“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” Ecclesiastes says. When it comes to large-scale, big-budget artworks, that time is Monday afternoon in Basel, Switzerland, when Art Basel‘s Unlimited sector opens to invited guests. It offers a rare chance to see enormous and complicated artworks that may soon be shipped off to a collector’s private island (or storage space) or plunked down in a far-flung sculpture park. If you want to understand what capital can accomplish in the art world, it is an essential visit.
The quality varies, of course. (This is an art fair. This is life.) The lows are perhaps lower than your typical fair booth, since you also have to mull the time, money, and effort that went into the presentation. But there are highs, too, remarkable ones, like a fearsome 1980 Bruce Nauman sculpture, Dead End Tunnel Folded Into Four Arms with Common Walls, that Hauser & Wirth is showing. But enough of this introduction. Let’s take a quick stroll through Unlimited, using numbers as our guide, moving from largest to smallest.
6: The number of canvas banners in Maia Ruth Lee’s Once we leave a place it is there (2024–25) installation, presented by Tina Kim. Their monochromatic ink patterns are inspired by the ropes used to keep luggage intact while in transport, while also perhaps suggesting the fractured grids of the Dansaekhwa painting Chung Sang-Hwa, who died in January at 93, or here in Switzerland, the off-kilter marks in Augusto Giacometti‘s delirious paintings. They’re soaring monuments to all the is handmade and resilient.
—Andrew Russeth
