Guided tour: Art by female artists in Unlimited

Large-scale works have long been linked to ambition – a trait too often reserved for male artists in curatorial and market narratives. In Unlimited, female artists reimagine what ambition can look like: materially, conceptually, and critically. This public guided tour spotlights 14 women working on an ambitious scale, from Petra Cortright’s 50 webcams with over 200 compositions to Nicola Turner’s new ten-meter-high sculpture made of horsehair and wool. Other standouts include a vibrant textile wall piece by Sagarika Sundaram and a punchy new painting by Katherine Bernhardt. With 67 projects across the sector, this tour offers a focused look at a selection of works that hold their own. Register here. A.R.

Piero Golia
Still Life (Rotating device), 2024
Gagosian
Unlimited

Suspended in a state of perpetual anticipation, the viewer of Piero Golia’s hypnotic Still Life (Rotating device) stares indefinitely at a roulette wheel spinning endlessly on a marble plinth amid a lush red carpet, waiting for their moment of glory to arrive. Making its exhibition debut in Basel, this 2024 installation by the Italian-born, LA-based artist is a subtle metaphor for our moment: the promise of resolution forever out of reach. The gap between reality and dream is at the core of the artist’s practice, transforming ordinary objects into situations that alter our perception of time and possibility. Through this endless rotation, Golia captures the modern condition: forever spinning between hope and illusion, never finding rest. P.S.

Galerie Neu
Galleries

Imagine a Venn diagram where cheeky humor, cool conceptualism, and genuine tenderness intersect; at its center, one could place Galerie Neu. In their Art Basel booth, you will find a suite of works that echo this distinctive positioning. Among them are Cosima von Bonin’s Alpha Plus Mind, Gamma Minus Morals (Mae Day X) (2024), which pairs a huggable stuffed whale with six German military lecture chairs; Louis Fratino’s Stromboli (2025), a timeless yet ambiguous portrait of a young man lying on a dark beach; and Klara Lidén’s Untitled (Trashcan) (2025), a minimalist sculpture made, quite simply, from a trash can. These juxtapositions may seem jarring at first sight, but they show how fertile the space between playfulness and rigor can be for artists. K.C.

Luigi Ghirri and Franco Fontana
‘Abstraction Line’
Polka Galerie
Feature

One started as a land surveyor, the other as a decorator. They had one thing in common, besides being two young men living a few kilometers away from each other in Emilia-Romagna in Italy: a passion for lines. While Luigi Ghirri delicately captured human infrastructures, Franco Fontana immortalized the vivid colors of the sea, the fields, and the clouds. In French gallery Polka’s booth, the two pioneers meet and converse through their photographs. Ghirri’s nostalgic shots mirror the eternity of Fontana’s compositions, creating a quiet song between fiction and reality. J.A.

Nanda Vigo and Grazia Varisco
‘Light Years Ahead’
M77 Gallery
Feature

Milan-based gallery M77 presents a selection of works dating to the 1960s by Italian artists/designers Grazia Varisco and the late Nanda Vigo. Both women grappled with abstractions like time and light – and how these coupled with the era’s new technologies. And although coming from different approaches (Varisco was aligned with Gruppo T, Vigo with the Zero group) both worked with light, using materials like glass, magnets, and mirrors to push conceptual boundaries. M77’s booth promises a dive into amplified perceptual dimensions, with light-based art that was indeed way ahead of its time. K.B.

Ndayé Kouagou
‘Here and Elsewhere’
Nir Altman
Statements

French artist Ndayé Kouagou is a fierce linguistic experimenter. He turns verbal clichés into fodder for his writing, which he often performs in spellbinding videos sitting somewhere between TV commercials and TikTok-style motivational monologues. In A not that dirty mirror (2025), Kouagou has largely withdrawn from the frame. A TV-style vox pop presenter stops passersby to ask: ‘What do you think of what’s happening here and elsewhere?’ Stripped of context, the answers range from the banal to the absurd, triggering an unnerving tirade from Kouagou on truth and crisis – words whose meaning, by contrast, has rarely felt more charged. C.M.

Nika Kutateladze
Gallery Artbeat
Statements

After passing through a narrow corridor, the audience enters a caged yet intimate space. Ghostly faces emerge from canvases etched with layers of scraping and rough textures. Could these vampire-like figures be the former tenants? Gallery Artbeat debuts at Art Basel in Basel with Nika Kutateladze’s solo presentation, which explores the psychological traces of displacement, migration, and rural abandonment. Resonating deeply with Georgia’s current reality, this site-specific installation evokes a deteriorating structure in a depopulated mountain village in western Georgia – gradually fading into haunting silence and blurred identities. A.S.

WangShui
kurimanzutto
Kabinett

Following outings at the 2024 Venice Biennale and Munich’s Haus der Kunst, WangShui brings their unique AI-assisted paintings to kurimanzutto’s Kabinett space. The New York-based artist creates abstract works on aluminum, using artificial intelligence models trained on their own paintings to discover new insights about their creative process. Rather than replacing the artist, AI acts as a creative partner, helping WangShui map relationships between fantasy and reality. Their practice combines video, painting, and installation to examine how technology shapes the way we see and understand the world around us. J.F.

Martha Atienza
TARONG/KAONGKOD, 2019
Silverlens
Parcours

Filipino-Dutch artist Martha Atienza explores compressor diving – one of the world’s most dangerous fishing methods – on Bantayan Island. Her haunting, slow-motion footage captures two generations – a young apprentice and an experienced fisherman ­– descending 150 feet underwater, breathing through surface hoses. This perilous practice has emerged from the devastating impacts of illegal fishing, industrialization, and climate change on marine ecosystems. Collaborating directly with local fishermen who chose filming locations, Atienza transforms environmental crisis documentation into visual poetry, celebrating Pacific Islanders’ resilience while highlighting their frontline climate struggles. S.L.

Liang Shaoji
Can Chanchan (Silkworm Spinning), 2015
ShanghART Gallery
Parcours

Liang Shaoji has pioneered a unique artistic practice centered on sericulture, exploring the biological relationship and cohabitation with silkworms since the 1980s. He nurtures silkworms through their complete life cycle, incorporating not only the silk but also the sounds, shapes, dynamics, smells, and even excrement from the process into installations, sculptures, and textile creations. His project in Parcours, a single-channel video partially projected onto silk textile, focuses on the murmuring and gurgling sounds of the worms eating mulberry and spinning silk, poetically closing the gap between natural process and artistic creation. P.L.