Liste-VIP-Preview-2026-Image-Silke-Briel-1.jpg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”A large crowd gathers outside the Liste entrance in Basel, with white fair banners hanging on either side of the building and colorful umbrellas to the right.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’While the usual sense of urgency was lacking, dealers reported that collector response on opening day was solid. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy Liste</span>’>
Liste Art Fair opened yesterday, June 15, with an edition that feels markedly more expansive and diverse than its usual German and Eastern European conceptual minimalism—thanks in particular to a group of emerging galleries from Asia and Southeast Asia that brought fresh voices to the conversation. By noon, the aisles were already crowded with collectors, curators, museum directors and arts professionals from across Europe and beyond. “The atmosphere is good; everyone is in good spirits,” Austrian collector Andreas Huber told Observer. Still, on day one, the crowd skewed European, if not largely drawn from the nearby German-Swiss region, with many Italian and French collectors seemingly choosing to skip the opening or drive to Basel later in the weekend for a single-day visit. And the usual sense of urgency was lacking, with none of the opening-day rush to secure the best discoveries that once characterized this fair.
Thematically, at the center of many presentations were explorations of geological and natural time, anthropological and psychological studies of human behavior, the tension between nature, humanity and society’s systems of knowledge and classification, alongside a contemplation of the fragilities of contemporary existence and the indecipherability of a reality under constant threat of manipulation. Seoul-based G Gallery, for example, staged a booth focused on a suspended cosmology around the different rhythms and cycles of matter’s transformation and dissolution. The magmatic paintings of Lim Heejae condense, within a contained canvas, the miracle of creation itself in a fluid drama that unites the earthy and the celestial. These stand in dialogue with the sculptural cosmologies and alchemical compositions of Moon Isaac—fragmentary remains or specimens dispersed in space, waiting to find new form in a continuous cycle. Modestly priced between $800 and $5,000, several small canvases by Heejae were sold or on hold by noon.
Another Korean gallery worth checking out is Cylinder, which, for its second time at Liste Basel, has put together a thoughtfully curated pairing of Jonghwan Lee’s formal exploration of the expressive and pictorial possibilities of materials with Minseo Kang’s embrace of the fragments and ruins that build our storytelling and mythopoiesis over time, pursued and revived with the tradition and precision of tempera. With prices ranging from $2,500 to $7,000 depending on dimensions, the gallery reported strong interest in Lee’s hybrid forest of paintings.
Several galleries from Japan are also participating this year, as the country’s vibrant art scene finally catches up with its long-delayed internationalization. The Waiting Room from Tokyo presents both visceral paintings and more playful textile and soft compositions about the body and identity by young Japanese artist Rikako Kawauchi, as the boundaries between the interior and exterior of the body blur ambiguously through the motif of a spider web. Centered around the large-scale embroidery work House of the Mouth (2026), the presentation organically combines the ball-shaped sculpture Beating (2026), the painting Sew (2025) and multiple drawings, composing the entire booth as a single installation. Prices range from $1,180 to $45,000, with several of the ball sculptures sold by noon at $3,000 each.
Also from Tokyo, Parcel spotlights the suspended, melancholic landscapes of Masamitsu Shigeta. His paintings function as portable cartographies shaped by walking, memory and movement, tracing emotional geographies of the places he traverses, with the frame becoming a portal between physics and imagination. By noon, the gallery had sold half the booth, with paintings priced between $4,000 and $6,000.
Nearby, another Tokyo gallery, Yutaka Kikutake, presents poetic paintings on stone by Tomoya Matsuzaki, conceived as an exploration of the ecosystem and our relationship with the external world—between the material and the immaterial, as suggested by the small found objects placed on threshold-like shelves as offerings. Priced between $4,000 and $16,000, Matsuzaki’s work was paired with wood sculptures by Kineta Kunimatsu, inspired directly by trees and their unique shapes, formed over many years in the rugged northern landscape. Also of note from Japan is the residency program and gallery Numanohashi, which is presenting a duo between Shihui Saito and Toru Otani, both exploring how images emerge from material and surface.
