June Art Fair returned to Basel for its seventh edition this year, opening for VIPs on June 15 alongside Liste. By midday, the concrete bunker was already buzzing—collectors and professionals packed in, eager to see what the edition’s sharp cohort had brought to the table. The tightly curated presentation of fifteen galleries from nine countries showcasing the work of twenty-three artists alongside “People’s Soup,” curated by Tobias Kaspar and Li Zhenhua, “The Garden Cinema,” presented by PROVENCE, and “Structures of Support: Independent Models of Exhibition and Exchange,” hosted by émergent magazine.
Launched in 2019 as a lean, gallery-led alternative to the big-brand circuit, June Art Fair was founded by Oslo’s VI, VII and Copenhagen dealer Christian Andersen, emerging out of a sense that their galleries had outgrown Liste. They began by inviting colleagues they respected, and the initiative quickly evolved. Notably, the fair has maintained its original location since its launch: the aforementioned repurposed concrete bunker at Riehenstrasse 90B, just steps from Messe Basel. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the space retains its raw industrial character—exposed concrete walls, high ceilings and austere geometry—while offering an underground, open-plan, booth-free layout that becomes a refuge away from the hustle and bustle of Art Basel.
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While not intentional, this year’s edition is distinctly focused on the Scandinavian scene, offering a rare and valuable opportunity to connect with Northern Europe’s art landscape. Christian Andersen is exhibiting at the fair, spotlighting the work of Patricia L. Boyd, a long-represented artist in the gallery’s program. Boyd’s conceptual practice delves into the traumatic aftershocks of emotional upheaval, explored through the act of packing one’s life into boxes after a breakup. She softens heavy existential reflections through the use of ephemeral materials like feathers and cardboard, evoking the fragile temporality and inevitable decay that accompany emotional states and relational attachments.
Meanwhile, VI, VII co-founder Esperanza Rosales is presenting work by Tobias Kaspar, who maintains a strong cross-fair presence this week, with his reflective canvases featured by Galerie Lars Friedrich at Basel Social Club and by CLEARING at its offsite project, Maison Clearing. At June Art Fair, Kaspar shifts his focus to textiles, treating them as both medium and message to weave together the social, political and economic dimensions of fabric production and circulation. With a critical yet playful approach to consumerism, he explores how fashion systems, branding logic, aspirational desire and the curated aesthetics of digital culture shape identity.
Among this year’s highlights, Amsterdam-based No Man’s Art Gallery is presenting the compelling practice of Surinamese-Dutch artist Benjamin Francis. Moving fluidly across sculpture, performance, video and text, Francis investigates the body as a site of transformation, instability and resistance, interrogating how societal structures enforce norms around cleanliness, correction and conformity—particularly in relation to dyslexia, queerness and racialized identity.
Working with materials such as clay layered with latex, decaying organic matter and objects charged with symbolic weight, Francis adopts a deeply physical, object-based approach to art-making. His installations often convey a visceral sense of aliveness—a refusal to be fixed, purified or disciplined by dominant systems. In this context, non-belonging becomes a generative state, where the grotesque, the unstable and the misread are reclaimed as sources of meaning and strength. Though his works are still priced accessibly, the artist is already receiving institutional recognition, having participated in the Mutter Biennial in 2023 and with forthcoming shows at De Singel in Antwerp and the SECONDroom in Antwerp. Elements such as fish eyes in decay, rituals of funerary transformation and performances that involve acts of cleansing or correction ask urgent questions about what we consider clean, pure or correct, and who gets to decide. Through a deliberately ambiguous aesthetic that balances the uncanny and the intimate, Francis repositions the so-called “errors” of the body not as flaws, but as potent expressions of resistance, memory and embodied knowledge.
Also worth checking out is London-based gallery Season 4 Episode 6’s presentation featuring painter Harley Roberts, whose work deconstructs the canvas to reveal its raw existential and expressive core. The surface becomes a site for intuitive mark-making, diaristic annotation and the projection of complex emotional states. Roberts treats the canvas not as a picture plane but as a psychological field—open, erratic and unresolved. Here, his work is shown in striking juxtaposition with Jack Kennedy’s sly critique of bureaucratic decay, expressed through a series of welded metal document archives, each one tightly sealed—as if to suppress the secrets, inefficiencies and latent corruption of the administrative machine.
