7 U.S. Museums Where You Can Watch the FIFA World Cup 2026 https://ift.tt/0LGEewT

No Player Shall Gain an Advantage, 2026
Curtis Talwst Santiago
Uffner & Liu

Now that the New York Knicks have finally won the NBA Championships, sporting attention across the U.S. can turn fully to the FIFA World Cup 2026, which got underway on Thursday, June 11th, and runs through July 19th.

Spanning 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, with 48 nations competing across 104 matches, the World Cup is in full swing. Artsy has already polled art world figures for their tournament picks and curated a collection of World Cup artworks for purchase, but the crossover doesn’t stop there: some of the U.S.’s most beloved cultural institutions are getting in on the action.

Galleries, theaters, and lawns are just some of the museum spaces being turned into unexpected and delightful watch party venues this summer. Whether you’re passing through via their permanent collections or want to add a bit of cultural finesse to your football fandom, here are seven museums showing games throughout this World Cup.

Guggenheim Museum

New York

Dates: select matches on Friday afternoons

Frank’s, the pop-up bar tucked inside the Guggenheim’s Wright restaurant, is screening select World Cup matches on Friday afternoons throughout the tournament. The space is freely accessible with museum admission.

It’s a civilized way to watch the game: a drink in hand under the gaze of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda (the bar is named after the architect). At the same time, the museum is also showing Zidane, the 2006 portrait film of the French legend by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, on continuous loop in the Peter B. Lewis Theater through July 19.

American Museum of Natural History

New York

Dates: select matches only

The American Museum of Natural History has gone all-in on the tournament with its “World Cup, World Cultures: Celebrating the Community and Science of Sport” programming series.

Watch parties (check which are showing here) are free with admission on the big screens in LeFrak Theater, Cullman Hall of the Universe, and the Global Sports Pavilion in Futter Gallery, running for the course of the tournament. The museum has also launched the “Goal Zone,” an interactive play space with digital simulators where you can test your striking and goalkeeping skills.

Hammer Museum

Los Angeles

Dates: select matches only

UCLA’s free museum in Westwood is hosting live screenings of 16 World Cup matches on big screens in its indoor-outdoor courtyard, running June 24th through mid-July.

Admission, as always, is free, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Between matches, you can wander the galleries, grab something from the café, or just linger in one of L.A.’s most underrated outdoor spaces. An RSVP via its website is recommended but doesn’t guarantee entry, so arrive early.

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas

Dates: May 30 to July 19, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The Dallas Museum of Art has turned its Eagle Family Plaza into Sideline, a pop-up café running through July 19th. The matches aren’t screened here, but at the Klyde Warren Park fan zone just steps away. The offering is summery in spirit: dirty sodas, soft-serve margaritas, loaded ice cream sundaes, lawn games, and music.

It’s not technically a watch party, but it’s the closest possible crossover between a world-class museum and live matches.

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York

Dates: Select matches only

The Whitney is pairing live match screenings with its flagship Biennial—an exhibition designed to take the temperature of American art—which, fittingly for a World Cup summer, features plenty of international artists as well as those from the U.S. Free Friday nights (5–10 pm every Friday) will also bring in DJ sets inspired by the nations competing in the tournament, cocktails, and terrace views over the Hudson. (Check here for screening details).

The museum is also running a citywide scavenger hunt in collaboration with artist Anastasia Inciardi, with a limited-edition soccer ball print waiting for anyone who completes it (check here for details).

Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

Santa Cruz, California

Dates: select matches only

Santa Cruz’s Museum of Art & History has transformed its iconic outdoor red ball sculpture into a giant soccer ball for the summer, and the watch parties inside match the bombastic spirit.

The museum is hosting multiple matches—including Spain v. Cape Verde on June 15th, Argentina v. Austria on June 22th, and the World Cup final on July 19th—with complimentary popcorn and hands-on art activities for all ages at each screening.

El Museo del Barrio

New York

Dates: World Cup Final, July 19th

In East Harlem, El Museo del Barrio is showing the end of the tournament. The museum screened the opening match in collaboration with its neighbour, Africa Center, on June 11th, and will screen the final on July 19th at El Museo itself.

