What to See in Basel Beyond the Fairs: Our Top Exhibitions of 2025
Art Basel isn’t the only show in town. From Medardo Rosso’s pioneering sculptures to Julian Charrière’s aquatic meditations, Basel is brimming with exhibitions that connect the art world to global crises and the human condition.
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Next week, the art world reunites in Basel for what is arguably the most consequential event on the global art fair calendar and the most telling market test of the year. As Art Basel director Maike Cruise recently told Observer, what truly sets the fair apart is the exceptional quality of work on view—nowhere else, not even at the fair’s other international editions, can you encounter this caliber of modern art assembled in one place. Over time, Art Basel has also deepened its relationship with the city itself, culminating this year in a full-scale takeover, most visibly in the public-facing “Parcours” section—a level of integration and engagement still seldom attempted by other art fairs. Basel’s major institutions have likewise planned their strongest programming for June, aligning their exhibitions strategically with the fair. With that in mind, here’s a list of must-visit exhibitions to prioritize when you step outside Messeplatz.
Medardo Rosso's Pioneering Sculptural Approach
- Kunstmuseum Basel
- Through August 10, 2025
Still not as widely recognized as his groundbreaking approach to sculpture warrants, Italian-French artist Medardo Rosso is now receiving long-overdue recognition with a major survey at Kunstmuseum Basel timed to coincide with Art Basel. Often seen as pushing further than Rodin in his psychological and emotional exploration of form, Rosso is regarded as a pioneer of abstraction in sculpture, translating key principles of Impressionism into three dimensions. Organized in collaboration with mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) and co-curated by Heike Eipeldauer and Elena Filipovic, the exhibition highlights Rosso’s radical investigations into form, and its dissolution, across materials and media, revealing how he conceived the sculptural object as part of a broader ecosystem of emotional, atmospheric and psychological relationships that ultimately shape our sense of self and identity. As Rosso famously remarked, “Nothing is material in space.”
Julian Charrière's "Midnight Zone"
- Museum Tinguely
- Through November 2, 2025
Continuing his ongoing investigation into more symbiotic modalities through which humans might inhabit the world, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière presents a fully comprehensive solo exhibition at Museum Tinguely, showcasing photographs, sculptures, installations and new film works that explore Earth as a world of water. Engaging with a liquid ecology and often intentionally blending and confusing submarine and celestial realms, Charrière draws attention to the fragile underwater habitats that host circulatory systems essential to the stability of our climate. Giving the show its title and serving as a central piece is the video work Midnight Zone (2025), which features at its heart a Fresnel lighthouse lens that doubles as a diving bell, symbolizing the threshold between land and sea. Confusing the boundaries between these two realms, the work invites viewers to descend into the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone, a biodiverse deep-sea region under imminent threat from polymetallic nodule mining for rare earth elements crucial to green energy infrastructure.
Few years in making, the exhibition was conceived for the Museum Tinguely, Basel, in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and curated by Roland Wetzel and Tabea Panizzi (Director and Assistant Curator at Museum Tinguely respectively), working closely with Julian himself.
The work Midnight Zone debuted at the Museo de Historia Natural y Cultural Ambiental with curator Pedro Alonzo, who is also behind the 2025 Boston Public Art Triennial.
Ser Serpas' "Of my life"
- Kunsthalle Basel
- Through September 21, 2025
After a full circuit of international exhibitions and biennials, Ser Serpas has staged her largest solo show to date in Switzerland. Presented as a dynamic landscape, the exhibition highlights the multiplicity of her aesthetic vocabulary while probing the boundaries between body, time, memory, sensory experience and the ephemeral images that surface in between. A continuous tension between evanescence and resistance, visibility and invisibility, animates these works. Serpas’ seemingly accidental assemblages composed of found materials like discarded furniture, trash and urban detritus form precarious, site-specific architectures that challenge any notion of fixed form or space. Her work exists in a state of intentional flux, a zone of creation and collapse that mirrors the endless cycle of production, consumption and obsolescence shaping contemporary life. In Basel, the performative staging at the core of her practice is amplified through a collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre from Tbilisi, which presents a series of live interventions that transform the exhibition into a shifting platform that is constantly under construction and unraveling.
Steve McQueen's "Bass"
- Schaulager Basel
- June 15 – November 16, 2025
Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Schaulager Basel is fortress-like—somewhere between a brutalist warehouse, a war bunker and a contemporary museum—making it an ideal setting for dramatic exhibitions and immersive art installations. Timed to coincide with Art Basel, the Laurenz Foundation is presenting Bass (2024), a recent work by Academy Award-winning filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen. Here, McQueen moves further into abstraction and allegory, offering an immersive video installation described as “radically immaterial” and composed entirely of color and sound. Central to the piece is its original musical score, developed in collaboration with an intergenerational ensemble of musicians from the Black diaspora. Directed by McQueen and legendary bassist Marcus Miller, the composition features contributions from acclaimed artists including Meshell Ndegeocello and Aston Barrett Jr. (on electric bass), Mamadou Kouyaté (on ngoni, a traditional West African string instrument) and Laura-Simone Martin (on upright bass). Taking over the entire space, Bass saturates Schaulager with an intense interplay of light and sound, creating a sensory experience that is equal parts physical and transcendent.