On the Southeast Asian side, a must-stop this year is Yeo Workshop, returning to Liste Basel for a second year with new and recent works by Singapore artists Wei Leng Tay and Brandon Tay. Both examine how images, technologies and inherited systems shape perception, memory and belief. Wei Leng Tay’s new series, Cuts | Traces | Arrangements (2026), begins with archival photographs of ikebana arrangements from a 1963 competition in Penang, Malaysia, in which her mother participated, translating those postwar, postcolonial images through sanding, repetition, digital intervention and installation. Brandon Tay’s sculptures, meanwhile, turn scientific discovery and media infrastructure into speculative mythologies: Serpent Vessel (2025) draws on Friedrich August Kekulé’s dream of the ouroboros and benzene’s ring structure, while Votive Spiral (2025) references the discovery of DNA’s double helix and DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE (2025) reframes social media as an altered-state technology. Together, the presentation looks past the surface of images and platforms to ask how our ways of seeing, remembering and believing are actively engineered.
New to Liste and just a year old, Ara Contemporary from Jakarta has mounted a solo booth by Thai artist Natalie Sasi Organ, “40 40 Home!,” an orchestration of delicate gestures and spiritual symbologies that turns the booth into a fluid playground of collective memory and introspection. Named after a childhood game and rooted in matriarchal connections, the works reflect on visibility, belonging and the desire to inhabit a space of recognition. With prices under $10,000, the artist’s works found international buyers in the art fair’s early hours.
From Taipei, ssspacespace brings together two Taiwanese artists from different generations, Teyu Wang and Sara Wu, whose practices explore space through the body, perception, the conditions of presence and the unstable ground of existence. Poetically titled “Unstable Grounds,” the presentation features fragmented interiors and domestic poetry interrupted by a large inflatable, becoming an intuitive, allegorical rumination on the precarious existential essence of contemporary navigation—through interior psychological space as much as external urban space—continually negotiating spatial conditions, perceptual habits and accumulated histories. Prices range from $1,570 for the small compositions to $24,000 for the large inflatable.
With Asian ties but operating in New York, Yve Yang Gallery drew an impressive response on opening day to its resurfacing of the painterly work of William Feaver, a critic, curator and author now in his 83rd year. Feaver has maintained a lifelong painting practice, producing plein air landscapes of northeast England that attracted collectors with accessible prices (between £6,000 and £8,000).
Also Chinese in spirit but based in Berlin and functioning as a bridge between worlds, Hua International brought Italian-born Swiss artist Alfredo Aceto into dialogue with Beijing-based artist Shi Yi. Engaging Craig Owens’s notion of allegory, the two artists examined masculinity and local cultural codes: Aceto’s Tongue Twister fragments the male body, while Bocca con Matita replaces speech with writing through the image of a pencil held between parted lips. In his European debut, Shi Yi merges Chaozhou painting traditions with Western motifs. His works, priced at €3,000, found easy traction, with all four works in the booth sold, two additional works placed from Liste storage, and a Basel private collection acquiring both a small and a larger painting, the latter priced at €9,000. Aceto’s works, all priced at €4,000, are also on view at Basel Social Club and the Swiss Art Awards. The gallery is still looking to place one of his larger bronze sculptures, priced at €16,400.
Several galleries from Turkey are also participating this year. Among them, Pilot Gallery stands out with a booth centered on Turkish artist İrem Tok’s reproduction of the Ephesus library, made from fragments of books. Investigating the fragile archaeology of knowledge, Tok transforms books, atlases and encyclopedias to question what we keep transferring—its weight, its fragility and its distortions—shifting perspectives through details like ants crawling across an atlas and quietly destabilizing the authority of inherited narratives. Works range from $6,000 to $38,000 for the epic book sculpture. The gallery paired her work with that of Pakistani artist Hamra Abbas, who now works between Boston and Lahore. Having returned to Pakistan to engage more directly with heritage, lineage and the geological memory of place, she uses lapis lazuli—a material central to the great history of Western art but dense with associations of trade, domination and extraction—to portray figures historically linked to lower social status, elevated here through one of the region’s most precious hard stones, turning material itself into a form of dignity, memory and cultural repair.
Also engaging with the alchemical and geological stratification of materials was CrossLypka, the collaborative duo of life partners Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka, presented by L.A. talent scout Chris Sharp. Neither painting nor sculpture, the works recall Donald Judd’s “specific object” but complicate that lineage through fluid, curvilinear forms rooted in drawing, semiotics and embodied natural time. The free-standing and wall-mounted ceramic sculptures extend the sensuous line of the body into the rugged coastal geology of Northern California, their loamy, alluvial surfaces buffeted smooth by surf and wind. The response was immediate: one work sold on the spot, another was placed on hold, with Sharp telling Observer he had only one left by evening.
