The Best Things to See at Art Basel 2026

From Alvaro Barrington’s carnival paintings to Nicole-Antonia Spagnola’s uncanny monkeys and Mónica Mays’ deconstruction of the cowboy, here are six highlights to catch at Art Basel 2026

One year around the sun, and Basel resumes its role as the art world’s pressure point: Each June, collectors, curators, artists and the culturally insatiable converge on the Swiss city to take the temperature of the market, the museum and the ideas shaping art now. For 2026, Art Basel gathers 290 galleries from 43 countries, setting blue chip powerhouses such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Pace, White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac alongside younger galleries including Emalin, Arcadia Missa, LC Queisser and Wschód.

This year, the Statements and Premiere sections give the fair some of its sharpest voltage, foregrounding younger artists working with unusual ambition and edge. Blue Velvet, moving from Liste and debuting at Art Basel Statements with a striking solo presentation by Mónica Mays, arrives with all works sold. Some of the strongest signals come from the margins within the Premiere section, at Felix Gaudlitz and its neighbouring booth Ginny on Frederick, where cinematic storytelling, residue, decay and unstable perception cut through the fair’s blue chip polish. In the main Galleries sector, Vienna’s Croy Nielsen stands out as a hothouse of artists combining advanced technical skill with singular imagination, material intelligence and thought-provoking approaches to multimedia forms, while Emalin brings its own sharper register of image culture, bodily tension and contemporary unease. Beyond the fair, Pierre Huyghe’s world at Fondation Beyeler offers a slower, stranger counterpoint to Basel’s charged density.

Emalin

At Emalin, in Art Basel’s main Galleries sector, Alvaro Barrington (b. 1983, Caracas, Venezuela, based in London) gives the booth its heat through burlap carnival paintings that move between Tate Britain, Notting Hill Carnival and his Venice presentation, where a truck appears in the Giardini. First shown at Tate, then mounted onto Barrington’s carnival float, the works extend painting into public procession. Their jab jab figures, devil characters from Trinidadian carnival, carry the force of ritual, body paint, engine oil and collective release. Hand-embroidered borders, added later, reference Kuba cloth, Matisse and a wider modernist lineage. “Carnival is one of the most complete forms of artistic expression on the planet,” Barrington says. Nearby, works by Tolia Astakhishvili, Jasper Marsalis, Jonathan Okoronkwo, Karol Palczak and Sung Tieu broaden the booth’s register, with Palczak’s eels on marble turning rural Poland, decay and paint’s materiality into a charged vanitas.

Blue Velvet

In Art Basel’s Statements section, Mónica Mays (b. 1990, Madrid, lives and works in Madrid and Zurich) emerges as one of the fair’s strongest contenders with Oasys Mini Hollywood. For Mays, a Spanish-American artist, the cowboy is not a distant genre figure but an inherited image moving between Spain, Mexico and the US. “The Western is less a film genre than a machine for producing reality,” she says. “Rather than revisiting the genre itself, the project examines its afterlife: the way its myths continue to inform contemporary ideas of identity, territory, freedom and violence.” The booth takes that machine apart through saddles, prosthetic bodies, exhaust pipes, truck fans and chemically aged silver nitrate mirrors. In works such as Buckaroo, tarred and feathered and Buckaroo, showdown, the cowboy body appears wounded, theatrical and unstable, caught between cinema, colonial fantasy and material collapse.

Ginny on Frederick

In Art Basel’s Premiere section, Ghosts, featuring Hamish Pearch, Sophie Giraux and Jack O’Brien, turns the booth into a study of residue: what remains materially, emotionally and functionally after an image, object or body moves on. Hamish Pearch brings that logic to ice, decay and repetition, with works in which lemons alter over a month and a father figure melts through the day before returning each morning. Sophie Giraux’s cast tablecloth works translate domestic surfaces into ghostly skins, as liquid rubber lifts colour, pattern and sheen from collaged fabrics. Jack O’Brien’s Claim gives the presentation its armoured centre, using a replica Gothic suit of armour as the basis for a new architectural body of restraint, wrapping and assemblage. “I’m interested in what happens when very different objects and histories are forced together,” O’Brien says. “The armour acts less as an image of the body and more as a structure that other materials can pass through, creating a space between recognition and abstraction.” A further work by Pearch, created for the fair, uses sand cast aluminium to turn iconic Swiss biscuits into pooled, frozen forms, catching Basel’s mix of appetite, commerce and display.

Felix Gaudlitz

At Felix Gaudlitz, in Art Basel’s Premiere section, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola’s Old Monkeys give the booth its uncanny pulse. Made from vintage Knickerbocker Co Sleepyhead monkey pyjama bag dolls carrying smartphone videos, they turn childhood companions into vessels for image memory, commodity value and technological afterlife. Spagnola frames the strange distance between a child’s emotional attachment to a toy and the historical value it gains in the present: “But now, we live in the future!” In Old Monkeys (two smiles), an image reflected through a Slurpee lid shows two children watching a chimpanzee performance at the St Louis Zoo in 1950; Old Monkey (money hole) folds coins, gems and belly buttons into dream logic. Around them, Kobby Adi’s Last Cypher makes the booth stand out, with a black wall and red neon creating a comforting sanctuary to enter from the fair’s visual noise. Lukas Posch’s paintings close the loop with withholding images.

Croy Nielson 

At Croy Nielsen, in Art Basel’s main Galleries sector, the Vienna booth stands out for technical delicacy, material intelligence and psychological unease. Soshiro Matsubara (b. 1980, Japan, based in Vienna) anchors it with Lover II (2026), a work of oil on ceramic, glazed ceramic, stone, wig, painted wood, epoxy glue and clay. Its two heads press together between tenderness, mourning and sleep, suspended between intimacy and disappearance. Inspired by Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s theory of the body, Matsubara describes his work as an attempt “to create a state in which life and death coexist simultaneously”. Through “the accidental combination of bodily fragments”, he explores “the dissolution of boundaries between the body, life and death”, linking the work to Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953). Joanna Woś (b. 1991, Poland, based in Vienna) extends the unease with thinly layered nude figures in Viennese postcard landscapes, while Sandra Mujinga, Olga Balema, Birke Gorm and Tomas Joshua Leth deepen the booth’s material transformations.

Pierre Huyghe at Foundation Beyeler 

During Art Basel, Fondation Beyeler offers the essential counterpoint to the fair’s density with Pierre Huyghe’s first solo exhibition in a Swiss museum. Conceived for the Renzo Piano-designed venue, the show turns the museum into a living system rather than a sequence of objects. New works, recent films and earlier pieces unfold through moving image, sound, sculpture, living organisms and machine learning, forming what the artist calls access to “other possible worlds”. At its centre, Apnea (2026), an artificial breathing organ submerged underwater, sends air, vibration and rhythm through the exhibition, while Liminals (2025) imagines a non-human state outside linear time. Huyghe’s work makes fiction, biology and technology feel porous, unstable and alive. Against the speed and glare of the fair, Beyeler offers a slower, stranger encounter with art as atmosphere, intelligence and evolving world.