Art Basel has announced the exhibitor list and first program details for its 2026 flagship fair in Basel, confirming 290 galleries from 43 countries and territories and consolidating the Swiss edition’s status as the most expansive snapshot of the global art market. The fair will run from June 18 to 21, 2026 at Messe Basel, with preview days on June 16 and 17, once again transforming the city into a dense circuit of exhibitions, public projects, and institutional shows.
Basel fair overview
The 2026 edition brings together galleries working across historical, modern, postwar, contemporary, and emerging practices, positioning Basel as a “moment-in-time” view of how different generations, geographies, and artistic languages intersect in one exhibition context. New gallery representation this year includes spaces from Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, signalling a continued broadening of the fair’s geographic reach.
Maike Cruse, Director of Art Basel in Basel, frames the edition as a convergence of historical depth and bold new production across both the halls and the city, highlighting new public commissions, the expansion of the Premiere sector, and a refreshed curatorial direction in several key sections as markers of “the exciting directions” the field is taking.
Key sectors and curatorial shifts
The main Galleries sector will host 232 international galleries, many opting for tightly curated presentations structured around themes such as metamorphosis and material transformation, memory, abstraction, and spatial perception. Twelve exhibitors move up from the fair’s curated sectors into the Galleries section, among them Jessica Silverman (San Francisco), Silverlens (Manila/New York), LC Queisser (Tbilisi/Cologne), Pippy Houldsworth (London), Larkin Erdmann (Zurich), Marcelle Alix (Paris), Kalfayan Galleries (Athens/Thessaloniki), and P420 (Bologna), each staging conceptually driven group booths that range from feminist “backstage” imaginaries to dialogues between Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Concrete Art.
Four galleries, namely Berry Campbell (New York), Tim Van Laere Gallery (Antwerp/Rome), Phillida Reid (London), and Ortuzar (New York) enter Art Basel’s flagship show directly into the main sector, underscoring the continued pull of Basel for mid-career and established programs. Feature will bring 16 art-historical projects into dialogue with the fair’s contemporary program, with first-time participants including Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Galería Guillermo de Osma, Galerie Kaléidoscope, ML Fine Art, and Kotaro Nukaga, and presentations devoted to figures such as Joaquín Torres-García, Marcia Hafif, Souleymane Keïta, Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Saori Akutagawa, and Eduardo Arroyo.
Statements will foreground 18 solo projects by emerging artists, with nine galleries—including a. SQUIRE, Blue Velvet, Noah Klink, Silke Lindner, Wschód, David Peter Francis, Galerie Molitor, Lodos, and Tarq—joining the Basel show for the first time, emphasizing research-led, materially experimental, and socially engaged practices. Editions, spread across both floors of Hall 2, will feature seven specialists in prints and editioned works, among them Cristea Roberts Gallery, Gemini G.E.L., knust kunz gallery editions, Carolina Nitsch, René Schmitt, Susan Sheehan Gallery, and STPI.
Premiere, Parcours and public commissions
Returning for its second year, the Premiere sector significantly expands from 10 to 17 presentations, strengthening Art Basel’s capacity to showcase ambitious work produced in the past five years in a context that bridges emerging and established positions. Defined by museum-scale installations, sculptural environments, film and sound works, and materially experimental practices, Premiere welcomes three new galleries—Ehrhardt Flórez (Madrid), Magenta Plains (New York), and Öktem Aykut (Istanbul)—alongside existing participants.
Highlights in Premiere include Athr Gallery’s large-scale walk-through installation Treehouse by Ayman Yossri Daydban, which uses translucent acrylic panels, light, and reflection to rethink architecture through the lenses of identity and exile. Ehrhardt Flórez will present a radical solo installation by June Crespo that recasts the booth as a single, monumental wall sculpture probing circulation, tension, and bodily presence, while Magenta Plains stages a curated presentation by Jennifer Bolande, Liza Lacroix, and Josephine Meckseper around gender, image, and power. Öktem Aykut contributes Strings by Koray Ariş, a suspended environment of leather and wood that invites touch and movement, while White Space (Beijing) shows Wang Tuo’s six-channel video Intensity in Ten Cities, revisiting modern Chinese architecture via suppressed personal histories and queer narratives.
