A First Look at the Big-Ticket Artworks that Galleries Are Bringing to Art Basel 2025

Maybe it’s Iwan and Manuela Wirth’s kinship with the original Basel, but the Swiss mega-gallery always seems to bring a top collection of big-ticket works, and this year is no different. For the fair, the gallery will have works by three of its most historic names, Phillip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, and Arshile Gorky. The highest listed price goes to Guston’s Migration, a 1978 oil painting that forms a series with two other late-era works focused on migration driven by war and violence, both of which are held by major museums. Migration is consigned from a private collection and listed at $7.5 million. (It last sold at Sotheby’s in 1990 for $242,000.) It will be accompanied by another Guston from the same year, Aegean, which comes directly from the artist’s estate. While the price for Aegean wasn’t disclosed, that work, which dramatically depicts arms clutching colliding trash can lids over a blood-red sea, figured in Guston’s recent retrospective and is quite a bit larger than Migration. 

Bourgeois’s 2002 hanging fabric sculpture Couple, priced at $1.9 million, depicts a nude man and woman with arms wrapped around each other. (That work, or another edition of it, sold at Phillips London in 2022 for just a shade over $1 million.) Another major work in the booth is an untitled 1939–40 Gorky painting, sized at around 47 inches by 36 inches and priced at $4 million, that pays homage to Pablo Picasso’s Figure (1929). It depicts an abstracted human form from the bust up, in muted tones. There are also several contemporary works in the booth, including a large-scale Mark Bradford work for $3.5 million and a George Condo painting for $2.45 million, both made this year.

But the most talked-about work from Hauser likely won’t be one in the booth, but over at Unlimited, a special sector for large-scale installations. There, the gallery will present Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), a seminal 1991 work by the artist that has been featured in over 30 exhibitions and which, according to the gallery, hasn’t come to market in over 30 years. It was most recently exhibited at mumok in Vienna last year and at the Pinault Collection in Paris in 2023. The dancing platform has been listed by the estate as a permanent loan to Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; the institution did not respond to a request for comment on whether it will remain that way if it is sold.

Headlining the booth at Gagosian is a rare 1963 work by Helen Frankenthaler, consigned directly from the artist’s foundation. Titled Evil Spirit and priced “in the region of $5 million,” the large-scale oil and acrylic painting is new to the market, according to the gallery, and has only been exhibited once before. 

“It is rare as one of the last paintings in which the artist stained the canvas with oil paint,” Jason Ysenburg, a director at Gagosian, told ARTnews. “She also added acrylic paint which was an unusual combination for her,” he said, adding that the work is a kind of precursor for later works that blended those mediums. 

Also in the booth is some wet paint from Jonas Wood, whose 2025 painting Bromeliad Nursery—listed for $2.5 million—also blends oil and acrylic paints.

With Pace celebrating its 65th anniversary, the gallery is bringing works from a wide range of 20th-century artists working in abstraction—a focus of Pace over the years—including Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko, among others. But the most highly priced work in the booth isn’t abstract at all: Pablo Picasso’s 1969 oil painting Homme à la pipe assis et amour, which has a whopping $30 million price tag. The painting last sold at auction for $7.85 million at Christie’s London in 2006.

A nine-foot wide untitled Joan Mitchell painting from 1957–58 is sure to be a showstopper, too.  Pace has priced it in the $15 million–$20 million range. It last sold at Christie’s New York in May 2018 for $9.1 million, just above its high estimate at the time; the auction house listed its provenance as being bequeathed to that owner directly by Mitchell. 
Other works in Pace’s booth listed at seven figures will be the 1974 Frankenthaler painting Ore, for around $3 million–$4 million, and Paul Thek’s Sicily (1962–63), for $2.5 million–$3 million.

Among the significant works heading to Basel courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac are two works by German painter Georg Baselitz: Drei Hundre aufwärts (1968), for around $3.4 million, and Hier jetzt hell, dort dunkel dunkel (2012), for around $2.1 million. Ropac described the latter as a “masterwork” with “special resonance” in the Swiss city, as it’s based on Otto Dix’s 1924 work The Artist’s Parents II, which hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel. “Baselitz reinterpreted the scene, turning it into a portrait of his own parents and, at the same time, a double portrait with his wife Elke, introducing his characteristic twists,” Ropac told ARTnews. “Bringing it to Basel carries a double significance: it’s a homage… but also a deeply personal work.” The dealer is currently presenting an exhibition of new large-format paintings by Baselitz at the gallery’s Paris location.

