Lionel Messi might have made his return to the FIFA World Cup 2026 yesterday, but there was only one Messe on the minds of the art world yesterday. Yes, Art Basel returns to its Swiss home in the Messeplatz this week with 290 galleries from 43 countries, bringing together blue-chip heavyweights, ambitious historical presentations, and closely watched newcomers.
As ever, the fair—which runs through Sunday, June 21st—offers a snapshot of the art market at its most polished: museum-quality modern works, fresh-from-the-studio paintings, and enough seven-figure trophy pieces to keep the aisles buzzing.
This year, however, Art Basel is also leaning into the drama of discovery. Basel Exclusive, a new initiative for the Swiss edition, asks participating galleries to hold back select works from pre-fair previews, online viewing rooms, and advance sales, unveiling them publicly for the first time during the VIP opening. The initiative did appear to add some urgency to the live encounter at a moment when much of the market’s top end is accustomed to seeing and buying work before the doors officially open. Also new to Basel this year is Zero 10, a dedicated hall in the Messe highlighting technology-driven practices that produce generative, computational, and screen-based work.
The sense of occasion this year is also extending well beyond the booths. Across town, Kunstmuseum Basel is staging a major Helen Frankenthaler survey, the artist’s largest European exhibition to date and her first institutional solo show in Switzerland, while the city’s satellite fairs and alternative platforms offer their own exciting counterpoints. Liste Art Fair Basel returns with its largest edition yet, bringing 105 galleries to Messe Basel, and Basel Social Club turns a vacant office building near the city’s main train station into a temporary stage for art, performance, and nightlife.
Still, the central pull of this week remains its tentpole fair. At Art Basel’s VIP day on Tuesday, June 16th, the significance of the people in attendance and the artworks on view affirmed its standing as the world’s premier art fair. While there were fewer blockbusters this year, many gallery presentations showcased a wider breadth of their rosters, with a notable uptick in the number of smaller works and more accessible works by major names. Several significant sales were reported by galleries on VIP day, led by a Pablo Picasso work with an asking price of $35 million at Hauser & Wirth. That gallery’s president, Iwan Wirth, hailed the opener as “as strong a first day as we’ve ever had.”
Here, we share our 10 best booths.
P·P·O·W
Booth B10
With works by Hilary Harkness, Dotty Attie, Grace Carney, Kyle Dunn, Elizabeth Glaessner, Ishi Glinsky, Hew Locke, Yu Ji, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Sanam Khatibi, Guadalupe Maravilla, Pepón Osorio, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Wilkinson, Robin F. Williams, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong
P·P·O·W’s booth has everything: historical figures, mid-career names, and some of the gallery’s youngest artists, offering a concise summary of the New York gallery’s dynamic program. Works by Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong, and Dotty Attie give the presentation its historical anchors. Meanwhile Grace Carney’s painting Turn of the Screw (2026) and Ishi Glinsky’s sculptural charm necklace Cool Crew #3 (2026) show that lineage alongside a more contemporary register of abstraction, identity, and material storytelling.
The booth’s gravitational center, however, is its presentation of new paintings by Hilary Harkness. The works belong to the artist’s ongoing “Prisoners from the Front” series, which began with her encounter with Winslow Homer’s Civil War painting of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From that source, Harkness has developed an elaborate fictional world around Arabella Freeman, a free, landowning Black woman in Virginia, using historical painting as a stage to reimagine power, privacy, and queer desire.
In her painting Moses (2026), the artist Moses Leonardo poses as Arabella, lounging in a lush landscape adapted from 19th-century Russian “mood landscape” painting. As gallery director Eden Deering explained, Harkness invents her characters “almost like theater” within these borrowed landscapes, building a narrative so elaborate it can feel like “its own romance novella.”