For one week each June, the art world converges on the picturesque Swiss city of Basel. Nearly 90,000 collectors, curators, artists, and art lovers descend on the Rhine to take part in what has become the definitive event on the international art calendar: Art Basel. The headline fair, now in its 56th edition, will host 291 galleries—up slightly from last year’s tally of 285—from June 17th to 22nd.

But there’s more to Basel week than booths. There are also installations and performances in every corner of the city. Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute, returns to curate Parcours—the fair’s platform for site-specific projects—with a thematic focus on “Second Nature,” a series of artworks exploring the boundary between what is artificial and what is organic. Outside the main fair, there are also smaller fairs catering to the crowds of collectors flocking to the city. Typically, Liste provides a platform for cutting-edge contemporary art, and Volta is dedicated to emerging galleries. Meanwhile, Basel Social Club is a more laid-back alternative to the traditional art fair model, located in a former private bank in Basel’s city center.

In addition to its art fairs, the city is sustained year-round by a vibrant network of museums and galleries that reinforce its role as a cultural hub. From museum-scale solo presentations to tightly curated group shows, the exhibitions on view during Art Basel week offer a compelling cross-section of contemporary art today. Here, we’ve selected 10 museum and gallery shows worth stepping outside the Messe to explore.

Meret Oppenheim

Hauser & Wirth

Through July 19

Surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim is best known for her sculpture Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), the fur-covered teacup that shocked contemporary audiences and made her an overnight icon. But that single work is just the tip of a wild, shape-shifting career. Oppenheim was never interested in repeating herself—her art moved from medium to medium, ranging from surreal readymade objects to dreamlike watercolor paintings. “I simply always did what I felt like doing, anything else wouldn’t agree with the way I work,” she once said, according to the press release. “Committing to a particular style would’ve bored me to death.”

At Hauser & Wirth Basel, a rare selection of works from the 1930s to ’70s reveals just how strange and wide-ranging her practice could be. A standout painting is Daphne und Apollo (1943), in which Oppenheim reimagined the classical Greek myth of Daphne’s transformation into a laurel tree by depicting the male god, too, turning into a tree. Elsewhere, the exhibition features sculptures like La dame bleue (Lady in Blue) (1963), a wooden blue and yellow sculpture evoking a woman’s silhouette, and Eichhörnchen(Squirrel) (1970), a beer mug transformed by a fluffy squirrel tail, yet another of Oppenheim’s surreal punchlines.

Caroline Achaintre

“Eye Level” at von Bartha

Through Aug. 8

French artist Caroline Achaintre makes her Primitivist textile wallworks by punching wool through canvas, a labor-intensive process known as tufting. The results are thickly textured masks and tapestries that feature ambiguous depictions of humans and animals. A selection of these works is on view at von Bartha in Achaintre’s show “Eye Level,” alongside a selection of glazed ceramics and watercolor drawings.

Many of Achaintre’s works feature ambiguous organic forms. For instance, Mastermind (2024), a large-scale tufted tapestry, resembles a spectral spider, with elongated limbs and skeletal contours. Evoking a ribcage, or perhaps a clump of plant tendrils, it appears to shift forms the longer you look at it. Her abstract ceramic works are similarly unsettling, such as Untitled (2025), a salmon-colored ceramic resembling a tangled intestinal cord.

Trained as a blacksmith and raised between France and Germany, Achaintre brings a hands-on intensity to everything she makes. She has held solo exhibitions across Germany, including at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg and the Museum Lothar Fischer in Neumarkt, as well as in the United Kingdom, where she lives and works, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, and the Tate Britain.

Steve McQueen

“Bass” at Fondation Laurenz Schaulager, Münchenstein, Switzerland

Through Nov. 16

In 2024, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen was tasked with creating an installation to fill the cavernous space of Dia:Beacon in New York. Instead of moving images, McQueen conceived of Bass (2024), a vast, image-less installation that saturates the senses with just light and sound. After debuting last year, Bass will be reconfigured to fit into the architecture at the Fondation Laurenz Schaulager in Münchenstein, just outside the Basel city center.

