The 2025 edition of the Art Basel fair reflected the turbulent state of the world.

AFP

La Jornada Newspaper, Thursday, June 26, 2025, p. 4

Basel. This year's Basel Art Fair painted a portrait of a troubled world, combining large-scale installations about the pursuit of happiness with works related to the fragility of democracies.

Founded in 1970 by art dealer Ernst Beyeler and two other Basel gallery owners, Art Basel is one of the world's leading annual events for contemporary art.

In its section dedicated to monumental works, the fair this year presented an 85-meter-long installation entitled The Voyage - A March to Utopia .

The work, created by the studio of Dutch artist Joep van Lieshout, included 80 large sculptures that form a procession of absurd objects, all moving in the same direction , on the way to a happy world , the artist explained to AFP.

Another work by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, composed of 21 doors engraved with articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

The work Forgotten Dreams invited us to contemplate collective aspirations and not forget the horrors of the past.

Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo installed a massive American flag made of wooden logs and decorated with 13 steel stars, referencing the first version of the American flag from 1777.

The work was created in 2020, during the election campaign pitting Donald Trump against Joe Biden, and was reconstructed for presentation this year at Art Basel.

In its first version, the logs were gradually removed and burned in fireplaces, gradually making the flag disappear.

The artist wanted to express an allegory of the fragile state of the American democratic project.

Every year, the Basel Art Fair hosts an (Unlimited) section of monumental pieces destined for museums and large collections. This section also includes older works, such as a 1991 performance by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban-born American artist who died of AIDS in 1996.

The work has no title, but is known as Go-Go Dancing platform .

The performance consists of a man dressed in silver shorts dancing for a few minutes on a podium twice a day.

"It's interesting to see it again ," Giovanni Carmine, curator of Unlimited, told AFP.

The artist had created this work shortly after the death of his partner, in a context that was also very reactionary , where some spoke of AIDS as a divine punishment .

The Art Basel exhibition hall featured 67 works this year, including three angels by German sculptor Thomas Schütte, which expressed a certain ambivalence , Carmine noted.

Meanwhile, Japanese artist Izumi Kato added a touch of poetry with his stone structures, painted with enigmatic faces, inspired by the Japanese tradition that each stone contains a spirit , he explained.

And American Arlene Shechet played with contrasts through a heavy orange abstract sculpture designed to give an impression of lightness despite its weight.

The current political situation is grim, so I'm bringing lightness and color , Shecet noted.

▲ The Fundació Joan Miró art museum in Barcelona is holding an open house to commemorate the institution's 50th anniversary. These events honor one of Spain's most famous artists, Joan Miró, and the foundation he founded half a century ago. Miró, who died in 1983 at the age of 90, was a giant of the surrealist movement, known for his playful, abstract paintings featuring bright geometric shapes and calligraphic lines resembling doodles. The museum, located in a modernist building on a hilltop in Barcelona, ​​houses a vast collection of his paintings, sculptures, and other works. Photo: Afp

La Jornada Newspaper, Thursday, June 26, 2025, p. 4