic languages converge within a single exhibition context.
Maike Cruse, Director, Art Basel in Basel, said: ‘For one week, Basel becomes the central meeting point of the art world – where historic depth meets bold new production across the halls and throughout the city. From major new public commissions by Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama to Ruba Katrib’s first edition as curator of Unlimited and the expansion of Premiere, this edition reflects both the enduring strength of the field and the exciting directions it is taking next, reinforcing Basel’s role as the global reference point for the art market. I am excited to welcome the global art community back to Basel.’
Across all sectors, the 2026 edition brings art-historical depth into close proximity with recent production and emerging practice, reflecting the show’s singular capacity to present the art world in its full breadth at once. Beyond the exhibition halls, Art Basel’s flagship show will once again unfold across the city, extending into public space and leading cultural institutions, and anchoring a week of exhibitions and events throughout Basel and the wider region.
As part of the inaugural class of Art Basel Awards Gold Awardees, Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama will unveil two major new public works in Basel this June, marking the first time that commissions stemming from the Awards program will premiere in the city where their recognition first took shape. As the inaugural Gold Awardees in the Established Artist category, both artists were invited to conceive ambitious, site-responsive projects for Basel’s public realm. Baghramian’s new work will unfold on the Messeplatz, while Mahama will present a large-scale installation on the Münsterplatz, extending the show’s presence into the historic heart of the city and reinforcing Art Basel’s long-term commitment to supporting artists beyond the exhibition halls as a platform for new formats.
Parcours
Parcours – Art Basel’s sector dedicated to site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, and public interventions — will be curated for the third consecutive year by Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute (SI), New York. The 2026 edition will coalesce around the notion of “conviviality” – the joy and challenges of living together – and unfolds across historic sites and public spaces along Clarastrasse, in close proximity to the show, inviting deeper engagement between artworks and the urban environment.
Galleries
The show’s main sector will welcome 232 international galleries showing the depth of their programs, bringing together museum-quality works spanning historical masterpieces and ambitious new productions. Increasingly conceived as tightly curated presentations, many booths this year unfold under clearly articulated themes — from examinations of metamorphosis and material transformation to reflections on memory, abstraction, and spatial perception – offering visitors a series of exhibition-scale experiences that resonate across the halls.
12 exhibitors will participate in the Galleries sector for the first time, including eight galleries that will graduate from Feature, Statements, and Premiere:
- Jessica Silverman (San Francisco) presents Significant Others, a curated booth exhibition featuring Judy Chicago, Loie Hollowell, Atsushi Kaga, Woody De Othello, GaHee Park, and Rose B. Simpson.
- Silverlens (Manila, New York) spotlights contemporary practices from Southeast Asia, with works by Pacita Abad, Yee I-Lahn, and Geraldine Javier.
- LC Queisser (Tbilisi, Cologne) stages a group exhibition exploring the poetics of transition, bringing together works by Ser Serpas, Tolia Astakhishvili, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi, and Karlo Kacharava.
- Pippy Houldsworth (London) foregrounds intergenerational dialogue, including paintings from Jacqueline de Jong’s iconoclastic series La vie privée des Cosmonautes (1966-1967), unseen in public since their debut in Paris.
- Larkin Erdmann (Zurich) presents a focused dialogue across Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Concrete Art, with major works by Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Meret Oppenheim, among others.
- Marcelle Alix (Paris) presents Aftershow, uniting Charlotte Moth, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Armineh Negahdari, Mira Schor, and Donna Gottschalk in an exploration of the “backstage” as a space of transformation, instability, and feminist re-imagination.
- Kalfayan Galleries (Athens, Thessaloniki) present Dialectics of the Visible, a curated dialogue juxtaposing a historic posthumous presentation of Vlassis Caniaris’s seminal installation Bicycle (1973–80) and key paintings by Giorgos Ioannou with new works by Antonis Donef and Farida El Gazzar.
- P420 (Bologna) brings together key works by Irma Blank, Laura Grisi, and Ana Lupas with newly commissioned pieces by Adelaide Cioni, June Crespo, and Francis Offman, reflecting its long-standing commitment to institutional rediscovery and the development of emerging practices.Four galleries will make their debut in Art Basel’s flagship show and enter directly into the main sector:
- Berry Campbell (New York) brings together 10 American postwar female artists for a group presentation, featuring Elaine de Kooning, Lynne Drexler, and Lucia Wilcox.
