There is a particular pleasure in discovering a great work of art for the first time. Basel Exclusive is a new Art Basel initiative that keeps selected major works unseen – no digital previews, no pictures – until the fair opens, so visitors experience that initial encounter in person. Now, the doors are open and the wait is over. Here's our guide to the standout works featured in Basel Exclusive, alongside other exceptional pieces presented throughout the fair that reward a closer look.

Basel Exclusive 

Louise Bourgeois
Untitled (2002) 
Galerie Karsten Greve, Booth F1

Celebrated for her sculptures and installations of intense psychological depth, Louise Bourgeois often drew from complex personal memories. Among them was her upbringing in a family that restored antique tapestries. Her inherited sensitivity to cloth as something fragile, personal, and capable of repair informed many of her fabric sculptures, including Untitled (2002), which comprises hand-sewn, stuffed fabric forms stacked on a steel base. Both totemic and anthropomorphic, the work also recalls Bourgeois’s ‘Pillar’ bronzes of the late 1940s.

Helen Frankenthaler
Phoebe (1979)
Yares Art, Booth E14

Helen Frankenthaler made her mark on Abstract Expressionism by pouring thinned oil paint onto unprimed canvas and letting it pool into soft fields of color. But she ran into a problem: the oil she used was degrading the canvas. Switching to acrylic in the 1960s solved that issue, and the artist established a brand-new painterly language. Phoebe (1979) shows the sharper edges and more intense color that this new medium made possible. Now is a fitting moment to have a closer look at Frankenthaler – the Kunstmuseum Basel is currently staging the largest European retrospective of her work.

Precious Okoyomon 
Sun dried slick the flames blind us – to the fact the fire bears the real – the radical body as somehow untouchable (2025) 
Mendes Wood DM, Booth S4

Nigerian-American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon works across installation, sculpture, and poetry, often using living and decaying organic materials to explore colonial history, ecology, and the racialization of the natural world. Fire, resilience, and nature under threat are recurring subjects in their work. Here, those themes are distilled into a multimedia sculpture with a title that functions – like much of Okoyomon’s work – as a poem in its own right.

Gerhard Richter
Silsersee (1995)
Sies + Höke, Booth R18

Many visitors to Switzerland go home with chocolate to remember their travels by. Gerhard Richter headed home with fresh inspiration for paintings. In 1989, the German artist began visiting the Alpine village of Sils Maria and returned regularly over the next quarter century, photographing the landscape each time. Back in his studio in Cologne, Richter projected the photographs onto canvas and rendered the scenes – here, one of Lake Sils – faithfully in oil paint, then applied his signature blur by dragging a soft brush and palette knife across the wet surface.

Andy Warhol
Troy (1962)
Acquavella Galleries, Booth F3

Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe, made shortly after her death in 1962, are among the most recognizable images in American art. But Marilyn wasn’t the first star to slide through Warhol’s screen. Earlier that summer, the artist had experimented with the technique using press photos of Hollywood heartthrobs Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty. When asked about Donahue, Warhol said he anticipated that the actor might die. Warhol’s morbid prediction was a little off: Donahue lived another four decades, and Troy was immortalized as one of the earliest works in one of the most consequential series in Pop Art history.

Other masterpieces 

Beyond Basel Exclusive, many more outstanding pieces are waiting to be discovered throughout the show. Here are just a few favorites.

Nairy Baghramian 
Side Leaps_Spatial Compositions (undated)
Hauser & Wirth, Booth C10

Iranian-born, Berlin-based sculptor Nairy Baghramian’s site-responsive works explore the relationship between architecture, objects, and the human body – as is obvious in the artist’s massive installation on Messeplatz this year. Side Leaps_Spatial Compositions brings together two distinct strands of her practice: ‘Side Leaps’ – sketches, drawings, and maquettes she treats as conceptual, unresolved investigations – and ‘Spatial Compositions,’ in which those elements are arranged on unpainted metal structures. The work is intentionally undated, reflecting Baghramian’s ongoing interest in precarity and statelessness.

Georg Baselitz
Due donne senza ombra (2019)
Thaddeus Ropac, Booth B14

Georg Baselitz, who died in April 2026 at age 88, was one of the great disruptors of figurative art. In 1969, the German painter and sculptor began inverting his subjects, painting them upside down to slow the viewer’s reading of the image and force attention onto the painting itself. Due donne senza ombra (2019) belongs to his late work; in it, two upturned spectral figures are rendered in pale paint against a dark ground. The title, which translates to Two Women Without a Shadow, closely echoes the name of one of Richard Strauss’s most symbolic operas, which premiered in Vienna exactly 100 years before the painting was made.

Pierre Huyghe  
Of Ideal (2019–ongoing) 
Esther Schipper, Booth S1

What if you could see inside someone else’s imagination? For Of Ideal, French artist Pierre Huyghe works with neuroscientists at Kyoto University to scan participants’ brains as they imagine memories and situations. Those scans are fed into a neural network, which searches a database of real-world images to find the closest visual match to the brain activity. What appears on the work’s LED screen is a continuous stream of amorphous digital imagery driven by human thought.

Barbara Kruger
Untitled (Thwart the Law) (1987)
Sprüth Magers, Booth B19

Barbara Kruger – a medalist in this year’s Art Basel Awards’ Icon category – has been turning the visual language of advertising against itself since the early 1980s. Combining found photographs with confrontational phrases written in bold Futura type, her practice targets patriarchy, institutional power, and systems of control. The text in this 1987 gelatin silver print issues two directives: ‘Thwart the Law. Baffle the Father.’ The legal world, it turned out, was paying attention: The next year, the work was reproduced in The Yale Law Journal, proving that artistic provocation can indeed reach beyond gallery walls.

Henry Moore
Large Four Piece Reclining Figure (1972–73, cast 1984)
Gagosian, Booth B15

Known for his monumental, semi-abstract bronze sculptures pierced by hollows and voids, the British sculptor Henry Moore was, for several decades, partial to depicting figures in recline. In his view, reclining is the only pose that is ‘free and stable at the same time.’ By the early 1970s, he began breaking the figures into fragments, forcing the viewer to move around the works rather than read them from a single point. Stretching almost four meters, Large Four Piece Reclining Figure is polished rather than patinated – one of the few times Moore made that choice.