It is Monday afternoon in June. The scent of fresh paint and a heightened sense of curiosity fill a 16,000-square-meter hall at Messe Basel as crowds file in for the First Choice VIP Preview of Unlimited. Art Basel in Basel’s signature sector for monumental art has consistently drawn substantial crowds since its inception in 2000, and for many, has become synonymous with the brand itself – especially in Basel, where it constitutes a major attraction for local visitors. How does this highly anticipated display come to be? Little do viewers know: As they roam the hall, the planning for next year has already begun.

The process to make an institutionally scaled sector at an art fair and to fill it with museum-quality works begins a year out and is completed the night before the preview. During the fair week in June, Unlimited’s curator Giovanni Carmine begins speaking with galleries and artists about potential projects for the following year, and he continues these conversations until January, when applications for Unlimited are due (galleries can apply for Unlimited only once they have been accepted to Art Basel in Basel’s main fair; this notification usually arrives in October). For the Berlin gallery Société, this means that as soon as they have received their acceptance notification for the Galleries sector, the team speaks with their artists to find out who is working on what. Subsequent brainstorming sessions reveal how – and if – these ideas could be made manifest within a 6-month timeline. The team spends many late nights ‘just going through ideas,’ Société director Marius Wilms says.

‘It’s about finding out what the artists have in mind and seeing how we can help them further their idea,’ Wilms continues. ‘Unlimited is such a special but also challenging environment in terms of size – and the work has to really create an impact and conceptually make sense. It’s not just about bringing a big work.’

Iwan Wirth, whose gallery Hauser & Wirth has exhibited regularly at the sector over the years, echoes this sentiment: ‘Unlimited allows us to include artists beyond our booth, which particularly suits our gallery because many of our artists work with sculpture and installation. The section speaks to the conversations that take place at Art Basel with institutions and museums.’

When Société applied for Unlimited in 2019, it was with a new project by American artist Bunny Rogers. The work, Self-Portrait as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc (2019), resulted from the gallery speaking with the artist about her ideas, multiple brainstorming sessions, and then jointly developing the project. For artist Christine Sun Kim, the process was similar: As soon as her gallery White Space was accepted into the Galleries sector in late 2023, they contacted her to see what she was working on and invited her to come up with an idea for Unlimited 2024. At that point, she says, ‘I went ahead and conceptualized something much bigger than my usual scale, and the White Space team worked with me from beginning to end.’ The result was FOMO Scores (2024), 15 paintings on shaped canvases installed on a 30-meter-long wall.

To choose which projects will be shown in the sector, Carmine leads a meeting with the Art Basel in Basel selection committee at the beginning of each year. The group of nine goes through every single project and decides what to accept, reject, or place on a waiting list. Once galleries are notified, planning starts immediately.

Meanwhile, Carmine is faced with an empty 16,000-square-meter hall. In collaboration with architect Sara Dillier, he envisions potential layouts, mostly by playing around with two-dimensional models and seeing how works might fit together. A few projects each year often help define the architecture. In 2024, it was Keith Haring’s 18-panel mural Untitled (FDR NY) #5-22 (1984), which required a 50-meter-long wall, along with other works requiring similar setups, including Kim’s installation and Sam Falls’s 45.7-meter-long painting Spring to Fall (2023–24). This year, it is a number of freestanding sculptures, including Atelier Van Lieshout’s The Voyage – A March to Utopia (2025), which comprises 180 individual pieces and requires a 90-by-15-meter space.

Once the architectural layout is developed, the focus shifts to a curatorial plan. Carmine explains that ‘Unlimited is not like a museum exhibition or a biennale. It has the scale – the hall is about the same size as the two buildings that host the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition combined – but it really lives out of heterogeneity. Rather than a group or thematic exhibition, it’s more like a festival that happens for one week and represents the global art community.’ The curatorial approach is thus more about making sure that all the paintings are not in one corner or that a neon work will not reflect onto the surface of another work nearby.

Challenges and surprises arise throughout this time. Some galleries back out. Others send messages that the dimensions or spatial layout of a work have changed. The result is a dynamic process from February until mid-April, when the final architectural and curatorial plans are set in place.

Artists and galleries often work on a similar timeline, with artworks largely finalized by early May. Final tweaks, troubleshooting, and shipping then happen throughout late May and early June. In mid-May, Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini, who will debut his sculptural painting installation Os Comedores de Terra / The Earth Eaters (2025) at Unlimited this year, noted that although his work was finished, shipping still had to be sorted; the studio needed to figure how to send a 3.5-by-5-meter painting, an even larger wooden fixture, and 60 rocks ranging in size from 40 to 110 centimeters from Rio de Janeiro to Basel without completely breaking the bank.

While crates are in transit, the infrastructural building processes begin on-site. Three weeks ahead of the fair, lighting is installed and the wall system is marked with lines on the floor according to a Cartesian coordinate system. The actual walls are then erected 2 weeks to 10 days before preview day, and crates start arriving on the Wednesday the week before the fair. Installation can begin on Thursday – 4 days before the preview – and all crates are there by Friday morning. Galleries, artists, art handlers, and tech teams then have until 8pm on Sunday to finalize the installation.

From Thursday to Sunday, Carmine roams the hall for 12 to 16 hours a day, making sure everyone is doing okay. ‘I walk 18 to 20 kilometers each day,’ he says. At the same time, gallerists and artists arrive alongside specialized teams. ‘With a lot of our Unlimited projects, we are basically trying to build a prototype [when we arrive in the hall] and sometimes it doesn’t work, so you have to change things on-site,’ Wilms says. This year, Société’s long-time tech partner Vidi Square will come from Belgium and work closely with Winkler, a Basel-based company that does Art Basel’s lighting and general audio-visual setup, to install Petra Cortright’s sapphire cinnamon viper fairy (2007–23), featuring 69 video screens mounted on an 11-meter-long wall. On Saturday and Sunday, the gallery’s team will meet at the Migros supermarket around 7:30am to buy and pack lunch, then head to the fair hall and stay until ‘8 or 9pm’ or even later in the night. It is an open-ended situation to get the work done,’ Wilms says.

Zerbini will arrive on Friday to oversee the installation of his work, alongside a team of three or four art handlers hired by his galleries Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Stephen Friedman, and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Coincidentally, one of the handlers is from Brazil and an acquaintance of the artist. Zerbini invited the handler to visit the studio to see how the work has been developed. Although this advance insight assuages much of his anxiety about the tight installation timeline, the artist remains nervous and excited to see the piece in full: He has seen it to some degree as he has been making it, ‘but not in a real way, because my studio is not that big.’

During these four installation days, anything can happen. One work might be installed in 30 minutes and covered in plastic until Sunday evening, while another might be tinkered with up until the last minute. A historical painting might be transferred to a new chassis, or a new work might be assembled and seen for the very first time, like Zerbini’s. Sometimes cranes deliver heavy works, but the most astounding tool during this period, Carmine says, is human power: ‘It’s incredible to see what artists and art handlers can make happen.’

Come Sunday at 7:30pm, plastic coverings are removed, final touch-ups are made to painted walls, and galleries photograph their artists’ works. At 8pm, cleaning crews replace installation teams. By Monday morning, an exceptional display of new and historic monumental artworks is ready – the hall is quiet and pristine, at least for a few hours before the crowds arrive. Then everything begins again.