Art Basel

Five sculptures arranged on a rough-hewn wooden shelf present the stages in the melting of a chunk of ice. Glass spheres balanced on four of the bronze ice blocks correspond in size to the volume of water that has metaphorically disappeared from the ice. The spheres increase in size in inverse relation to the shrinking of the ice.

The largest of the ice blocks is based on a three-dimensional scan of ice that Eliasson and his team collected from a beach on the southern coast of Iceland known as Diamond Beach. Glistening pieces of ice wash up there after breaking off the Breithamerkurjökull glacier and remain on shore until they melt away. In 2020, Eliasson and his team made 3D scans of individual ice fragments in order to capture the ephemeral forms before they disappeared for ever. The six smaller ice fragments were extrapolated digitally from the original scan. Software was used to simulate the complex process of melting, to predict where the block might lose mass and at what rate. Moulds were made from the digital files, and the bronze forms were cast according to traditional methods in a hybrid technique that unites timeless knowhow with modern technology. The material has been treated with a matte white patina that obliquely references the whiteness of the ice that inspired it. Bronze, a favourite material of sculptors since antiquity, was chosen because of its association with permanence and commemoration. Using the metal to immortalise these disappearing, ephemeral forms produces a kind of temporal incongruity.

The log used for the shelf was scavenged from the coast of Iceland, where the wood washes up from as far away as Siberia. The wood has been planed on one side and left raw on the other, revealing the traces of its long journey across the Arctic. Driftwood was long an important source of lumber in Iceland, where less than one per cent of the land is covered with forest.

This painting is based on a photograph of a rainbow that Olafur took from the roof of his studio in Berlin in 2024. A circular band of colours progresses from red through orange and yellow to green, blue, and indigo – the tones that make up the prismatic spectrum. Geometrically speaking, a rainbow is actually a circle that only appears to be an arch because it is intersected by the horizon line. If the earth did not block our view of it, the rainbow would appear as a full ring – much as in this painting. The contrast between the colourful ring and the hazy grey background reproduces the palette of the photograph as precisely as possible and causes the circular rainbow to almost seems to be made of light.

Packed tightly on a steel support, a cluster of glass spheres of widely divergent sizes resembles water droplets or a clutch of eggs. Seen from the front, the spheres are filled with a bright cyan tone. When viewers move around to the side, however, they see the spheres become clear, an effect achieved through covering only the back third of each sphere with a layer of translucent paint and a mirror coating. The curved interiors of the spheres reflect the observer upside down and inverted. As viewers move, they experience themselves in a visually unfamiliar way, echoed by the multiple reflections.

This work emerged from Eliasson’s long exploration of optical devices, mirrors, and lenses. By magnifying the viewers’ every movement, the multiple, inverted reflections conjure new ways of seeing and invite viewers to retrace and examine their perceptual orientation.

“What gives these forms so much power over our lives and longings?” — Shilpa Gupta

Shilpa disassembles national flags into discrete symbols and blocks of shapes, several of which bear uncanny resemblance to one another. Like a set of wooden blocks that reminds of a Jenga game, the pieces are grouped together to create new configurations that blur or reimagine the original geopolitical relations. While flags are closed systems that are codified, Shilpa brings an element of open-ended-ness into this work, suggesting that they could be fluid and interchangeable.

For Sewing Into Soil: Invisible Needle, Invisible Thread, Kimsooja pushes a needle into a slab of porcelain as if stitching a cloth. The needle acts as a brush, shaping the irregular surface to register the artist's physical action. Kimsooja associates the act of piercing the porcelain mass with that of sowing seeds in the earth -- the way a new crop is planted, deep into the topsoil. Manufactured at the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Meissen, the first porcelain manufacturer in Europe, the relief panel engages with the multifaceted history of exchange between Europe and China, Japan, and Korea. Porcelain is historically very closely associated with East Asia, until the 18th century Europeans did not have the technology to produce the prized luxury good. Kimsooja's porcelain panels also engage with the tradition of European landscape painting. Rather than depicting the horizon line, the artist turns her eye to the earth; rather than adding material to the surface, Kimsooja pierces through it. 

For more than thirty years, Mark Manders has developed an endless self-portrait that has taken the form of sculpture, still life, and architectural plans. In Ramble Room Chair, the reclining androgynous figure has a highly craquelure surface seemingly made of wet clay - is in fact rendered entirely in painted bronze. The figure seems to exist outside of time, as if they belong to an eternal mental space rather than a specific moment in history. This recurring figure, merges stylistic references adopted from various cultures and periods such as ancient Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, and African and reveals a sense of timelessness and placelessness seen throughout much of the artist's work. The chair becomes both a functional object and a sculptural metaphor for the mind's rambling, nonlinear processes.

Upcoming, Mark Manders will have a major solo exhibition at Voorlinden, opening September 20, 2025.

Mark Manders' Perspective Study, made of self-made nonsensical newspapers, is more than a visual trick or clever fake-it is a meditation on how we process information, perceive reality, and construct meaning. By mimicking the authority of the newspaper, Manders invites viewers to enter a space where perception, language, and logic all begin to unravel-quietly, poetically, and with great precision.