Meanwhile, Fabian Lang from Zurich has brought the rediscovered work of Werner Frei, a Swiss artist active during the second half of the 20th Century. Although his work is held in major institutional collections across Switzerland, it remains largely unknown on the international stage. With prices ranging from €3,500 to €45,000, the presentation at June Art Fair reveals the remarkable breadth of his oeuvre. Frei’s career traversed a wide spectrum of styles, from impressionistic portraits and landscapes to tachist abstraction and a pioneering fusion he called “Concrete Impressionism,” a dynamic synthesis of minimalist form with emotive color and rhythmic composition. The gallery pairs Frei’s work with the lively, vaporous abstractions in pastel hues by Sarah Dwyer, and a monumental, uncanny sculpture by Maria Ceppi that scales up microscopic material to oversized, surreal effect.
Another Northern European gallery, Ellen de Bruijn Projects from Amsterdam, foregrounds an intergenerational dialogue rooted in performance. Italian artist Daniele Formica explores embodiment and disembodiment through gestural painting that reflects on the body in flux, while his mentor Klaas Kloosterboer offers a structural counterpoint through textile-based installations that stage bodily interaction within space. In a complex layering of poetry, semiotics and psychology, their works map lived experience in layered, diaristic terrains in pieces priced accessibly between €4,000 and €10,000, and the presentation offers a compelling meditation on the relationship between the body and its environment.
First-time exhibitor C.C.C. from Copenhagen is presenting work by Danish artist Rasmus Røhling, including video, drawings and sculpture that examine the interface between the healthcare system and the public. His practice interrogates the value of images and their role as documents by critically exploring the relationship between language, materiality and systems of meaning. Driven by a deep interest in semiotics, architecture and the performative potential of objects, Røhling blurs the boundaries between installation, video and environment to challenge how context shapes meaning and perception. His work has recently attracted significant institutional interest, with exhibitions at Artists Space (U.S.) and Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Germany).
Many of the new galleries emerging in Denmark and Scandinavia began as artist-run spaces before evolving into more formal institutions, C.C.C. founder Simon Rasmussen told Observer. Now in its third year, the gallery (whose name stands for Conceptual, Critical, Sociopolitical Curating) launched as an independent initiative before establishing a reputation for systematic experimentation and social critique. Its program highlights cutting-edge practices that investigate material systems, language, identity and institutional structures.
Another of the artist-run experimental spaces from the region debuting at June Art Fair is Jennifee‑See Alternate (often styled as JSA), a collective and exhibition space based in Copenhagen. JSA’s two founders told Observer that the space was initially called “Arcway Nightlands Connector Jennifee‑See Alternate” and originated from a shared creative need to create and cultivate a vibrant platform for actual free experimentation, ranging from exhibitions and artist books to lecture series and other events.
JSA brought works by three artists from the collective: Malene List Thomsen, Helene Due and Ani Liv Kampe. List Thomsen’s cast latex garments act as detailed impressions of vintage ready-to-wear clothing, materializing their negative doubles and exploring the simultaneous absence and presence of the body. These ghostly shells play with embodiment and disembodiment, casting garments as both containers and shelters in the societal performance. Suspended from metal sheets, the hollow, colorful forms resonate with Due’s wrapped and dressed furnishings, which repurpose discarded objects and gently push them into the realm of sculpture, finding painterly composition in the overlooked and mundane. Dominating the booth is a large photograph by Kampe: confrontational and seductive, it challenges the viewer’s sense of judgment and vulnerability, questioning the compromises of intimacy required when we step out of our private bubbles into public international spaces. Kampe told Observer that her works are both performance and staging, “projecting reality and non-reality at the same time” and offering alternative modes of reading, presence and connection.
Last but not least, Green Gallery, which is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and a multi-year exhibitor at June Art Fair, is spotlighting the work of American artist Katy Cowan. Notably, Cowan, who is known for her textile-like paintings that merge art, craft and a rigorous analytical approach, was one of the first artists to exhibit at the fair. Here, her work celebrates painting’s physicality and material resonance; densely layered and richly textured, her surfaces engage perception and reflection, emphasizing both the process-conscious nature of her practice and the tactile logic from which it emerges.
Overall, this latest edition of June Art Fair is again a fertile platform for discovery—one that offers art enthusiasts and collectors a unique opportunity to engage with galleries from Northern Europe that one often finds situated within more insular, regionally specific ecosystems. Whether intentional or not, it opens a rare window onto a vibrant scene that typically requires on-the-ground exposure to fully understand who is shaping it in the continued absence of an international fair dedicated to art and artists from this region.
June Art Fair runs through Sunday, June 22, 2025.
