Liste 2026 Puts Material, Labor, and Age in the Spotlight
Basel’s most closely watched satellite fair is once again proving that the emerging-art market is rarely only about youth. At Liste, where 105 galleries are participating this year, several booths are using modest scale and unusual materials to make a sharper point: the strongest presentations often begin with process, not spectacle.
One of the fair’s most resonant works comes from Kemil Bekteši, a Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina-based artist who turns 30 next year. In the booth of Galerija Manuš, based in Split, Croatia, Bekteši has installed bread dough on metal panels, a project that links migration, family, and making by hand. Buyers receive the recipe with the work, and the installation can be expanded with additional dough once it is installed. The artist said the project has also altered his relationship with his father, a baker, whose profession supplied the work’s primary material.
A different kind of surprise appears at YveYang Gallery, where William Feaver, 83, is showing small paintings of English landscapes. Feaver is better known in Britain as the former chief art critic for the Observer, a post he held from 1975 to 1998, and as the author of books on Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Yet his own painting has remained comparatively little seen. After discovering the work online, dealer Yve Yang made a five-hour studio visit in London and brought the paintings to Basel. Their thick, brushy surfaces hover between landscape and abstraction, offering a quieter counterpoint to the fair’s more crowded visual field.
Chris Sharp is also working on two fronts this week. In addition to participating in Art Basel’s outdoor Parcours program with P.P.O.W. and Ishi Glinsky, he is showing CrossLypka — Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka, who work in Oakland, California — at Liste. Their wall-hung ceramic abstractions suggest ancient fragments or weathered bones, with sand and color left visible in the making. Sharp said one visitor asked whether they were whale bones; they are not, but they carry a similar sense of weight and residue.
At Shower gallery, Ruofan Chen’s booth is built around a sloping plywood installation that contains seven embedded paintings. The project, titled “Counterweight,” addresses unseen labor in art production and the risks of exposure to hazardous materials. In a fair devoted to new names, Chen’s work stands out for turning the booth itself into a site of construction, concealment, and physical strain.
If Liste is meant to forecast the future of the market, this year’s edition suggests that the most persuasive artists may be those who can make process visible without losing mystery.