Bass fills Schaulager’s cavernous interior with resonant bass tones and bands of light that drift across the visible spectrum, from deep reds to near-ultraviolet hues. The soundscape was developed in collaboration with a group of intergenerational musicians from the Black diaspora, led by legendary bassist Marcus Miller, along with Meshell Ndegeocello and Mamadou Kouyaté.

“What I love about light and sound is that they both arise from movement and fluidity,” McQueen said in a statement. “They can be molded into any form, like steam or scent; they sneak into every corner and hiding place. I also love the starting point, where something doesn’t yet take on a concrete form, but rather encompasses everything.”

Jordan Wolfson

“Little Room” at Fondation Beyeler

Through Aug. 3

Unfolding inside a custom-built chamber at the Fondation Beyeler, Little Room (2025) is American artist Jordan Wolfson’s latest push into immersive technology. After a full 3D body scan, visitors (two at a time) put on VR goggles: when they enter the space, they see themselves through the eyes of their partner. The work promises a disorienting moment of recognition that quickly unravels into a series of visual and spatial glitches, confusing the viewer’s idea of their own identity.

Known for unsettling installations that use animatronics as well as the visual language of advertising and digital culture, here, the American artist raises sharp questions about perception and what it means to occupy a body in an increasingly virtual world. Premiering in Basel with support from the LUMA Foundation and others, Little Room continues Wolfson’s exploration of how technology both reflects and distorts the darker corners of human experience. You don’t just watch this work; you become a part of it.

Medardo Rosso

“The Invention of Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel

Through Aug. 10

Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso once accused his contemporary, Auguste Rodin, of lifting one of his techniques: a dramatic tilt, seen early on in Rosso’s steel sculpture Bookmaker (1894), which gave his sculptures a sense of instability and life. A once-friendly rivalry quickly turned into a bitter, enduring enmity. While Rodin was etched into the annals of art history, Rosso was all but forgotten, despite creating works in wax, plaster, and bronze that changed sculpture forever.

On view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, “The Invention of Modern Sculpture” brings Rosso’s ghostly, groundbreaking work back into full view, featuring around 50 sculptures and approximately 250 archival drawings and photographs. Rosso’s subjects—blurred faces, collapsing forms that emerge from plaster masses—redefined sculpture: framing it not just as a medium for permanent monuments, but also as something more intimate and unstable. Installed across multiple floors, the exhibition welcomes guests with a piece from Rosso’s rival: Rodin’s Les bourgeois de Calais (1884–89) in the courtyard. Rosso’s work is also placed alongside pieces by more than 60 artists from his lifetime to now—from Constantin Brâncuși, to Edgar Degas to Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

“Frames of Reference”

Franck Areal, presented by the 0xCollection

Through June 22

Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993), which won the Turner Prize in 1996, is a silent installation that stretches Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho into a 24-hour loop, slowing it to two frames per second and projecting it on a translucent screen for durational, double-sided viewing. This work is the centerpiece of the 0xCollection’s exhibition during Art Basel 2025. Entitled “Frames of Reference,” this group presentation focuses on how artists investigate the way time influences perception, media, and material.

The show references different timescales—body clocks, mechanical timing, ecological eras—with works by Korean media art pioneer Nam June Paik and contemporary Canadian performance artist Miles Greenberg, among others. Highlights include German artist Carsten Nicolai’s Transmitter Receiver (2022), a site-specific installation that uses a Geiger counter to detect radioactive particles, converting them into sounds, light, and visual patterns, Elsewhere, the show presents documentation of Hungarian artist Agnes Denes’s A Living Time Capsule-11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years (1992–96), a colossal project in Finland where 11,000 people planted 11,000 trees on a former gravel pit, meant to be observed for 400 years.

“Frames of Reference” will be held at the Franck Areal venue in Basel, just blocks away from the Rhine River. It is the Basel-based collection’s first exhibition in Switzerland, following a presentation of Refik Anadol’s work at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. last year.