A reflection on matter’s relentless movement beyond human control appears in VIN VIN’s booth with the magmatic wood paintings and carvings of Rose Ras, a Haitian-born, Paris-raised artist whose practice turns wood into a living material ecosystem. Working through its layers, resistance and capacity to hold light, Ras draws on volcanic eruptions, explosions and the transformative force of nature to think through rupture, environmental fragility and human impact. Her carved surfaces seem to generate light from within the material itself, as if the work were caught between geological pressure and atmospheric release. Priced between $5,000 and $17,000, the large work sold on day one, with several others on hold. As gallery founder Vincenzo Della Corte confirmed, it is not a feverish market, but the response has been solid. “Liste has been very lively, as always, with very high-quality conversations that have already brought a couple of important opportunities,” he added.
Another compelling reflection on the tension between the anthropological and the natural is offered by the sculptures of Belgian artist Vincent Scheers, presented by Munich gallery Paulina Caspari. Working through hybridity, human-nature entanglement and the slow takeover of manmade systems by natural cycles, Scheers combines discarded film stock, decaying metals, vintage amplifiers and military sound-measuring tools with fragile natural specimens to stage encounters between technologies designed for permanence and forces of organic transformation. Tracing feedback loops of production, obsolescence, decay and renewal, technology here rejoins nature, turning into a mutating landscape itself, as bacteria, fungi, oxidation and erosion become collaborators in a symbiotic process that exposes the fragility of human systems of control, preservation and categorization. Works are priced between $4,000 and $9,000.
Similarly engaging with the potential of materials to carry meaning, the presentation of Barcelona-based gallery Sorondo stages a site-specific dialogue between Russian artist Nikolay Morgunov and Venezuelan artist María Elena Pombo, both exploring material migration, geological displacement and procedural erosion as metaphors for the human condition within world dynamics and time. With works currently on view in “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, María Elena Pombo’s fossil rubbings crystallize geological and natural time through imprint, asking what the land leaves behind and how ancient tropical fossils can be carried into the present. That question of trace and migration extends into her video, which follows South American women encountering snow for the first time and reflects on the body’s own archive of experience. Meanwhile, Russian-born, Barcelona-based Nikolay Morgunov approaches material through tension, control and release. His work plays with the balance between empty and full, precision and collapse, using grids, coal gestures and resin surfaces to soften the friction between structure and abandonment. One of the most striking pieces was made from 42,000 nails embedded in a punching ball, turning an object of impact and aggression into a dense sculptural field of conflict, pressure and suspended force. Both artists’ works are priced under $15,000, with most under $5,000, despite the conceptual and poetic weight they carry.
The fragility and precarity of daily existence amid social and familial constraints are central to the work of Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža, whose glass sculptures and staged objects examine fragility as both a material and psychological condition. Growing up queer in a strict family where emotions could shift without warning, Kumža learned to read the smallest details of behavior and environment as survival cues: a door left open, a gas hob still burning, a frightened dog. He now transforms that hyper-attunement into highly aestheticized, surreal semiotic arrangements that draw on anthropology and psychological studies of human behavior, creating works with immediate visual allure and a deep undercurrent of instability. Priced between €2,500 and €28,000, the works drew strong attention early in the fair, with an edition of four already sold out by noon and several other pieces placed by evening.
Copperfield is part of a strong and growing cohort of more experimental galleries and new voices from London’s expanding art scene at Liste this year, proving both the scene’s vibrancy and its potential. Among them, Gathering presents a philosophically dense solo booth of works by Emmanuel de Carvalho, secluded and almost compressed by an imposing five-meter-long metal structure at its entrance. Titled black archē, the monolithic steel barrier finished with a slate-black patina emerged from the artist’s ongoing collaboration with French philosopher Catherine Malabou and reflects on the concept of anarchy while drawing on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of inaccessibility. Its imposing presence, at first, nearly obscures the only other work in the booth—a large, dark, gray-toned painting—prompting a reflection on how perception shapes thought and asking how what we see, or fail to see, structures consciousness itself. Referencing the visual architecture of Portugal’s postwar authoritarian regime, the booth turns obstruction into method: the more one looks, the less one understands. Walls disorient, barriers become watchtowers and ambiguity becomes a catalyst for reflection in an age of information control and obscurity.
