The Best Large-Scale Works at Art Basel Unlimited 2025

Basel is all about its tramway network. Could the city’s public transportation service be going underground? This is what Martin Kippenberger’s 1997 sculpture METRO-Net Transportabler U-Bahn Eingang [METRO-Net Transportable Subway Entrance] (1997) proposes. Presented by Gagosian, this fake subway entrance with ventilation shafts is part of Kippenberger’s final series, “METRO-Nets,” which offered a vision of an interconnected, globe-spanning subway system. This installation, devised specifically for Documenta X in 1997, features an all-white stairway leading to a large, locked gate, which serves as a metaphor for access denied to this utopian dream. Growing up in postwar Germany, Kippenberger had trouble believing in grand promises of progress and unity. His works symbolize their failure; the illusion of connectivity turns out to be a dead end.

With no more than 20 produced between 1970 and 2000, Arman’s stand-alone, monumental sculptures are extremely rare. Most of them have been integrated into public spaces around the world. For Unlimited, French dealers Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois have selected Captain Nemo (1996), which results from the French artist’s visiting the Fragonard perfume factory in Grasse, France. Named after a character in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the sculpture incorporates different disused machine parts from the Fragonard factory. Arman was known for turning garbage and found objects into pieces of art, as is the case with the retro-futuristic Captain Nemo.

Petra Cortright may find a video of you online and end up incorporating it into one of her works. At Unlimited, the Los Angeles–based artist presents 200 looping videos across 50 screens. Some show people dancing, others are portraits of people starting at the screens. The short videos invite visitors to reflect upon how fast online contents are being consumed on a daily basis. Begun in 2007, long before smartphones and social media, sapphire cinnamon viper fairy kept evolving until 2023, with Cortright editing her found footage constantly and via different software programs. The staggered, salon-style hang makes them endlessly fascinating to look at for a long time.

It seems Michelangelo Pistoletto, a key figure of the Arte Povera movement, has taken a page from Aretha Franklin’s songbook. His installation Rispetto (2025) features a large table, with a mirror surface shaped like the Mediterranean; the accompanying chairs are designed to evoke the countries that border the sea. Surrounding the table are 24 wall-hung mirrors, each cracked and partially covered with a colored wooden board with the word “respect” painted in a different language, Chinese, French, English, Greek, etc. This installation refers to Pistoletto’s Love Difference movement, meant to foster conversation between cultures to overcome global conflicts. By bringing the chairs and the table together, the Italian artist creates a space for dialogue.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most influential artists of the latter half of the 20th century, made “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform) in 1991, while grieving both his partner Ross Laycock, who had recently died of AIDS-related causes, and his father. This work was acquired by a Swiss collector in 1995, who has owned it ever since. Traditionally, the artwork is meant to be activated once daily by a silver lamé-clad go-go dancer who ascends the light blue platform, framed by lightbulbs. (For Unlimited, Hauser & Wirth will have it activated twice daily, at undisclosed times.) He dances for approximately five minutes while listening to music on a personal device. What is he listening to? The audience isn’t supposed to know.

Buckle up for Atelier Van Lieshout’s The Voyage – A March to Utopia, which stretches from the entrance to the exit of the Unlimited section. Premiering at Art Basel 2025, the work is conceived as a journey “to utopia, to an unknown place – a better place – a Garden of Eden – a place where we want to find happiness, a place where we want to create a new world, a parallel world or a better world,” according to an accompanying booklet. This 80-piece installation tells the story of the Leader, a discarded scooter that has been repaired to guide the way to the Promised Land.

A patched-up toy symbolizes the resilience and optimism future generations will need to overcome the obstacles that life will throw at them, in the shape of pickaxes, mannequins, prosthetics, pumping machines, and other inventions. Other works are even creepier like the Modular Operation Table (2022), a contraption that will supply a surgical team with coffee while they are saving lives, or  The Flying Dutchman (2016), a red steamroller that marks “the end of everything, the beginning of everything!”

Os Comedores de Terra/ The Earth Eaters is a double-sided installation by Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini, whose work references ecological damage. The front features a nearly 54-foot-wide panoramic landscape. Mesmerizing at first glance, the piece bears the scars of human activity, from logging to slash-and-burn farming. This captivating composition is mounted on wooden scaffolding which supports papier-mâché sculptures of giant, multicolor precious stones. Zerbini said in creating the work he was inspired by his private collection of minerals, as well as the movie Melancholia (2011), where nature is portrayed as both breathtaking and ominous, to define his aesthetic. “The end is near, but there is beauty in most natural disasters, when you think about it,” he told ARTnews.

French artist Daniel Buren, who is famous for using industrial fabrics with white and colored vertical stripes, abandoned his studio practice decades ago to work in situ. His latest work, Coup de vent, travail in situ, 16 Juin – 22 Juin (2025), is an adaptation of his Structure rigide et rose pour structure libre et verte Vent-Mouvement (Wind-Beweging), designed as part of the 1985 “Don Giovanni, een opera voor het oog” exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This new version, presented by Galleria Continua, consists of a striped frame, measuring 39 feet by 13 feet, inside of which a striped fabric flaps like a trembling veil. The installation is animated by a ventilation system hidden behind it.

Deep into the Unlimited section stands a monumental, curved wall with an undulating black-and-white pattern inspired by oceanic rhythms, its ebbs and flows creating an illusion of depth and volume. This surface is punctuated by three large cutouts, matching the marble sculptures standing in front of them. These openings—a coral, a leaf, and a cactus—act as passageways for visitors to walk through. As is often the case in her work, artist Claudia Comte challenges the public to reconsider their relationship with the natural world.

At last year’s Unlimited, Konrad Fischer presented Körners Repose, a floor piece of 50 steel units by Carl Andre. This year, the German gallery returns with an even more impressive work by the American Minimalist: Thrones, one of the largest wood works in his oeuvre, first shown at his solo exhibition at Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. The sculpture consists of 100 western red cedar beams installed along a wall, alternating between a vertical and a horizontal beam. This piece embodies  what Andre called “sculpture as place,” where an installation becomes a spatial experience.