- Tim Van Laere Gallery (Antwerp, Rome) presents a cross-generational and cross-disciplinary booth bringing together Dirk Braeckman, Carroll Dunham, Adrian Ghenie, Leiko Ikemura, Tal R, Rinus Van de Velde, Eline Vansteenkiste, and Franz West.
- Phillida Reid (London) debuts with a group presentation spanning generations, cultures, and geographies, featuring Mohammed Z. Rahman and Prem Sahib, as well as major works by Joanna Piotrowska, among others.
- Ortuzar (New York) stages a cross-generational dialogue including Lynda Benglis, Suzanne Jackson, and Lee Bontecou.To discover the full list of Galleries exhibitors, please visit artbasel.com/basel/galleries.
Premiere
Expanded from 10 to 17 presentations, the Premiere sector underscores Art Basel in Basel’s role as a platform where ambitious recent production is tested, contextualized, and elevated within a broader historical and institutional framework. Conceived for works created within the past five years, the sector brings together museum-scale installations, sculptural environments, film and sound works, and materially experimental practices, with three galleries joining for the first time – Ehrhardt Flórez, Magenta Plains, and Öktem Aykut. Highlights include
- Athr Gallery (Jeddah, Riyadh, AlUla) presents Treehouse by Ayman Yossri Daydban, a large-scale, walk-through installation of translucent acrylic panels that uses light, reflection, and void to rethink architecture as a site of identity, exile, and belonging.
- Ehrhardt Flórez (Madrid) shows a radical solo installation by June Crespo, consisting of a single, large-scale wall sculpture that transforms the booth into a site of circulation, tension, and bodily presence through industrial materials and architectural constraint.
- Hoffman Donahue (New York, Los Angeles) brings together Susan Cianciolo, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Kate Mosher Hall in Refracted Realities, a generational dialogue across craft, technology, and collage that traces feminist practices operating ahead of their time.
- Magenta Plains (New York) proposes a curated group presentation by Jennifer Bolande, Liza Lacroix, and Josephine Meckseper, examining gender, image, and power through photography, sculpture, sound, and installation rooted in advertising vernaculars and bodily perception.
- Öktem Aykut (Istanbul) presents Strings by Koray Ariş, a suspended sculptural environment of leather and wood that invites touch and movement, extending a foundational sculptural language into a sensorial, spatial experience.
- White Space (Beijing) stages Wang Tuo’s six-channel video installation Intensity in Ten Cities, revisiting modern Chinese architecture through suppressed personal histories and sexual minority narratives, with a spatial display that fragments perception and historical truth.
To discover the full list of Premiere exhibitors, please visit artbasel.com/basel/premiere.
Feature
Feature brings 16 art-historical positions into proximity with the wider program of Art Basel in Basel, allowing historic works and curated presentations from across the twentieth century to be encountered as part of the show’s present-tense landscape. Five galleries will join the show for the first time: Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Galería Guillermo de Osma, Galerie Kaléidoscope, ML Fine Art, and Kotaro Nukaga. Spanning early modernism through the postwar period, the projects demonstrate how foundational practices continue to shape contemporary artistic thinking, including:
- Galería Guillermo de Osma (Madrid) presents The Universal Constructivist, a historical selection of works by Joaquín Torres-García created between 1916 and 1935, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and toys. The presentation traces the development of Universal Constructivism and its role in bridging European avant-garde thought with Latin American modernism.
- Galería Hubert Winter (Vienna) presents rare works by Marcia Hafif from her Italian Paintings and Acrylic Paintings, charting her decisive transition toward Radical Painting. The latter series is shown at an art fair for the first time since the mid-1970s.
- Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjan, Dakar, Paris) revisits the abstract works of Souleymane Keïta from the 1970s through the 1990s, repositioning a seminal figure of Senegal’s post-independence art scene within broader narratives of twentieth-century abstraction and African modernism.
- Giorgio Persano (Turin) brings together key works by Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto dating from 1966 to 1994, establishing a dialogue between Arte Povera and reflective practice that underscores the continuity of material and conceptual experimentation across decades.