Also notable is Robert Rauschenberg’s Lipstick (Spread), a large-scale multimedia work from 1981 that recalls the artist’s “Combines” due to its integration of found objects with his painting. Priced at $1.5 million, it features a physical red umbrella that gives the impression of looking down on a room. “It’s all about space, perspective, and the changing view, and I believe it’s a masterpiece of his later work,” Ropac said. It last sold at Christie’s London in 2007 for around $650,000.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan’s Basel presentation includes French painter Pierre Soulages’s ​​Peinture 162 x 130 cm, 6 octobre 1963, a characteristically black painting leavened by brushstrokes of deep blue at its center and white at its top, priced at $5.8 million. There’s also Nicolas de Staël’s 1954 painting Sicile, listed for $5.6 million; a Richard Serra lead work, Plate Roll Prop (1969), for $2.8 million, and a Brice Marden abstraction, Smith (1971), for $1.5 million. 

Well-timed to the release of David Sheff’s Yoko Ono biography and a Gropius Bau retrospective for the artist are three pieces by her —prices not given—that all appeared in her career-making 1966 exhibition at Indica Gallery in London. (Yes, the one where she met John Lennon.) The works are all sculptures or, as she called them, “conceptual objects”: Pointedness (1964/66), Forget It (1966), and Water Piece (Painting to Be Watered) (1962/66).

While the longtime London dealer didn’t give many prices for works coming to Basel, citing recent market volatility, he did mention that the gallery is bringing 13 works by Egon Schiele (including several watercolors priced at $2 million–$3 million each), eight works by Gustav Klimt, three Weinmar watercolors by Otto Dix ($500,000 each), watercolor and oil Cubist works by Juan Gris (priced at “just under $1 million” and “a couple million,” respectively), and a “major surrealist work” by Paul Delvaux.

The Delvaux, Nus à la Statue (1946), measures four feet wide by six feet tall and is on consignment from an American collection. While Nagy said it will be priced “in the millions,” he has yet to nail down the exact figure, as the consignment came at the last minute. Blame the market. 

“Nobody wants to consign into a volatile marketplace because they don’t know what’s going on,” Nagy said, noting that several auction results earlier this year for works by Delvaux from the same period reached up to $5 million.

While Acquavella declined to provide prices for works, the centerpiece of its presentation is Vija Celmins’s Long Ocean #3, a large-scale graphite work from 1973 that painstakingly renders a view of the ocean. Similarly sized works from the “Long Ocean” series sold at Christie’s New York in 2019 for $1.8 million and at Sotheby’s New York in 2015 for $1.3 million. (The Fondation Beyeler will open a retrospective of Celmins’s work next week.) The gallery has also said it is bringing works by major market figures like Jean Michel-Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Cy Twombly, Tom Sachs, and Zao Wou-Ki. 

Another gallery that doesn’t give out prices, Zwirner headlined its Basel presentation with a large-scale Marlene Dumas work, Magdalena (1995), depicting the eponymous disciple of Christ naked with long black hair stretching down over most of her figure, with her hands pressed together in prayer. Two other Dumas works from 1995, both depicting Mary Magdalene, sold at Sotheby’s, one in London in 2019 for $3 million and the other in New York in 2017 for $3.6 million. Zwirner is bringing the Dumas fresh off the artist setting a record for the most expensive work by a living woman artist at auction in May, when her 1997 work Miss January sold for $13.6 million at Christie’s.

Other major works in the booth are Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.278, Hanging Nine-Lobed,Single-Layered Continuous Form) from 1955 and Gerhard Richter 1987 work Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting). A roughly similar hanging Asawa sculpture from 1955 sold at Christie’s New York in 2023 for $2.47 million. Zwirner will also have its own Felix Gonzalez-Torres work in the booth, an untitled double paper stack, with each sheet printed with the phrase “Somewhere better than this place” or “Nowhere better than this place.”

Other galleries bringing seven-figure works include Brussels’s Vedovi Gallery, with René Magritte’s 1950 gouache on paper Shéhérazade for $2.9 million and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (1966) for $2.7 million; Milan’s Cardi Gallery, with sculptor Mimmo Paladino’s Testimoni (2009), a group of 20 standing sculptures made from tuff stone, on viewin the Unlimited section and priced at $2.3 million; Michael Werner, with Sigmar Polke’s Forêt Nationale (1989) for $2.5 million and Kurt Schwitters’s Untitled (Red-Rubber-Ball Picture), 1942, for $1.2 million; Jeffrey Deitch, who is bringing several 1970s works by Frank Stella, consigned by the artist’s estate, and two historic works by Paul Klee, all priced at or around $1 million; and Karma, with Jonas Wood’s 2017 oil and acrylic painting Wimbledon M2 for $1.95 million, Milton Avery’s 1944 oil painting Dead Trees with Firs for $1.35 million, and an untitled 1940 Alice Neel oil painting for $1 million.