The galleries are set to transform into a watch party from 1 to 7 p.m., free and family-friendly, with art activities and a set by DJ Pablo Romero. The event takes place at the same time as “Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures,” the museum’s first survey dedicated to the groundbreaking photographer. In its courtyard, through September, artist Ronny Quevedo’s large-scale soccer ball sculpture—one of 25 public artwork installations across the city for the tournament—makes for a fitting backdrop.

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Decoding the Art Historical References in Olivia Rodrigo’s New Album https://ift.tt/DdAtn8B

Last week, pop star Olivia Rodrigo’s new album you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love made its eagerly anticipated debut. The 23-year-old singer’s third album is widely read as chronicling the rise and fall of her romance with actor Louis Partridge across 13 standard tracks.

Last week, Rodrigo’s album caught the art world’s attention when the singer revealed she had commissioned artist Chloe Wise to create original cover art for the album. The limited-edition collectible vinyl features Wise’s oil painting Carve our names (2026), which shows Rodrigo clad in a pink babydoll dress and menacingly holding a switchblade in her hand.

The collaboration is just one of the album’s art world crossovers. In fact, art historical references are dotted throughout the album’s visuals if you take a closer look, from suggestions of Edgar Degas’s dancers and Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe in the music video for “stupid song” to allusions to Frida Kahlo in “the cure.”

Fans were quick to point out the album’s particular fascination with French aristocratic frivolity. The album’s standard cover, shot by hipster-era icon Ryan McGinley, shows Rodrigo sailing high into the air on a playground swing, wearing the same pink babydoll dress and black platform Mary Janes.

Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), 1863
Édouard Manet
Musée d'Orsay

With its flirty insouciance, the image offers an obvious parallel to the famed Rococo painting The Swing (1767–68) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. That playful painting shows a young woman in magnifcent pink ruffled gown being propelled on a swing by one man. A second glance reveals that the seemingly innocent image is anything but. The woman’s paramour is hiding in the bushes near the swing, looking up her petticoats. She casts one slipper into the air as she swings upwards. She is, one might notice, seated upon a small cushion.

In an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, Rodrigo said the photograph, which shows the singer nearly entirely upside down, took over two hours to capture. She also shared that she was seated on a small cushion for the duration of the shoot.

Superfans of the pop star were quick to notice that Rodrigo’s ex-boyfriend, Louis Partridge, recently posted a photograph of The Swing, on view at the Wallace Collection in London, on social media. Given that the painting is considered famous for its sexual innuendo and suggestion of erotic intrigue, the Instagram post fueled new speculation about the end of the couple’s relationship.

The Swing is not the only reference to French courtly life, either. The music video for Rodrigo’s song “drop dead” was filmed in the opulent Château de Versailles, the royal palace of the French monarchy. Directed by Petra Collins, the filmmaker and photographer known for her dreamy girlish aesthetic from the 2010s, the music video pictures Rodrigo in chunky baby blue headphones and a Chloé ensemble of a dusty blue babydoll top, ecru bloomers, and white knee-high socks.

In “drop dead” Rodrigo sings, “You’re lookin’ like an angel on the walls of Versailles.” While we can’t be sure which angel Rodrigo means exactly (Baroque putti can be found on frescoes throughout the palace), visitors to Versailles are on the case.

Filming in Versailles is a rare occasion and Rodrigo likened the experience of the nine-hour overnight shoot to the 2006 film Night at the Museum. The music video certainly has cinematic inspirations, most obviously Sofia Coppola’s hugely influential film Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst. The 2006 film, which was also shot in the halls of Versailles, imagined the luxurious layabout lifestyles of the French court set to contemporary music, not ulike Rodrigo’s.

Other landmark films earn nods, too. One unforgettable sequence shows Rodrigo dashing and dancing through Versailles’s halls. The scene is a reference to French auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 Bande à part. In the film’s most famous scene the three central protagonists gleefully run through the Louvre. That memorable scene was also recreated in Bernardo Bertolucci’s steamy 2003 film The Dreamers.

