Art Basel Unlimited

Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Hustlers is a restaging of the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition, Strangers, held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993. This presentation includes the 21 individual photographs from that show, which was the first public display of diCorcia’s groundbreaking series Hustlers (1990 – 1992). Taken around Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, the images feature male sex workers who posed for a fee loosely equivalent to what they charged for their services. DiCorcia paid the subjects using National Endowment for the Arts grant money, a bold gesture at the height of the 1990s culture wars. Depicted in a variety of settings, the hustlers are identified in the titles of the photographs by their name, age, place of birth, and payment received for posing for the camera.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) emerged in the 1980s as part of a generation of photographers who explored and challenged the boundaries of the medium. Documentary and theatrical, his work operates in the interstices between fact an fiction. DiCorcia lives and works in New York.

Untitled (2018) consists of dislocated airplane parts– windows and seats–evoking the instability of a global, homogenous society in constant flux and perpetual motion. Hanging from the walls are 15 airplane windows that are strangely reminiscent of eyes, their blinds like eyelids that are either open, half-open, or completely closed. They subvert the preconceived notion of a window looking out onto the world: Here they look back, observing the viewer while simultaneously turning the observer into the view. For Isa Genzken, travel presents the opportunity to view the world from a new perspective. In this work we find a dreamlike countenance pervading the displaced, vacant seats, implying an abandoned mode of transport–they are melancholic remnants that recall the splendor of air travel and the wonders it might bring.

Isa Genzken (born 1948 in Bad Oldesloe, Germany) is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, photography film, and interventions in public space, critically examining conceptual and constructive approaches of modernism. Genzken lives and works in Berlin.

Standing nearly 6 meters high, the monumental Flowers That Bloom in the Cosmos–which has never been exhibited before–is one of Yayoi Kusama’s sculptural installations of bright, fantastically scaled flowers that have featured in major presentations of her work during the past two decades. Flowers have been one of Kusama’s most enduring and noteworthy motifs, one that she has been exploring on a larger scale since 2000. They emphasize her lifelong interest in the organic world and its connections to the wider universe while also harking back to the childhood she spent in her family’s plant nursery. The outsized flower proffers cheerful connotations, its anthropomorphized features appearing to be almost dancing. Vividly composed and celebratory, Kusama’s flower is inspired by the universal themes of love, beauty, and hope.

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan) has been integral in shaping the landscape of international contemporary art. Her work traverses a range of postwar artistic movements while engaging such themes as subjectivity, life, death, infinity, and obsession. Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.

Conceived by Thomas Ruff as an installation to commemorate the 25th anniversary of September 11, this group of 12 works derives from image of the World Trade Center attacks in New York in 2001 and is taken from his larger jpegs series. Ruff was in New York on 9/11 and documented that day and its aftermath. Returning home to Germany, he was faced with an unexpected misfortune: The images he had taken had been lost. Seeking an appropriate artistic response to tragedy on such an unimaginable scale, he began to source and appropriate imagery of 9/11 from the internet. Using digital techniques, Ruff altered the selected images by changing their structure, often enlarging pixels and manipulating colors. The resulting large-format prints appear almost abstract–testaments to narratives lost in the information overflow of mass-media society.

Thomas Ruff (born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) rose to prominence in the 1980s, becoming known for his experimental approach to photography and its evolving technological capabilities as well as his overarching inquiry into the ‘grammar of photography.’ Ruff lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Dana Schutz’s sculptures are of the same world as her paintings; these two sides of her practice continue to animate and engage the formal, experimental, and pictorial possibilities of her work. One of her largest and most ambitious projects to date, Sea Group was modeled in clay at scale before being cast in bronze. Measuring nearly 3 meters tall and viewed in the round, it presents a monumental scene of tangled figures huddling together on an island seemingly made of bones and crutches–dynamically reimagining imagery found in the artist’s significant 2021 painting, Sea Group. The sculpture’s surface shows traces of Schutz’s hand and process, reflecting a newfound, dynamic physicality in her work. It debuted in New York in 2023 and another edition is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

In 2025, Luc Tuymans was invited to create two paintings for San Giorgio Maggiore church in Venice, a Renaissance structure designed by Andrea Palladio that dates to the 16th century. Installed there from May 2025 through March 2026, the canvases took the place of Jacopo Tintoretto’s Last Supper (1592–1594) and The Israelites in the Desert (c. 1593) while they were restored, occupying a central position in the presbytery of the basilica. Each measuring 6 meters wide to match the scale of the Tintorettos, they are among the largest canvases produced by Tuymans. Unlike Tintoretto’s masterworks, the paintings do not deal with biblical subject matter directly but rather utilize light and color to underscore a disjuncture between appearance and reality.

Luc Tuymans (born 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium) is one of the most important painters working today and a pioneer of a distinctive style of figurative painting that emerged in the 1980s. He has been influential among his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists. Tuymans lives and works in Antwerp.