Parcours, Art Basel’s sector for site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, and public interventions in the city, will be curated for a third year by Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute, New York. For 2026, Hessler will organize Parcours around the notion of “conviviality”—the joys and tensions of living together—with works unfolding along Clarastrasse’s historic sites and public spaces, creating closer engagements between artworks and the urban fabric.
Beyond the halls, Art Basel will debut two major public commissions by the inaugural Art Basel Awards Gold Awardees in the Established Artist category, Nairy Baghramian and Ibrahim Mahama, marking the first time awards-related commissions premiere in Basel itself. Baghramian, known for sculptures that negotiate architecture and the human body, will realize a new work on Messeplatz, while Mahama will install a large-scale project on Münsterplatz, extending the fair’s presence into Basel’s historic center and underlining its stated ambition to support artists in the public realm as well as in the fair.
Citywide program and institutional context
As in previous years, Art Basel’s Swiss fair will anchor a dense week of institutional exhibitions and cultural events across Basel and the surrounding region, leveraging the city’s close-knit network of museums, foundations, and galleries. During the fair, Fondation Beyeler will present a Pierre Huyghe exhibition, while Kunstmuseum Basel will host shows dedicated to Helen Frankenthaler, Cao Fei (Testimonies to the Near Future), and The First Homosexuals: The Birth of New Identities 1869–1939.
Kunsthalle Basel’s program will feature exhibitions by Janiva Ellis and Shuang Li, and Kunsthaus Baselland will stage projects including Monira Al Qadiri: Annual Project and Mémoires voyageuses / Traveling Memories. Museum Tinguely will offer exhibitions such as Labouring Bodies, La roue = c’est tout, Nicolas Darrot: Fuzzy Logic, and Angelica Mesiti: Reverb, while the Vitra Design Museum will present Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things, and the Vitra Schaudepot will focus on Verner Panton: Form, Colour, Space.
Governance, partners and dates
The selection for Basel is overseen by a committee of gallerists including Sadie Coles (Sadie Coles HQ, London), Peter Freeman (Peter Freeman, Inc., New York/Paris), Atsuko Ninagawa (Take Ninagawa, Tokyo), Franck Prazan (Applicat-Prazan, Paris), Prateek Raja (Experimenter, Kolkata), Niccolò Sprovieri (Sprovieri, London), and Bärbel Trautwein (Trautwein Herleth, Berlin). Additional experts advise on the Feature sector (Jennifer Chert and Isabel Mignoni), on Statements and Premiere (Jennifer Chert, Bridget Donahue, Aleya Hamza), on Edition (Carolina Nitsch), and on classical photography (Thomas Zander).
UBS returns as Global Lead Partner, continuing to align the fair with its corporate art collection and joint research, including the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report and the Survey of Global Collecting. Qatar Airways serves as Premium Partner, with BMW, Audemars Piguet, and Hong Kong Tourism Board as Associate Partners, and a wider roster of show and host partners including Jet Aviation, Airbnb, Ruinart, Samsung, Zegna, ERCO, Enea Landscape Architecture, Vitra, JNBY, and Movenpick Hotel Basel; the Financial Times remains Global Media Partner.
Press preview days for Art Basel in Basel 2026 are scheduled for June 16 and 17 (by invitation), with public opening from Thursday, June 18 through Sunday, June 21. Press accreditation will open online in April, ahead of a full calendar of Art Basel’s 2026 shows in Hong Kong (March 27–29), Basel (June 18–21), Paris (October 23–25), Miami Beach (December 4–6), and Qatar.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