Not all Rodrigo’s art allusions are locked in the 18th century, however. In the music video for “the cure,” Rodrigo plays a nurse looking to cure ailing hearts. Throughout the course of the video, however, the nurse herself begins to unravel and red strings spool out of her fingertips. Harper’s Bazaar noted the painting’s similarity to Frida Kahlo’s harrowing self-portrait Henry Ford Hospital (1932), which pictures the Mexican artist in a hospital bed, her red veins unfurling from her naked body to objects around her.

Kahlo returned to similar imagery of veins in her striking painting The Two Fridas (1939), which shows the artist twice—once in colonial Spanish dress and once in Indigenous Mexican attire—both connected by red veins.

While Rodrigo’s album laments the disappointments of her relationship with Partridge, Kahlo famously painted The Two Fridas in the aftermath of her divorce from her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, after his devastating affair with Kahlo’s sister Christina (Rivera and Kahlo would later remarry). It was a time of heartbreak but also success for the artist who traveled to Paris for an exhibition of her work organized by Surrealist André Breton that same year. It was also at this point that the French government purchased her self-portrait titled The Frame (1939), ultimately making her the first 20th-century Mexican artist to have a work enter The Louvre. The Two Fridas became emblem of Kahlo’s fractured identity, a theme Rodrigo grapples with throughout her new album.

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Frida Kahlo–inspired murals to open across London, celebrating new Tate Modern show. https://ift.tt/zo08Bs9

Fridamania is set to sweep across London this summer. As Tate Modern prepares to open its major exhibition “Frida: The Making of an Icon” on June 25th, six large-scale public murals inspired by Frida Kahlo’s life and work have been unveiled across Bankside, where the Tate Modern is located. The works mark the centerpiece of a citywide celebration of the artist’s enduring legacy.

Each of the murals is the work of an emerging artist under the age of 25 as part of “Beyond Boundaries,” a collaboration between Better Bankside and Tate Collective. The murals tap into different aspects of Kahlo’s complex identity, including her Mexican heritage, feminist ambitions, queerness, and her experience of disability. Installed on walls, railway arches, and public spaces throughout the neighborhood surrounding Tate Modern, the murals will remain in place for several years.

The participating artists include Amy Almeida, Eddie Donaldson, Milena De Rosa, Helena Samarasinghe, Gloria da Silva, and Sharoola.

The murals are one part of a wider public art program celebrating the iconic Mexican surrealist, coinciding with the Tate Modern exhibition. Other city-wide programming includes ¡Frida Icónica!, a large-scale installation by artist Alejandra Ballesteros featuring traditional Mexican papel picado. Contemporary artists have also reinterpreted Kahlo’s 1940 Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, and these public artworks will be on view at locations from Piccadilly Circus and Blackfriars.

The public enthusiasm for “Frida: The Making of an Icon” has been unparalleled. More than 35,000 tickets have been sold ahead of the exhibition’s opening, according to the Tate, making it the highest pre-selling exhibition in the museum’s history. The exhibition will mark the first major London show focused on Kahl since “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up” opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2018.

“The extraordinary demand for Frida Kahlo is testament to the enduring power of her story and her work,” Catherine Wood, Tate Modern interim director, said in a statement. “Positioning Frida as an artist for 21st-century London, we will offer audiences multiple entry points into her world—from the intimate space of the gallery to the shared experience of the public realm.”

Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with Tate Modern, “Frida: The Making of an Icon” will run through January 3, 2027.

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Our 5 Favorite Artworks Under $10,000 from Liste and Basel Social Club 2026 https://ift.tt/myrDbUR

This week, Basel is coming alive with contemporary art. Anchored by Art Basel—one of the biggest moments of the international art world calendar—this week in the Swiss city promises a dense concentration of art on view. Most of these are even within walking distance of each other (read our guide to Art Basel Week to get up to speed).

While Art Basel doesn’t open to the public until Thursday, June 18th, several fairs are already up and running. Here, we share some choice artwork selections from Liste and Basel Social Club.

Liste Art Fair Basel

Through June 21st

Messe Basel, Hall 1.1, Maulbeerstrasse / Riehenring 113, CH–4058

Art Basel’s steady satellite fair, Liste, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Known for its focus on cutting-edge emerging artists and galleries (early participants have included future powerhouse dealers like David Zwirner), the fair returns to its regular spot in Messe Hall 1.1, a stone’s throw from Art Basel.