“The Shakers: A World in the Making”

Vitra Design Museum

Through Sep. 28

The religious group known for its quiet devotion and furniture-making takes center stage in an expansive exhibition about how the Shakers influenced modern design and art. With more than 150 objects—furniture, tools, textiles, and architectural elements—“The Shakers: A World in the Making” at the Vitra Design Museum traces how this 18th-century American sect-turned-belief system evolved into a design movement. Known for their communal lifestyle and strict celibacy, the Shakers created objects of remarkable beauty and utility, guided by values of equality, order, and labor as a form of worship.

The exhibition includes four thematic sections that examine the Shakers’ spiritual worldview, their distinctive material culture, their openness to innovation and commerce, and their enduring legacy today. It combines historic artifacts with new commissions from contemporary artists, including Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s series of abstracted glyphs inspired by 19th-century writings of Black Shaker spiritualist Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, and a newly choreographed dance piece by dancer Reggie Wilson, drawing on both Shaker and African American dance traditions.

Julian Charrière

“Midnight Zone” at Museum Tinguely

Through Nov. 2025

Julian Charrière’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning sculpture, photography, and film—is rooted in the fieldwork that he carries out at ecologically and symbolically charged locations, from radioactive sites to volcanoes. For his latest exhibition, the French Swiss artist sent a deep-sea camera into the ocean’s darkest depths. In his film Midnight Zone (2025), he used a Fresnel lens—typically used to amplify light in lighthouses—and a remotely operated vehicle on the ocean floor. Underwater forms, both manmade and organic, are visible through shadows from this strong beam, where light only reveals partial shapes.

This is the titular work in Charrière’s most expansive exhibition to date. Across three floors of the Museum Tinguely, the artist reflects on water as a versatile and transformative medium where life on Earth originates.“Water is not a landscape—it is the condition of all life, the first skin of the Earth, the medium of our becoming,” the artist said in a press statement. Another work on view is Albedo (2025), filmed within the Arctic Ocean. Here, Charrière documents massive icebergs as they melt, showing the real-time effects of the climate crisis with a sense of calm. His work portrays the painfully slow process of catastrophe with quiet, atmospheric attention.

“Arthaus Basel”

Ethan Cohen Gallery, with Blond Contemporary and Guelman und Unbekannt

Through June 21

In a 13th-century house perched above the Rhine, Ethan Cohen Gallery will stage Arthaus Basel, a collaborative, six-story exhibition organized in partnership with Berlin’s Guelman und Unbekannt and London’s Blond Contemporary galleries. This is the third iteration of founder Ethan Cohen’s “Arthaus” project, which he first staged in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 15 years ago. Each floor is curated by one gallery, with solo and group exhibitions installed throughout bedrooms, stairwells, and living rooms.

Throughout the building, there will be solo presentations by Congolese artist Catheris Mondombo, Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Chinese artist Li Daiyun, American painter Paul Paiement, and New York–based artist Margaret Innerhofer. Guelman und Unbekannt will stage an immersive exhibition by Komar & Melamid, the Soviet-born conceptual duo known for projects like “The People’s Choice,” in which they created paintings based on statistical surveys of taste. Meanwhile, Blond Contemporary presents a focused exhibition of works by David Hockney.

Ser Serpas

“Of my life” at Kunsthalle Basel

Through Sep. 21

By pressing one wet canvas against another, American artist Ser Serpas creates “double-image” paintings that appear like ghostly imprints or blurry mirrored images. This process is central to “Of my life,” her most extensive institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland to date, spanning five rooms and the foyer of Kunsthalle Basel. The smeared, twinned surfaces echo the nature of memory itself: partial, distorted, ungraspable.

Alongside these paintings, Serpas is presenting four performances inspired by historic stagings from Margo Korableva Performance Theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia. These performances will take place from June 12th to 22nd across three rooms and the entrance hall. They consist of repetitive actions—hitting a ball, spinning a spoon, kissing goodbye—in slow, looping sequences. The reinterpreted performances are stripped of plot and character, and the movements instead become familiar yet detached gestures. In Serpas’s work, performance and painting have something in common: Both are loose imprints of their source materials, whether it’s a “double-image” or a deconstruction of an original stage performance.