AMANZOE: DISCOVER AMAN’S ULTIMATE GREEK PARADISE

Carl Gustav Jung wrote that the artist is not a person in the ordinary sense but “a collective being—a vehicle and vessel for a superpersonal creative force.” For Jung, the act of making art was not merely self-expression, but a conduit through which the collective unconscious—the vast storehouse of archetypes, myths, and ancient symbols shared by all humanity—comes to speak. In this sense, art does not merely reflect culture; it anticipates it. First, the artist feels. Then, the thinker explains. Finally, society follows. And if you want to know where society is heading, Unlimited at Art Basel is one of the sharpest divining tools we have.

This year, the fair’s monumental section—172,000 square feet of works too large, too strange, or too unruly for traditional booths—opened with 67 installations curated by Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Supported by 92 galleries from around the world, the 2025 edition of Unlimited may be slightly smaller than last year’s, but the ideas feel outsized. These are not quiet, contemplative pieces. They are visceral. They demand scale, space, and full-body attention.

Walking through Unlimited feels less like attending an exhibition and more like stepping into a collective state of mind—turbulent, searching, and intensely alive. These works don’t aim to resolve the tensions of our time; they inhabit them, giving shape to emotions we haven’t yet fully named. Some confront, some mesmerize, others quietly unsettle. But all of them seem to pulse with a kind of premonitory energy, as if sensing what’s just beyond the visible horizon.

What follows are five installations that not only stood out for their ambition and execution, but for the way they seemed to crystallize the cultural undercurrents shaping the year ahead.

Claudia Comte

Temporal Drift (coral, leaf, cactus), 2025

Freestanding wall painting and white Carrara marble sculptures

Claudia Comte’s Temporal Drift moves with the rhythm of the ocean, though it’s made of marble and pigment. At the center of the work is a sweeping, curved wall, its surface pulsing with hypnotic black-and-white patterns that suggest tides, temperatures, and time itself. Three sculptural voids interrupt the surface—silhouettes of a coral, a cactus, and aleaf—each echoed by a hand-carved marble sculpture placed nearby. These openings invite viewers to walk through, to pass from image into form, from surface into space.

Comte, who lives and works in Basel, translates digital precision into tactile presence, fusing machine logic with ancient organic rhythms. In her work, the natural world is not a background—it’s a living archive, surfacing in pattern, texture, and form. Here, nature not only simply exists—it remembers.

Latifa Echakhch

Untitled (Tears Fall), 2025

Glass beads and nylon thread

In Untitled (Tears Fall), Latifa Echakhch suspends hundreds of delicate glass beads on nearly invisible threads, forming a shimmering cascade that hangs from ceiling to floor. At first glance, it’s a waterfall of light. But spend a moment beneath it, and the emotional weight begins to register. These are droplets, tears, raindrops frozen mid-fall.

The piece is both heavy and light, both mourning and renewal. Like much of Echakhch’s work, it gestures toward fragility with startling strength. The Moroccan-born artist, based in Switzerland, uses minimal means to maximum effect, creating spaces where emotion pools just beneath the surface. Water becomes metaphor—for memory, for movement, for resilience when things fall apart.

Arlene Shechet

Midnight, 2024

Painted aluminum

Midnight, by Arlene Shechet, is a sculpture that manages to feel improvised and inevitable all at once. Vast sheets of painted and welded aluminum curve and collide in mid-air, alternating between raw metal and dusky gradients of sunset color. Despite its monumental scale, the piece feels remarkably buoyant—like a thought half-formed or a gesture mid-flight.

Originally created for Shechet’s celebrated exhibition Girl Group at Storm King Art Center, Midnight brings her signature balance of weight and whimsy into a new register. It’s a sculptural chord held in suspension, somewhere between play and structure, intuition and engineering. In Shechet’s hands, metal bends not just to shape but to feeling.

Lee Ufan

Relatum – Dialogue, 2005/2023

Steel and natural stone

Lee Ufan’s Relatum – Dialogue doesn’t speak loudly, but it doesn’t need to. In a room full of large, ambitious gestures, his quiet pairing of rough stones and flat steel plates feels like a breath being held. The work is minimalist, yes—but its simplicity is loaded. It asks you to slow down, to notice the space between things.

Emerging from the Mono-ha movement in Japan, Lee’s work resists spectacle in favor of encounter. His materials—steel, stone—do not perform; they coexist. There is no center, noclimax, only a relationship: man and nature, made and unmade, weight and light. In Relatum, you don’t look at the art. You stand with it, and maybe, if you’re still enough, you begin to listen.

Piero Golia

Still Life (Rotating device), 2024

Decommissioned roulette wheel, motor, marble

Piero Golia’s Still Life (Rotating device) isn’t quite an object—it’s an atmosphere. Tucked into a quiet enclave, the installation draws you in with the hush of heavy curtains and the soft give of carpet underfoot. At the center is a modified roulette wheel that never quite settles, its motion steady, its conclusion always deferred.

The piece is hypnotic, absurd, oddly comforting. There’s no jackpot here, no outcome—only movement, chance, and time made visible. In a fair that celebrates spectacle, Golia offers introspection, reminding us how often we confuse direction with control. His background in engineering, paired with a knack for the poetic, makes the familiar uncanny. Still Lifespins, and we watch—not waiting for a result, but recognizing the loop we’re already inside.

Together, these artworks don’t provide clear answers on how we should move forward, but instead create space for emotions, memories, and the complex tensions that shape our lives. Whether through the solid presence of stone and steel, the gentle shimmer of suspended glass, or the hypnotic spin of a roulette wheel, these installations invite us to pause and listen deeply. In a world rushing ever forward, art’s purpose seems to be to remain mindful, embrace feeling, and remember that the darkest night comes just before the dawn.

author ANASTASIA YOVANOVSKA

images COURTESY OF ART BASEL