The Best Booths at Art Basel 2025

Templon, one of France’s leading galleries, presents no fewer than 21 artists in its booth, including Valerio Adami, Martin Barré, Iván Navarro, and Omar Ba, who will have a solo show at the gallery’s New York outpost in September. Ba’s most recent painting, completed just a few days before the fair, stands out. The Senegalese painter often displays his unstretched canvases horizontally, starting off with a black preparatory layer that adds depth and texture. The combination of various materials—acrylic, BIC pens, and Tipp-Pex—in Ba’s work and the recurring depiction of flags reflect his exploration of the power relations between Africa and the rest of the world.

Is this blue-dominated abstraction a self-portrait? That is the question raised by Maria Lassnig’s 1998 painting Blauer Weicher (Soft Blue One). The late Austrian artist is famous for depicting herself as part of her research on “body awareness,” a term she used to describe her practice. Her point was to capture what she felt like, rather than what she looked like. “This is how she would depict noses in the 1990s, which leads us to believe that this work could be a self-portrait, but nothing confirms it,” a representative of Petzel Gallery said on opening day. Complementing Lassnig’s historical work, which had never been shown publicly before, is a painting by Emily Mae Smith, who has just had a show at the Magritte Museum in Brussels. The Huntress, Detourned (2025) features a furry-legged archer broomstick who got shot with arrow in the chest and the head.

Part of Galerie 1900–2000’s booth is devoted to appropriation. The star of this themed corner is none other than Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. Rasée (1965). (When pronounced in French, L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul,” or “She has a hot ass.”) Duchamp first came up with it in 1919, writing it down on a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa, onto which he also drew a mustache and beard. Forty years later Duchamp pastiched his own work, sending out 30 dinner invitations in the shape of game cards featuring the Mona Lisa and the inscription “Shaved.” This version sold within the fair’s first two hours to a private collector who already owns two others from the series.

If not for the pink walls in von Bartha’s booth, the insects pinned to an adjacent white wall could easily be overlooked. But once you see, you cannot help but take a closer look. These are cockroaches, and they look real! “Cockroaches are ancient creatures. They will outlive us, but that we get to exhibit them suggests that we are still in control,” a gallery representative told ARTnews. In 2009, before 3D printing those creatures, SUPERFLEX, mostly known for their works of public art and design, invited people to be hypnotized into considering climate change from the viewpoint of cockroaches. The Danish trio is also responsible for a tour of the London Science Museum with visitors dressed as cockroaches. The fascination lives on, it seems.

The best art in Esther Schipper’s booth isn’t just on the walls. In addition to Simon Fujiwara’s monumental painting Studio Who? (Red Room) (2025), a triptych filled with references to canonical works from Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase to Manet’s Olympia are two floor pieces. Just to the right is an ice cream with a hefty scoop of vanilla that has been knocked to the floor. No, a visitor didn’t drop their melting treat while looking at Fujiwara’s canvas. It is a bronze sculpture, Moving Object, or Stability Metrics (2025), by Ryan Gander that is part of an ongoing series exploring the tension between the intentional and the accidental. Nearby is Martin Boyce’s Somewhere There Are Trees (2022), consisting of red paraffin coated crepe papers spread out in one corner.

The Berlin-based neugerriemschneider has brought to Art Basel U.S. Boots (2004) by Isa Genzken. This eye-catching installation features a four-sided white pedestal that supports a faux-fur pelt; strips of pink foam, metal, and plastic; and a pair of white rubber boots, among other objects. Part of the “Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death” series, U.S. Boots marks a turning point in Genzken’s career, when she began using the mass-produced trappings of everyday life to create sculptural assemblages.

London’s Edel Assanti is making its Art Basel debut in the Premiere section with a solo presentation of Lonnie Holley, who also features in this year’s Unlimited section. Holley’s 2024 installation Without Skin, made of thick red fire hoses coiled around a pile of wooden chairs, takes center stage. This work’s materials reference the power hoses used against civil rights protesters in the US during the 1950s and ’60s; the spray was so strong that it could strip the skin off people’s backs.  On the wall behind is a painting of entangled profiles which match the cut-out motifs of a wooden pew titled The Mourning Bench (The last Shall Be First), from2025.

Jacky Strenz is making her debut in the Premiere sector with a new showcase of Lin May Saeed, whom she devoted an entire booth to at the June Art Fair last year. The late artist, who dedicated her life and work to advocating for the respect of animals, started “The Liberation of Animals from their Cages” in 2006. The soft-toned sculpture, made of Styrofoam, bronze, and cardboard, dates to 2023, the year of her death. This version features a rainbow-struck landscape where an elephant, a giraffe, a blue-skinned musician, a monkey, among other characters, peacefully coexist. The artist defined her vision as “works of hope.”

Sounds of mumbles, deep breaths, and swallows are coming from Raffael Cortese’s booth. They are coming from a three-screen installation that is part of Gabrielle Goliath’s ongoing “Personal Accounts” project, which records the testimonies of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, non-binary, and trans individuals. Each account, which often deals with the violence and trauma experienced by the interviewee, is also a message of hope on how to survive and move forward. Goliath, however, cuts out most of their words, emphasizing instead these paralinguistic elements so that the narrative remains unavailable to the viewer.

The iteration on view at Art Basel tells the story Nigerian news anchor Deinde Falase, who, in 2014, had to announced on national television that the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill had passed; its passage caused him to leave Nigeria for South Africa, where LGBTIQ+ rights are constitutionally enshrined. In the central panel, he talks about his beloved mother, who died before he could fully come out to her. On either side, he mentions his supportive brother who lives in the USA and his younger brother who has turned his back on him.