While Liste Art Fair is known for showcasing younger galleries and more experimental artwork, the satellite fair is now 30 years old. It’s hardly the young upstart it once was—and yet, it still manages to surprise.
In 2021, the fair moved from the Warteck Brewery to Hall 3 of the Messe, bringing it closer to Art Basel proper. But the newish surroundings have come with growing pains. Last year, the fair tested a circular layout that was criticized by dealers for stymying foot traffic to certain booths. Organizers rejiggered the floor plan again for the 2025 edition.
This year’s design seems to be better received, with few complaints from the fair’s 99 exhibitors. Around 40 are first-timers, and 32 countries are represented among the galleries.
While some critics argued that last year’s presentations were too safe, the 2025 edition leaned into the unusual and jarring—with far-out sound installations and conceptual works that reinforce why Liste remains the art world’s go-to platform for the vanguard.
Here are ARTnews’ top five booths at the fair:
Jin Haofan at Vanguard Gallery
At Beijing’s Vanguard Gallery is a site-specific project by Shenzhen-based painter Jin Haofan titled Islands. Comprising three sets of painting installations—two of which consist of 100 small canvases—the works are pieced together like puzzles, creating the illusion of chromatic and translucent atmospheres reminiscent of dusk and dawn. The effect is that of “Turneresque seascapes after a storm,” according to Vanguard director Sherry Zhang.
The works touch on themes including loneliness, the blurred boundaries between day and darkness, and “the unrelenting passage of time,” she told ARTnews.
Lukas Heerich at Max Goelitz Gallery
The bright pink walls lining the booth at Berlin’s Max Goelitz gallery are immediately eye-catching, but the accompanying awkward steel-and-aluminum sculpture that emits whispers leaves visitors slightly unnerved. The sound creeps in—I initially thought my phone speaker was broken—from old Tannoy speakers once used to broadcast disaster warnings. Recorded by Nigerian American poet Precious Okoyomon, the audio was inspired by The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s 1955 cinematic fever dream, and represents “a fallen tower, architectural ruin, or skeletal signal,” said Gabriel Schmidt, the gallery’s fresh-faced director.
The striking pink on the walls is Phos-Chek, a flame retardant used at airports, “which is corrosive but also soothing, like a balm spread across the harshness of the metal structure,” Schmidt added. “Like a painkiller, the art becomes a calming force, diffusing the tension it generates, softening the brutality of the built environment.” He noted that the work was acquired by a European institution.
Tom Hardwick-Allan and Kin Ting Li at South Parade
London’s South Parade, founded by Isaac Simon in 2020, is showing at Liste for the first time this year. The gallery brought a trio of cast-iron reliefs by British sculptor Hardwick-Allan, made by pressing carved wood into a mixture of sand and petrol to leave an imprint into which molten iron was poured. “They echo the extra-uterine maintenance of a premature chick—with the balance of fuel, fluid, and oxygen,” Simon told me.
The paintings of Hong Kong–born, London-based artist Kin Ting Li complement Hardwick-Allan’s reliefs. The works are based on observations of nature, literature, film, architecture, and sci-fi, “eliciting new and unexpected forms that are both organic and inorganic, microscopic and astronomical,” Simon said, adding that it is “important the gallery has a presence in Basel.” He also participated in Frieze London’s Focus section for emerging galleries last year.
Inuuteq Storch at Wilson Saplana Gallery
Copenhagen’s Wilson Saplana Gallery is also participating in Liste for the first time this year. For its debut presentation, the gallery brought a series of photographs by Greenlandic Inuit artist Inuuteq Storch. The works are his attempt to wrest his country back from Denmark’s colonial grip, “which has defined its culture for decades,” the gallery’s director, Nanna Saplana, told me.
Storch represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale last year. His photos highlight personal relationships, intimate moments, and Greenland’s environmental struggles. They have been “hung in a way to evoke memories and nostalgia that flash before your eyes,” Saplana said.
The works are priced between $5,000 and $15,000, with several already sold.
Kim Adams at Hunt Gallery
At first glance, the booth of Toronto’s Hunt Gallery—also debuting at Liste this year—looks like the attic of a middle-aged model train enthusiast. Spread across a long U-shaped table are miniature industrial scenes featuring shipping containers, train carriages, trees, and tiny people. The works are all by 74-year-old Canadian artist Kim Adams, known for using readymade and prefabricated elements “to interrogate social structures, the impact of technology and mobility, and the intersection between life and art,” the gallery’s director, Daniel Hunt, told me.
“Adams builds these minuscule ‘worlds’ as a form of social critique, occupying the unique space between life and art,” Hunt added.
Auto Office Haus (Auto Office House) is a scaled-down model of a building the artist designed for Skulptur Projekte Münster’s 1977 show. It’s an old gas station fitted with a rotunda; Adams would return to Münster each year, photograph the structure to see how it had aged, and adjust the artwork accordingly. Hunt said he has sold several works, ranging from $5,000 to $15,000.