Also from London, Indigo + Madder brings to the fair the symbolically dense, dreamlike and fluid painterly surfaces of Indian artist Noorain Inam. Developed over the past year, this new body of work began with a hillside fall that briefly overturned perception: sky inverted, a branch appearing like a hand, lights flickering at the edges of vision. From that suspended moment, Inam builds an exploration of gravity, memory and imagination, creating uncanny, destabilizing phantasmagorical worlds in which identity, belonging, personal experience and symbolic storytelling allow both the personal and collective subconscious to surface.
The now one-year-old Soho gallery TINA is at the fair for the first time, extending its current London solo presentation of Scottish artist Katie Shannon. Through sculptures and two-dimensional works shaped by Glasgow’s psychological atmosphere, Shannon addresses social oppression, gentrification and the politics of labor, exposing exhausted civic infrastructures, social collapse and cultural detritus while tracing the compression and depression produced by urban displacement.
Strong as always at Liste is the presence of galleries and artists from Eastern Europe. Among them, Bucharest’s Catinca Tabacaru Gallery presents a solo booth by Somaliland artist Najaax Harun, whose expansive storytelling examines women’s oppression, patriarchal structures and the erasure of identity in postwar Somaliland. Across 10 paintings staged dramatically within a precarious wooden structure and priced at up to $10,000, Harun’s storytelling unfolds as a space suspended between history and narrative. Reworking Herbert Bayer’s idea of “expanded vision,” painting here recovers stories submerged within collective memory, confronting contested notions of belonging, social memory and gendered visibility while also reflecting on masculinity as a performative construction.
At first glance, the more playful booth is Megan Dominescu’s presentation of cartoonish, hallucinatory textiles at Anca Poterasu Gallery, but these works carry a sharper social bite. Working in tapestry, Dominescu turns human behavior into satirical, self-contained narratives that swing between absurdity and alarm, using irony to address feminist politics, climate anxiety, gentrification, consumerism and the performative rituals of online culture. The unstable, electric psychological voltage of her eccentric textile worlds speaks clearly from the perspective of a generation that inherited a collapsing economy and learned to process it through the frantic, distorting pulse of social media.
Based in New York but with a sharp eye on the Eastern European scene, Margot Samel presents a solo booth by Estonian painter Mariann Metsis, whose work explores the unstable, fragile ground between perception, memory and performance. Through a process of wiping, reworking and returning to an image, Metsis brings each painting to a state that feels at once familiar and unsettled, hovering in a blurred zone of indecipherability and potential—like a hallucination just beginning to form or an intuition already slipping away. Staged in a horizontal sequence at the same height, the works create a single line through the booth that reads like a fragmented Greek theater: episodic, unresolved and cut into scenes that suggest connection without ever settling into narrative. Priced from $5,000 to $9,500, the paintings attracted strong interest on the fair’s first day.
The nightmares of contemporary life return with greater force in the works of Ukrainian artist Alina Kleytman and Polish painter Jędrzej Bieńko, presented by Warsaw’s Gunia Nowik Gallery. The booth brings sculpture and painting into an immersive, uncanny confrontation around corporeality, trauma and transformation. Kleytman, born in Kharkiv in 1991, defines her practice as “hysterical realism,” transforming everyday and war-derived materials into grotesque, seductive sculptural forms that balance dark irony, mourning, violence and power. Opposite them, Bieńko’s blurry, ghostly faces and atmospheric paintings on raw linen operate like membranes or stages, turning the booth into a psychologically charged space where traumatic memories appear to flicker in and out of focus. Prices in the booth ranged from $7,000 to $25,000.
Overall, Liste’s presentations revealed a global generation openly confronting many of the anxieties and ruptures of the present moment. Early sales across price points and media suggested that collectors are willing to engage with the questions these works pose, even as a new buying confidence appears to be accompanied by greater selectivity. The strongest response could be seen in booths showcasing informed, materially engaged practices that felt urgent given the current social conditions rather than merely aligned with market trends.