Méret Oppenheim's Mystery and Humor
- Hauser & Wirth
- Through July 19, 2025
In “Méret Oppenheim,” Hauser & Wirth honors the unique, mysterious and often humorous universe of the pioneering Swiss artist who lived in Basel for a time. Though clearly influenced by Surrealism and Dada, Oppenheim never fully accepted or fit within any single label, embracing instead a distinctive multimedia language that played freely with the meaning of objects (part of a personal code to decode the absurdity of language and reality). As she once said, “Committing to a particular style would’ve bored me to death.” Born in Berlin, Oppenheim had a nomadic childhood, moving between Southern Germany, Switzerland and Paris by the time she was 18, when she became an artist. Her wide-ranging practice, which was infused with humor and intellectual independence, explored themes of identity, gender inequality, sexuality and societal expectations—issues that remain central to contemporary discourse. Curated in close collaboration with art historian Josef Helfenstein, the exhibition brings together paintings, sculptures and multimedia works from the 1930s to the 1970s, including several rarely exhibited pieces.
"Jordan Wolfson: Little Room"
- Fondation Beyeler
- Through August 3, 2025
Known for his uncanny, robotic and dystopian creatures, American artist Jordan Wolfson shifts his focus to the realm of A.I. with a new immersive experience at one of Basel’s most beloved cultural destinations, the Fondation Beyeler. Unlike his previous installations, in which viewers were cast in an uncomfortable, voyeuristic role, witnessing the absurdist performances of seductive android figures, here Wolfson invites visitors to actively engage with an experimental environment. They play a central role in the unfolding experience, but with a catch: they must share it with a stranger. The result is a sociological and psychological test, probing resistance and reaction at the intersection of interpersonal, physical and virtual experiences. Known for confronting difficult and often controversial themes within American culture and contemporary society, Wolfson now tackles one of the most pressing paradoxes of our time. While individuals express heightened concern for privacy in real-life interactions, they frequently volunteer the most intimate details of their lives online.
Vija Celmins's Subtle Meditative Landscapes
- Fondation Beyeler
- June 15 – September 21, 2025
Also at Fondation Beyeler is the first comprehensive E.U. exhibition of Vija Celmins’ work, following the major survey dedicated to the artist at the Met Breuer in 2019. Celmins is known for her subtle yet meticulously precise, almost photographic landscapes, created through a painstaking attention to detail. Often depicting natural scenes such as oceans, deserts and the night sky, her repetitive marks invite viewers to contemplate the infinite forces of nature and the vastness of the cosmos. The pulviscular quality of her images—emerging from her distinctive process—suggests the infinite number of particles and molecules in continuous fluctuation that form the universe. Marking the most significant presentation of Celmins’ work in Europe in nearly two decades, the exhibition also features a small selection of sculptures, which Celmins refers to as “three-dimensional paintings.” Her work is held in major museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and London’s Tate Modern.
The "Parcours" Installations
- Basel
- June 16 – June 22, 2025
As touched on above, Art Basel is expanding beyond the perimeter of Messeplatz to take over the historic center of the city with a series of site-specific installations curated by Stefanie Hessler. The 2025 edition, Second Nature, features twenty-one projects that explore the increasingly fluid boundaries between life and lifelikeness. St. Clara Church, the Manor department store, the Merian Hotel and even the underpass beneath it will host works by Sturtevant, Thomas Bayrle, Selma Selman and Shahryar Nashat. “It’s about reshaping how we inhabit space—and how art can shift the way we move through the city,” Cruse said. Often conceived to directly engage with their surroundings, the works selected this year delve into the blurred lines between the natural and the artificial, addressing themes of replication, perception and sensory experiences beyond the visual. “Parcours” is free and open to the public (with most locations accessible around the clock), providing a unique opportunity to experience contemporary art in Basel's urban and natural environments.
Katharina Grosse's "Messeplatz Project"
- Messeplatz
- Through June 22, 2025
Another public art project organized annually by Art Basel takes place right at the entrance of the fair, where immersive installations transform the entirety of Messeplatz through the “Messeplatz Project.” This year, Katharina Grosse created a bold, large-scale mural using spray paint, turning the square and surrounding structures into a vibrant, immersive artwork. CHOIR is a monumental in situ painting—an explosion of color, energy and physical expression that disrupts public space, activating new relationships between individuals and their surroundings. Grosse’s cascade of brightly colored spray paint transforms the architectural setting into a surreal landscape, disorienting and reorienting visitors’ perception, expanding the medium beyond the traditional canvas and establishing a dynamic interaction between space, viewer and artwork. As Natalia Grabowska puts it, “Painting at scale and speed, she will disrupt this familiar space of passage and gathering, using color to momentarily shift our experience of reality.”
"Whispers from Tides and Forests"
- Kunsthaus Baselland
- Through Aug 17, 2025
Questions about the relationship between humans and nature return in "Whispers from Tides and Forests," an exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland that explores new narratives for our times, focusing on climate change, deforestation and mass migration. Featuring works by contemporary artists from across regions and continents—including Caroline Bachmann, Johanna Calle, Lena Laguna Diel, Abi Palmer, Nohemí Pérez, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Belén Rodríguez, Ana Silva, Julia Steiner, Surma and Liu Yuji—the show prompts reflection on the fragile relationship between humans and the natural world and suggests a more caring, resilient coexistence in the face of global challenges. Ranging from depictions of vulnerable landscapes to meditations on nature's immense power, the works on view invite a shift in perspective, positioning humans in a newly symbiotic and respectful relationship with space, time and the body. These pieces advocate for thoughtful coexistence between people and nature, while also acknowledging progress and the strength of resilience, without dismissing the urgency of current events. Each artist crafts a delicate dialogue between nature’s vulnerability and its enduring power.
