Liste 2026 Opens in Basel With Strong Sales and a Focus on New Voices
The latest edition of Liste art fair in Basel arrived with an unusually buoyant mood: by Wednesday afternoon, many exhibitors had already sold out or nearly sold out their stands. The fair, which organizers described as its largest to date, once again leaned into the role that has defined it for decades — introducing new galleries, new artists, and new points of view into the wider art-fair circuit.
Nikola Dietrich, the fair’s director, said Liste is designed to bring “new faces, new galleries and new artist positions” into the fair. She also pointed to one of Liste’s enduring strengths: in a single week, it can place different art scenes and contexts side by side, creating what she called “really nice dialogues for everyone to see.”
That sense of exchange was visible across the stands. Francesca Facciola’s work at Lodovico Corsini drew on performances staged with friends, then translated through film, 3D modeling, and painting into a series that probes family structures, collective identity, and the darker edges of inheritance. Motifs inspired by Scottish clan tartans threaded through the work, sharpening its focus on lineage and belonging.
At Pilot Galeri, İrem Tok presented “L’Origine du Monde” (2026), a dense installation built from hollowed encyclopaedias, miniature nude female figures, and natural materials set between plexiglass layers. Tok’s practice turns books into altered micro-worlds, questioning how knowledge is organized and who gets to define truth. The title, of course, nods to Gustave Courbet’s notorious painting of a vulva.
Lutnița, the first gallery from Malta to show at Liste, brought Alex Bodea’s “Bathers of River Diana” (2025), a large blood-red chalk drawing that reimagines Domenico Passignano’s “Bathers at San Niccolò” (1600) with women in place of nude men. In Bodea’s version, leisure gives way to labor. The work was offered at SFr12,000.
Elsewhere, sales were already moving. Mackerel Safranski’s “The Blue Room and his Origins” (2026) sold for SFr6,700 at A-Lounge Contemporary, while Fiker Solomon’s “Spiral” (2025) sold for $10,000 at Afriart Gallery. Brandon Tay’s “DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE” (2025), shown by Yeo Workshop, used a stroboscopic light to loop social-media imagery in a way that blurred the line between scrolling and hypnosis.
Taken together, the fair’s strongest presentations suggested why Liste remains a key Basel stop: it is not only a market venue, but a place where emerging practices can be seen in relation to one another, and where sales, ideas, and artistic risk still share the same floor.