These self-made newspapers are a recurring motif in Manders' practice. Timeless and abstract, devoid of any linear narrative, these notional newspapers contain every word in the English language-used only once and placed in random order. Manders created these newspapers in an attempt to remove any sense of time or place in his work. 

Perspective Study also makes reference to art historical tradition - artists have done since the Renaissance, Manders creates a 'perspective study.'

In Yuko Mohri's Decomposition, she inserts electrodes into fruit to measure their internal moisture levels and converts changes in resistance, caused by withering or rotting, into light. 

Decomposition translates minuscule changes occurring inside fruit into dimming lights, conveying the life of fruit that continues to emerge and evolve even after its connection to the soil or tree trunk has been severed. Hinting at the history of still-life painting, Mohri's work questions the relation between stillness and liveliness, revealing that what might seem without life is actually full of it. 

Upcoming in September, Yuko Mohri has a major solo exhibition at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, curated by Vicente Todolí.

Since the mid-1990s, Ernesto Neto has drawn inspiration from Biomorphism and minimalist sculpture, along with Neo-concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s & 70s. The artist often references and incorporates organic shapes and materials.

With hand braided chita, a traditional Brazilian fabric, woven around wooden pegs, from the earth to the sky infinitus porous being, evokes imagery of dreamcatchers or pathways to create a sense of harmony and tension. In this way, the materiality of the work presents an intuitive meeting point of old and new, or traditional and contemporary. The intertwined fabric follows at continuous, circuitous path, building upon itself to create a pattern that is at once both human made and entirely organic.

For this body of work, Lisa Oppenheim transforms and embodies the art practice of one of the twentieth century's most well-known yet enigmatic artists working in and around photography: Edward Steichen (born Edouard Jean Steichen, 1879, Luxembourg - 1973, Redding, Connecticut).

Although today he is most renowned for his innovations in publishing and exhibiting photography, Steichen was also well-known for a similarly experimental approach to the breeding and exhibition of flowers. In 1910, French amateur botanist Fernand Denis created a new Iris hybrid by crossing the species Chameiris Alba and Iberica. He named the new flower Mons. Steichen, presumably in honor of his fellow horticultural enthusiast. There are no known photographs of Mons. Steichen, nor extant examples of the flower. As such, it is impossible to know with any certainty precisely what the iris looked like. Oppenheim's research led her to realize that, while it was impossible to recreate this flower through traditional techniques, perhaps other means of technological reproduction could be used instead.

Steichen himself embraced new photographic technologies as they emerged, and he even equated his experiments in plant breeding with his approach to photography. One such example can be identified in Steichen's late-1930s experiments with dye transfer printing. This technique impregnates red, green, and blue photographic matrices with cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, creating hyper-saturated prints that look like no others. Unlike anyone else at the time (or for that matter since), Steichen also experimented with the process's "normal" chromatic order, and the results turned the concept of photographic realism on its head, producing quasi-psychedelic renderings of everything from theatrical performances to bouquets of flowers.

Clementine (Chlks) is made from a polished white plaster. Reminiscent of the iconic Bonne Maman jam jar, its materiality also hints at Greek columns rendered in plaster. A sequence of tooth and molar shapes are hand-carved into the jar's faceted sides. Nestled atop one side is an airbrushed leaf made out of aluminum foil; modeled after a leaf found in Reus's mother's garden. The lid of the jar features an airbrushed painting of a terracotta jug placed on a gingham tablecloth. A splatter of bird feces obscures the idyllic table scene, contrasting the constructed and desirable notion of 'Nature' with the reality of the natural world. In French, 'Nature' also means plain or unflavored ice cream or yoghurt. 

The right hand side of the jar reads 'grace vanille' (translated: vanilla ice cream). The scribble is rendered in Reus's grandmother's handwriting (taken from one of her hand-written recipe books) - Reus's grandmother (her Bonne Maman) was part of the generation that the brand mimicked to establish a traditional identity, and align itself with the home and authenticity.

Informed by the worlds of art, architecture, natural sciences and engineering, Tomás Saraceno’s floating sculptures and interactive installations propose new, sustainable ways of inhabiting the environment. Embodying one of the core concepts in Saraceno's work these works both present a model of life floating in space and suggests an architectural vision of the future. Suspended from the ceiling like a cloud, the complex geometric shape of the modules are derived from the artist's continued experimentation with a structure termed the "Weaire-Phelan Model," which describes an idealized mathematical geometry of foam.

Expanding on the themes of her early work, Wearing’s practice has since explored questions around public personas and private selves through a diversity of media, often drawing from disparate cultural history and techniques, including theatre and television. Her ongoing Spiritual Family series, begun in 2008, explores the notion of influence and lineage in the construction of identity in photographic self-portraits of the artist in the guise of artistic forebears that have impacted her practice. Wearing has created five new portraits inhabiting the likeness of icons of Italian film: Monica Vitti, Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. These works use masterfully rendered silicon masks, custom wigs, and precise lighting to realise powerfully arresting, uncanny portraits, playing with identity as embodied performance while examining the art historical tradition of self-portraiture as a technique of self-representation, expression and promotion.