Art Basel | Paris 2025

Born in Scalea, Italy, 1942. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Drawing from the everyday female consciousness and from an oppressive, censorial dictatorship – as experienced in 1970s and 1980s Brazil – Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino has produced works steeped in vital force, in a wide range of languages and media throughout her artistic career: from performance to sculpture, from videos to photography, installation and drawing.

Maiolino was involved in Brazil’s 1960s New Figuration movement: her representational prints and drawings from these years were acts of resistance to the national military regime, rising urban inequalities, and culturally ingrained patriarchy. She would later cultivate an interest in spatial and existential issues with a shift towards Minimalism and Conceptualism, creating installations that coaxed interaction between viewer and object. Since 1989, Maiolino has started working with clay, crafting impermanent labor-intensive installations that foreground her physical handling of the material, references to the unconscious and recurrent gestures of everyday life.

Maiolino’s works are based on processes of creation necessarily paired with destruction, and almost constantly on matters of identity, from the subjective and universal point of view. Developing a dialogue between opposing and complementary categories, her artistic practice dissolves between dichotomies between the inside and the outside, between emptiness and matter, ancient and contemporary.

Maiolino was awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2024.

The artist has just concluded his major solo exhibition, “Je suis là. Estou aqui,” at the Musée National Picasso, Paris.

Silvia Bächli was born in Baden, Switzerland, in 1956. She lives and works in Basel.

Bächli has developed her drawing practice working on sheets of white paper of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. Using the body and its movements as a starting point, her work spreads into everything that can be considered part of the realm of feeling. In this way she presents a reality made up of fragments and impressions. The result is not just painterly moments: the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures, and processes. Her works tell stories without an actual beginning or end, just a visualization of a moment captured in time.

Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951. She lives and works in New York.

Through photography, installation, film and books, Bloom explores notions of museology, design, collect- ing, taste and our investment in the objects we surround ourselves with. Her gaze does not focus on single items or images, but rather on the relationships between these objects, and the inherent meaning carried by their posi- tioning and juxtaposition. Though enthusiastically visual, Bloom’s practice is rooted more in the traditional act of literary production rather than that of painting or sculpture making. She has often compared herself—and the view- er of her work—to a detective, who is confronted with disparate clues and is asked to form a visual narrative.

Books have always had a relevant role in Barbara Bloom's research. Lolita Carpet, 1998 is surely one of the most interesting and intriguing work that she realized looking at a novel. After the publication in 1955, Nobokov's “Lolita” book had twenty different covers. Among all these covers, that she all collected, Bloom decided to get inspiration from the very first one. The first Olympia Press two-volume edition, published in Paris in 1955, is an abstract block of mid-century modernist green implanted with funeral lettering and a thin, white stripe, locked within a prickly black fence – in 1999, the centenary of Nabokov's birth, Bloom used this image with the author’s hand-written notes knit into the rug in purple.

Bloom's series Corner are photographs mounted on a two-tone support, with the shift in tones aligned with the change in light on the walls meeting at an angle. Each work is hung diagonally so that it touches both sides of the two cornering walls in the room. This unusual arrangement arose as Barbara’s response to the fierce struggle over wall placement that artists involved in group shows often contest passionately.

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, Korea. She lives and works in New York, Paris and Seoul.

Combining performance, video, photo and installation, her work addresses issues of the displaced self and the other, while investigating the dualistic and existential nature of philosophy such as the relationship of yin and yang to life and death; mobility to immobility; and location to dislocation.

Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. Central to her work is the “bottari”, a traditional Korean bed cover used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection.

Marcello Maloberti was born in 1966 in Codogno (Lodi), Italy. He lives and works in Milan.

Maloberti’s artistic research draws inspiration from trivial events and urban contexts, paying attention to shapeless and precarious states of life. His observations, however, go beyond the ordinary evidence of everyday life experience thanks to an often estranged and visionary neorealistic approach. His performances and multimedia installations take place in both private and public spaces having a strong interactive impact for the audience. The artist puts together an extremely condensed, theatrical narrative and suspenseful atmospheres for the viewer to watch and feel. The performers’ bodies belong to each other, they are part of a dialogue as they set up a participatory event. Maloberti also emphasizes the relationship between art and life researching new approaches to photography, video, performance, installation, sculpture and drawing, as to form a contemporary gesamtkunstwerk. Maloberti has a current show at Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan and has just closed a major retrospective at PAC, Milan in 2025.

The works appear as installation objects, composed of catalogs of ancient art — including Titian, Cimabue, Giorgione, and others — cut and placed on the ground and marked by angular cuts, becoming an integral part of the hosting architecture. The books thus become the foundations of the place, as if they were a necessary element of construction — a load-bearing brick, yet one imbued with culture.