Fiker solomon

Becoming What we Wear, 2026

Presented by: Afriart Gallery

Price: $6,000

At Afriart Gallery’s arresting solo booth of works by fiker solomon, Becoming What We Wear (2026) is one of several densely layered tapestries that practically vibrate off the wall. The Addis Ababa–born, Kampala-based artist builds her surfaces from yarn, sisal, raffia, and beadwork, combining materials chosen as much for their symbolic weight as for their texture, evoking labor, nature, and the beauty of the everyday. Here, cascading fringes of natural fiber give way to vivid fields of blue and green, part-abstract composition and part-ghostly garment.

Perhaps surprisingly, solomon’s recent practice begins with taking photos. She moves, observes how her clothing responds, and photographs the result. The shapes her fabric makes by folding, stretching, and shifting become the foundation for artworks that explore how clothing relates to identity. Indeed, Becoming What we Wear itself is shaped like a garment waiting to be worn.

Ju Young Kim

The Light Was Still On Behind the Curtain, 2026

Presented by: max goelitz

Price: €5,400 ($6,268)

On VIP day, max goelitz’s booth was making visitors pause before they entered: a floor-to-ceiling translucent strip curtain, the kind found in airport service corridors or cold storage warehouses, bisects the space, dividing it into a public and a private half.

Titled “Holding Lounge,” the presentation by Korean artist Ju Young Kim transforms the booth into a transit zone, complete with what appears to be a baggage conveyor running through the center. It’s an environment designed to evoke the in-between: the anonymous, semi-public spaces of air travel where strangers briefly share a destination before dispersing.

The Light Was Still On Behind the Curtain (2026), a wall-based sculpture, is mounted in the corner. The work, a bolted metal casing, is similar to a “bulkhead light” used on planes, and emits light through a wire grille. Art Nouveau–style florals decorate the lamp’s glass blue glow. A light built for routine service operations becomes something intimate, even tender, an object carrying, as Kim herself put it, “an atmosphere of care, routine, and hidden operation.”

Mackerel Safranski

The Narration of Night, 2024

Presented by: A-Lounge Contemporary

Price: CHF2,500 ($3,151)

The Narration of Night, 2024
Mackerel Safranski
A-Lounge Contemporary

In sculptures and paintings at the booth of Seoul gallery A-Lounge Contemporary, Korean artist Mackerel Safranski explores themes of death and the body. The Narration of Night (2024) is typical of the artist’s ongoing “Room Tone” series, which depicts moments of presence and disappearance with careful tension.

Here, a solitary figure in dark blue holds something red, raw, and ambiguous up toward her face, while three glass lanterns glow behind her and a pocket watch hangs in the shadows. The mood is somewhere between folklore and horror; the figure’s empty eyes stare blankly at the winged shape between her hands.

Safranski, who draws on a personal history of living with an eating disorder, constructs her paintings from literary sources, news, and everyday observation. The works on view here masterfully hold dread and tenderness in the same frame.

Basel Social Club

Through June 20th

Erdbeergraben 1, 4051

Launched in 2022 as an “alternative” art fair, Basel Social Club has staged editions in open fields, a former mayonnaise factory, and now, an abandoned office. This highly curated, artist-first fair swaps traditional booths for a mazy, four-story experience where art fills unexpected crevices, alongside an onsite gym, indoor golf, and a book fair, among other surprises.

Max Keene

Combo, 2026

Presented by: Pangée

Price: $1,500

Around an unsuspecting corner in a fair venue full of surprises, a selection of paintings by Canadian painter Max Keene—presented by Montreal gallery Pangée—offers a moment of unexpected stillness. Combo (2026), a watercolor-and-wax work on paper over panel, depicts a loose arrangement of bottles on a pale, dusty ground, rendered in muted greens and hazels. Layers of wax blur the forms, giving them the quality of something glimpsed through smeared glass, or scanned too slowly.

That last reference is intentional. Keene’s source material is images made with office equipment, such as scanners and copiers, and the aesthetic created by that process carries into the painting. The bottles are rendered with a flattened, slightly drifting quality of a scanned image and the wax layers add a further blur, as if a document has been copied one too many times.

