Art Basel 2026

Mai 36 Galerie at Art Basel 2025 Hall 2.0, Booth B12

For Art Basel 2026, Mai 36 Galerie brings together established and emerging artists across five decades of work, with a special Kabinett presentation and three gallery artists participating in Art Unlimited.

Kabinett: Peter Hujar & Paul Thek

Central to the booth is a dedicated Kabinett presentation bringing together works by Peter Hujar (1934–1987) and Paul Thek (1933–1988), two towering and deeply intertwined figures of the New York avant-garde. Hujar’s searingly intimate black-and- white photographs and Thek’s idiosyncratic sculptural and painted works bear witness to a shared downtown world of radical creativity, tenderness, and urgency. Presented in dialogue, the works illuminate a friendship and a milieu that shaped American art of the late twentieth century. Also this year at Art Basel’s Unlimited section, Peter Hujar’s “The Gracie Mansion Show” will be on view.

Thomas Ruff

The booth will feature one of Thomas Ruff’s most celebrated works: 16h 48m / −45° (1990), an iconic large-format photograph from his landmark Sterne (Stars) series. This series is regarded as one of Ruff's most significant, as it marked the first time that Ruff worked from photographic material that he had found, rather than made, something he has continued to do throughout his career. Ruff will also participate in Unlimited, reaffirming his position as one of the defining figures of the Düsseldorf School and of late-twentieth-century photography.

Maia Ruth Lee

Mai 36 Galerie presents new works by Korean, San Francisco-based artist Maia Ruth Lee, whose practice weaves together questions of migration, labour, memory, and material culture. Working with rope, fabric, and found objects, Lee creates densely layered sculpture, paintings and installations that carry within them the traces of human hands and human movement. In addition to new works on the booth, Lee will present a major large-scale installation at Unlimited.

Selected Works on the Booth

The booth will debut new works by three emerging artists whose practices are generating significant critical attention. Poppy Jones, Leon Xu and Magali Reus, known for her meticulously crafted sculptures that tease apart the logic of everyday objects, whose solo exhibition is currently on view at Kunstverein Freiburg.

A new abstract painting by Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis will be presented at the booth. His presence at Art Basel coincides with the solo exhibition XIV Steps, currently on view in Venice on the occasion of the Venice Biennale.

Historic works by Matt Mullican, General Idea, Robert Mapplethorpe, Luigi Ghirri, and Irma Blank anchor the presentation, placing seminal photographic, conceptual, and text-based practices in conversation with the gallery’s contemporary programme. New Works by Kentaro Kawabata, Magnus Plessen, and Raphael Hefti round out the presentation.