- Kotaro Nukaga (Tokyo) presents a comprehensive solo project dedicated to Saori Akutagawa, tracing her work from early oil paintings to pioneering dye-based works and later abstraction from the 1950s and 1960s, highlighting her role as a trailblazing female avant-garde artist in postwar Japan.
- Galerie Kaléidoscope (Paris) stages a museum-caliber solo presentation of Eduardo Arroyo, highlighting politically charged and art-historical works from the 1960s and ’70s that position the artist as a leading figure of the Nouvelles Figurations movement in France and beyond.
To discover the full list of Feature exhibitors, please visit artbasel.com/basel/feature.
Statements
Statements will present 18 solo projects by emerging artists whose practices are often research-driven, materially experimental, and socially engaged, offering a platform for new voices within the show’s multi-layered program. Nine galleries join Art Basel in Basel for the first time – a. SQUIRE, Blue Velvet, Noah Klink, Silke Lindner, Wschód, David Peter Francis, Galerie Molitor, Lodos, and Tarq – underscoring Basel’s role as a site where new voices are introduced not in isolation, but in dialogue with the wider ecosystem of the fair and the city itself. Highlights include:
- a. SQUIRE (London) presents Delamination (2026) by Eli Coplan, a material analysis of the LCD screen that dissects the infrastructures of vision and mediation through peeled polarizing films, sculptural partitions, and video.
- Galerie Molitor (Berlin) debuts Fireworks Festival (2026) by Yalda Afsah, a new film drawn from the Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival in Taiwan that examines ritual, collective ecstasy, and the ambivalence of violence and social control through immersive sound and image.
- Gypsum Gallery (Cairo) showcases Plot Twist (2026) by Hana El-Sagini, an immersive sculptural landscape of braided bronze branches and reliefs that transforms personal experience, illness, and resilience into bodily and environmental forms.
- sans titre (Paris) presents The depths beneath the cage (2026) by Liselor Perez, a monumental installation of textile and silicone figures that destabilizes domestic scale and bodily hierarchy through a feminist and queer reimagining of childhood, care, and power.
- Wschód (Warsaw, New York) presents a new site-specific installation by Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw examining Berlin’s waste infrastructures through architectural sculpture, projections, and sound.
- Blue Velvet (Zurich) presents a new sculptural installation by Mónica Mays that examines the Western genre as a transnational fiction of conquest, weaving together assemblages of saddles, mirrors, and industrial debris to explore cycles of appropriation, spectacle, and cultural erasure.
To discover the full list of Statements exhibitors, please visit artbasel.com/basel/statements.
Edition
Spread across both floors of Hall 2, Editions will feature seven leading galleries in the field of prints and editioned works. They are: Cristea Roberts Gallery, Gemini G.E.L. – returning to the sector after a hiatus – knust kunz gallery editions, Carolina Nitsch, René Schmitt, Susan Sheehan Gallery, and STPI. For the full list of exhibitors in Edition, please visit artbasel.com/basel/edition.
Cultural events in Basel during the show
Beyond the exhibition halls, Art Basel in Basel anchors a week of major institutional exhibitions and cultural events, positioning the city as a focal point of the European art calendar. The close proximity of world-class museums, foundations, galleries, and public projects creates an experience defined by intensity, encounter, and exchange – one in which art is encountered not only inside the fair, but throughout the city itself. They include:
- Fondation Beyeler
‘Pierre Huyghe’ - Kunstmuseum Basel
‘Helen Frankenthaler’
‘Cao Fei. Testimonies to the Near Future’
‘The First Homosexuals. The Birth of New Identities 1869–1939’ - Kunsthalle Basel
‘Janiva Ellis’
‘Shuang Li’ - Kunsthaus Baselland
‘Monira Al Qadiri: Annual Project’
‘Mémoires voyageuses / Traveling Memories’ - Museum Tinguely
‘Labouring Bodies’
‘La roue = c’est tout. Permanent exhibition’
‘Nicolas Darrot. Fuzzy Logic’
‘Angelica Mesiti. Reverb’
- Vitra Design Museum
‘Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things’
- Vitra Schaudepot
‘Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space’