It’s a fitting contribution to the fair’s “Office” theme, which invites artists to explore the meaning of labor, rest, and time in an era of digitalization and remote work.

Laurian Popa

Broken chair, 2026

Presented by: Jecza Gallery

Price: €7,000 ($8,104)

Broken chair, 2026
Laurian Popa
Jecza Gallery

Laurian Popa’s painting Broken chair (2026) is hard to walk past. Presented by Romanian gallery Jecza in a darkened first-floor room, a painting with a deep crimson ground reveals a chair seat leaning against a wall with its scattered, splintered legs and loose fragments lying strewn across the floor below. The word “INVISIBLE” is faintly inscribed across its surface, hinting at a tension of an object present in its parts, but its purpose already gone.

Popa, who works as both a painter and theater set designer, brings a scene-maker’s instinct to his canvases. Everyday objects are isolated, recomposed, and stripped of their original function until they become what gallery director Andrej Jecza calls “enigmatic presences”—objects “broken from the usual context,” stripped of function and placed somewhere between observation and imagination.

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FIFA World Cup 2026 on Artsy https://ift.tt/xy9WZ74

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Rising Painter Danielle Fretwell's Decadent Still Lifes Reinvent the Dutch Masters https://ift.tt/h58Fkaf

In her New Hampshire studio, painter Danielle Fretwell arranges opulent banquets for no one.

She thinks of herself as the host of an imaginary party and carefully selects pieces of silverware and table linens from a collection she’s assembled over years of scouring New England vintage shops. She arranges fresh fruit, scoops ice cream, and pours wine. When the table setting feels just right, Fretwell photographs it. Then, she packs everything away.

She uses her photographs as the basis for her visually seductive still-life paintings. Fretwell is best known for her “split” compositions, in which she juxtaposes her hyperrealistic renderings of banquet scenes with abstracted fields of color that seem like veils or curtains concealing the image below. The paintings are visual riddles challenging perception and blending illusion and truth.

Fretwell arrived at this characteristic style of painting several years ago, and she’s steadily been gaining the art world’s attention since. Two years after earning her MFA at Boston University in 2021, Fretwell was included in “Infinite Loop,” a group show at Alice Amati in London. That was soon followed by “Shallow Invitations,” her first solo exhibition with Amati in 2024.

Now, Fretwell is making her New York solo debut with “Terms of Consumption” at Olney Gleason, showcasing a suite of new paintings that revel in luminous textures from iridescent tablecloths to the glittering scales of fish. The centerpiece of the exhibition, In Good Taste (2026), measures five and a half feet tall. In it, a crimson veil hangs above a decadent banquet of cakes, bowls of ice cream, and fruits. A crisp white linen napkin hangs off the edge of the table with a trompe l’oeil effect.

The splendor and decadence of the Dutch Golden Age banquet scenes certainly come to mind in the presence of these new works.

“What I love so much about 17th-century Dutch still life painting is that it had this focus on opulence, but the paintings are also about skill,” Fretwell explained. “These painters were showing off this full array of everything that they could do with surfaces.”

One painting in particular inspired the works at Olney Gleason. Last fall, during a trip to the National Gallery in London, Fretwell was captivated by the painting A Banquet Still Life (1622) by the artist Floris van Dyck, which was recently acquired by the museum. The painting is a bountiful, almost encyclopedic display of foodstuffs arranged on a tabletop.

“It’s probably my favorite painting that I’ve ever seen,” Fretwell remarked. After seeing the painting, Fretwell began researching the subgenre of banquet still life painting, which focused on large arrangements of objects.

Painting food allows Fretwell to show off what she can do, too. “Food is already attractive to us because we need it to survive,” she said. “But in painting, I can get a level of glossiness that heightens its appeal. When I paint a fish, how can I extend how wet the scales are? Painting is always pushing the effect further than it is in reality.”

But there’s a counterbalance to the controlled perfection of these still lifes. Fretwell’s passages of abstraction rupture the hyperreality of the rest of the canvas, offering a sense of release and distance. Fretwell creates these abstract veils by dragging and pressing bed sheets across a wet canvas. “I’m crawling all over it. It’s a very physical process, and sometimes you see handprints, knee prints, footprints,” she said. In some ways, she sees these passages as more visually honest than the still lifes. “I use fabric in order to depict fabric on the canvas,” she said, “That feels closer to the truth.”

