Forget about Qatar. Forget about Paris. This week is all about Art Basel, original flavor, in the Swiss town that gave the art fair juggernaut its name. Through June 21, no fewer than 290 galleries from 43 countries around the world are pulling out all the stops for what one first-time exhibitor described to CULTURED as “the pinnacle” of all art market events.
The crowds lined up outside the Messeplatz on Tuesday morning for entry to the pre-fair champagne breakfast, where they sipped Ruinart amid an immersive nature installation designed by Swiss landscape architecture firm Enea and inspired by the Enea Tree Museum near Lake Zurich. Then, it was game time, and the doors quietly opened to a two-floor art mecca.
In a slight twist on the normal state of affairs, Art Basel had asked dealers to wait until opening day to share “Art Basel Exclusive” works, rather than promoting them to collectors ahead of time along with the rest of booth offerings.
Amidst the sea of works on view, four artists stood out as having veritable breakout moments by the end of day one. Below, we detail what’s available, what’s already sold, and where to find them next.
Leoncillo at Thaddaeus Ropac
When CULTURED visited Thaddaeus Ropac’s Art Basel booth, the gallery was prepping to send out of the press release announcing its representation of the estate of Leoncillo, an Italian sculptor born in 1915 who represented his country at the Venice Biennale no less than six times.
After the artist’s death in 1968, a lack of consensus among family members kept any one gallery from taking on his work. Now, the family is finally working together to secure Leoncillo’s legacy, joining Ropac’s roster as well as launching a new foundation to manage the estate. The first show will open at the dealer’s Milan outpost in September.
The gallery has a track record of taking on artists and estates who are little known outside Europe. “There have been Leoncillo sales at auction of up to a million dollars, but they are quite isolated,” Sarah Rustin, the gallery’s global senior director of communication, told me. “There hasn’t been consistent access to his works internationally.”
Leoncillo had two major cheerleaders within Ropac’s orbit who helped make it all happen: Elena Bonanno di Linguaglossa, who joined the gallery as its Milan director in January 2025, and Bernard Blistène, the recently retired artistic director of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, who had shown the artist’s work there, and collaborated with the gallery over the years.
At the fair, Ropac is offering the 1967 sculpture Tre Tagli (A, B, C), a trio of almost spinal-looking terracotta columns measuring about 20 inches tall. The piece sold for €270,000 ($313,500).
Leoncillo is known for his work in clay, which set him apart from contemporaries who favored bronze. “He really wanted to bring the life force out the material,” Rustin shared.
Helen Frankenthaler at various galleries
As the star of this year’s main exhibition at the city’s Kunstmuseum, Helen Frankenthaler has quite a presence in Basel, with at least four galleries featuring her work in the main fair. (On Tuesday, Ropac was also touting the sale of a roughly $3 million canvas by the artist, which it sold ahead of the fair and ultimately opted not to transport to the event, due to size.)
A noted Abstract Expressionist who pioneered her own soak-stain painting technique, Frankenthaler died in 2011 at the age of 83. Over the last decade, amid a growing reappraisal for 20th-century women abstractionists, her already-sterling reputation has only continued to rise, bolstered by a recent show at MoMA. A traveling retrospective is set to launch for her centenary in 2028 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The artist’s auction record has stood at $7.9 million since 2020, with seven-figure prices at Art Basel reflecting her increasing status as a market heavyweight: Her 1963 canvas Center Break, which last sold for $672,500 at Christie’s New York in 2018, was on reserve at New York’s Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries for $2.2 million.
But Dennis Yares of New York’s Yares Art was quick to insist this is not a moment of rediscovery: “She’s been pivotal and iconic all the way through. The more exhibitions there are, the more the recognition grows globally. That’s the difference.”
The gallery actually plucked canvases off the walls of its current show pairing Frankenthaler and her close friend Anthony Caro, the British sculptor, to bring three of her 1970s-era works to Basel. On Tuesday, one had already sold for $2 million, and the others were priced at $3.2 million and $5.8 million.
Just across the aisle, Ben Brown Fine Arts, of London, New York, and Hong Kong, had tapped a shimmering 1980 Frankenthaler for its Art Basel Exclusive, priced at $2.8 million.
And tucked around the corner, New York’s Berry Campbell, known for specializing in 20th-century women abstractionists, was not about to miss out on the Frankenthaler party. The gallery had a small work on paper, created by the artist as a gift to a concert pianist, featuring a handwritten birthday greeting, on offer for $95,000.
Hernan Bas at Victoria Miro and Lehmann Maupin
Fresh off the debut of Hernan Bas’s solo show at the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice, Victoria Miro selected a new painting by the Miami native for its Art Basel Exclusive.
The painting, Self-storage, has an almost furtive quality, its imagined protagonist, a thin white man, clutching a bag of mannequin limbs amid a roomful of these ersatz humans. “It’s about how whatever you collect around yourself reveals something about you,” Will Davies, the gallery’s director of sales, explained on Tuesday.
Bas, who was born in 1978, actually created the work in Venice, where he did much of the painting in residency for the Ca’ Pesaro exhibition.
“The Visitors” was inspired by mass tourism, each painting set in locations around the world, revealing a tension between Bas’s travelers and their destinations through their seemingly superficial and performative embrace of local delicacies, fashions, and other photo ops. (The paintings’ exploration of the clichés of tourism is especially easy to appreciate in Venice, a city perennially besieged by visitors who threaten to overrun the historic lagoon.)
Bas’s early work is also featured at Art Basel, with his 2007 piece The Temptation of the Shepherd, from the “Saints and Secret Sects” series, on offer from Lehmann Maupin and priced between $250,000 and $300,000.
Aziza Kadyri at East Contemporary
Across the Messeplatz at Zero10, the fair’s sector for digital art making its inaugural Basel appearance this week, is a striking presentation by Aziza Kadyri. The artist is working with Suzani embroidery, a type of tribal textile from her native Uzbekistan. She also employs modern technology, training A.I. on traditional Suzani designs and generating new iterations that she has artisans stitch by hand on vintage fabrics from the Soviet Union.
“Working with A.I., I noticed that there were a lot of biases showing through, and that it doesn’t know anything about Central Asian culture,” Kadyri, who was born in 1994, told CULTURED. She hopes to rectify those biases while using the technology as a creative tool.
New interactive works debuting at Zero10 are machine-stitched on delicate organza, with circuitry embedded into the fabric. This creates a tactile piece that live generates new designs responding to viewers’ touch, floral designs blooming on screen before your eyes.
The works on view are priced from €15,000 to €25,000 ($17,400 to $29,000).
The artist, who is an Art Basel Awards medalist in the emerging artist category, previously represented Uzbekistan at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Kadyri had a recent solo show at Somerset House in London, where she lives, and is currently included in a group show at Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile.
Her upcoming exhibition schedule is also packed. Kadyri is working on a commission for the V&A South Kensington that will open in September, and has work in upcoming exhibitions at the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Almaty, Kazakhstan; the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland; and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan—and that’s just what’s been announced.
Art Basel is on view at the Messeplatz through June 21.
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