These abstract passages, she says, were inspired in part by works made by Mark Rothko during the mid-20th century. “I saw a Rothko painting that looked like a tabletop with this veil coming down on it,” Fretwell recalled. “That arrangement of geometry and color-blocking was very inspiring to me.”

For Fretwell, her paintings are ruminations on the limits of perception in our oversaturated age. “I think it’s just important for me to remind viewers with these paintings to be skeptical of what they’re looking at,” she said, referencing the rise of AI and the proliferation of internet misinformation. “We are having to discern what is true all the time. Even in a painting, we can see the same thing and come to different conclusions.”

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All the Art You Need to See During Art Basel 2026 https://ift.tt/dn20l4E

Every June, Art Basel reminds us where the modern art fair tradition began. The gold standard of art fairs since its founding in 1970, the Swiss fair is both sprawling and exacting, with top galleries from around the world offering a sweeping view of the commercial art market now—from buzzy emerging names to breathtaking blue-chip masters.

The fair itself is very much the center of gravity, but the city has more to offer. Basel may be one of the most enjoyable fair weeks precisely because its list of essential stops is finite: a sprinkling of fairs, museum exhibitions, and gallery shows with a strong track record of excellence. It’s a refreshing counter to the typical jam-packed art week that sends you crisscrossing a major metropolis at warp speed.

From the fairs of the Messeplatz to standout museum shows and the genre-defying Basel Social Club, here are 10 stops to make during Art Basel 2026, whether you’ll be there in person or are simply curious about what you’ll be missing.

If you are Basel-bound, save the locations below to your phone with our Google Maps list.

1. Art Basel

June 18–21 (Invitation-only days on June 16 and 17), Messe Basel, Hall 2

For its 2026 edition, Art Basel’s flagship fair brings together 290 galleries from 43 countries and territories, with works ranging from exceptional 20th-century pieces to fresh contemporary art from some of the most sought-after artists working today.

Excitingly, this year marks the launch of Basel Exclusive, a new initiative that will see galleries unveiling select marquee works for the first time at the fair’s VIP opening—meaning they have not been circulated online or shared with collectors in advance. While we don’t know what exactly is coming, Artnet News reported a long list of participating artists spanning major names Marcel Duchamp and Leonora Carrington through to rising voices like Alvaro Barrington, Poppy Jones, and Klára Hosnedlová.

2. Art Basel Unlimited

June 18–21 (Invitation-only days on June 15 evening and June 17), Messe Basel, Hall 1

A sector within an art fair rarely warrants its own spot in a guide like this, but Unlimited is the exception. It is an annual, sprawling showstopper, bringing together artworks so large, ambitious, or performative that you would hardly expect to encounter them at an art fair. It presents the kind of work you might expect to find in a museum—at a much larger volume.

This year, Unlimited features 59 projects spanning installation, sculpture, performance, film, and immersive environments, and is curated for the first time by Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1. Among the artists likely to make an impression are Matthew Barney, Tracey Emin, Ryan Gander, Theaster Gates, Eva Jospin, Zsófia Keresztes, Woody de Othello, Dana Schutz, and Wael Shawky.

3. Liste Art Fair Basel

June 16–21 (Invitation-only day on June 15), Messe Basel, Hall 1.1

Founded in 1996 as Basel’s “young art fair,” Liste has built a reputation for platforming emerging galleries and artists. This year brings together more than 100 galleries from around the world.

Among the booths to seek out are Pangée, presenting Bronson Smillie’s sculptural drawings; Sorondo Projects, with a geologically driven conversation through works by Nikolay Morgunov and María Elena Pombo; Afriart Gallery, showing Fiker Solomon’s fiber works and emotive ecological forms; and max goelitz, presenting Ju Young Kim’s sculptures, which reimagine the infrastructure and psychology of airplanes.

4. Basel Social Club

June 14–20, Erdbeergraben 1

Though it’s become a fixture on the Basel calendar, Basel Social Club reinvents itself every year. Less art fair than socially driven meeting place, the annual event has previously taken shape in a former factory, a farm, and an old bank; for its fifth edition, it settles into a vacant office building a few minutes’ walk from the Basel SBB train station.

The context is fitting for a sprawling exhibition centered on the workplace as a site of critical reflection, with some artists creating work in response to the building itself. Throughout the week, Basel Social Club will bring together art, performances, music, food, and space for conversation—while considering labor and productivity in this moment, when remote work is normalized and AI is radically disrupting entire industries. There’s even an “Out of Office” zone where you can take a break.

5. MAZE/Design Basel

June 14–18, Offene Kirche Elisabethen, Elisabethenstrasse 27

Now in its second edition, MAZE/Design Basel returns to the majestic Offene Kirche Elisabethen, a Neo-Gothic church in the middle of Basel’s Old Town.

This year, there’s also an adjacent pavilion added to accommodate more galleries. Founded in 2025 in response to the absence of Design Miami/Basel, MAZE has quickly positioned itself as a go-to destination for collectible design. It will convene an international group of galleries including Laffanour | Galerie Downtown, Mitterrand, Ketabi Bourdet, Galerie kreo, Salon 94, and more.

6. Kunstmuseum Basel

St. Alban-Graben 16

The oldest public art museum in the world, Kunstmuseum Basel reliably delivers an impressive slate of shows each June. This year brings an exciting contrast: the largest Helen Frankenthaler exhibition in Europe to date and “Cao Fei: Testimonies to the Near Future,” a survey of the acclaimed Chinese artist exploring digitalization, street culture, and speculative futures. And the museum’s permanent collection is always a treat, with Old Masters, 19th-century paintings, modern icons, and contemporary works spread across three buildings.

7. Kunsthalle Basel

Steinenberg 7

Kunsthalle Basel, one of Europe’s sharpest contemporary art spaces, presents two solo exhibitions by artists making their European institutional solo debuts. Shuang Li examines how digital technologies shape relationships, bodies, and desire, premiering a film installation that takes up extreme weather to consider climate crisis and capitalist extraction. And Janiva Ellis shows 11 new paintings that delve into three loaded traditions in painting: the religious, the landscape, and the erotic.

8. Fondation Beyeler

Baselstrasse 101, Riehen

A short tram ride from the Messe, Fondation Beyeler is presenting the first major Pierre Huyghe solo exhibition in Switzerland (through September 13th). The French artist is known for unsettling, boundary-crossing works that bring together film, technology, biology, digital systems, and physical environments, often blurring the line between fiction and reality. Conceived specifically for Fondation Beyeler, the exhibition will pair new and recent works, offering a rare look at Huyghe’s evolving practice.

9. Basel gallery shows

Various locations

Basel’s gallery scene is small, but there are several strong shows worth catching. Start with Hauser & Wirth, which presents a dedicated exhibition of Max Beckmann curated in close collaboration with the artist’s granddaughter Mayen Beckmann, promising an intimate view into his practice (through July 11th). A short walk away, Gagosian is presenting an extension of its Art Basel booth at its Basel outpost. And nearby, MASSIMODECARLO stages “DEE-TOUR,” a pop-up presentation of works by France-Lise McGurn at Domushaus, where the Glasgow-born artist’s paintings extend beyond the canvas and across the exhibition space (June 15th to 21th). And keep heading northwest to see the newly renovated von Bartha, which reopens during Art Basel week with “Fable and Form,” pairing works by Barry Flanagan and Ursula Reuter Christiansen (June 15th to August 7th).

10. Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (KBH.G)

Spitalstrasse 18

Artist Chloe Wise, best known for her lush figurative paintings, presents her first major institutional exhibition in Switzerland with “EXTRASENSORY,” her most ambitious film project to date. For the show, the foundation’s roughly 5,400-square-foot Kunsthalle space will become a cinematic environment, with screens surrounding viewers as performers play figures that draw from religion, mythology, sci-fi, and mass media. The film channels the heightened lighting of Wise’s paintings and the drama of late 20th-century cinema, using its seductive visuals to poke at fantasy, consumer culture, and the stories we choose to believe. The show runs through September 6th.

from Artsy News https://ift.tt/6SLeJvX