Hauser & Wirth returns to Art Basel Hong Kong with a tightly curated presentation that moves across generations, placing modern masters alongside leading contemporary voices in a dialogue that feels both expansive and sharply focused.
At the centre of the booth is a late work by Pablo Picasso, Chat et crabe sur la plage (1965), one of a series of four paintings made over just a few days. Charged with humour and invention, it captures the restless experimentation that defined the artist’s final years.
Nearby, a suspended mobile by Alexander Calder drifts with quiet precision. Horizontal (1956) balances wire and colour into a composition that feels both weightless and exact, a signature example of Calder’s ability to translate movement into form.
The presentation moves fluidly between eras and sensibilities. A richly worked canvas by Francis Picabia reflects his late shift toward looser, more gestural forms, while Philip Guston’s Feet on Rug (1978) brings his unmistakable late language into play — intimate, uneasy, and quietly surreal.
Contemporary painting holds its own within this historical framework. George Condo’s Blues in F minor (2021) folds art history and musical rhythm into his fractured figuration, while Mark Bradford’s What are you doing in here (2018) draws on the textures of urban life to probe questions of class, labour and social structure.
Elsewhere, Qiu Xiaofei’s Garden (2025–26) unfolds as a space of memory and atmosphere, somewhere between personal history and dreamlike reconstruction.
Sculpture threads through the booth with equal force. A fabric work by Louise Bourgeois, Couple (2002), stages an embrace that feels at once tender and precarious, held in suspension within a glass vitrine. Roni Horn’s cast glass piece shifts subtly with light, its surface absorbing and reflecting its surroundings in real time.
New works by Lee Bul push further into perception and illusion. Using mirrored panels and LED light, her Infinity wall (2026) opens onto an endless, disorienting space, while Perdu CCXXVII layers materials to blur the line between the organic and the synthetic.
Across the booth, additional works by artists including Agnes Martin, Willem de Kooning, Cindy Sherman, Rashid Johnson, Henry Taylor and Zeng Fanzhi extend the conversation, reinforcing the gallery’s ability to stage encounters between distinct practices, histories and geographies.
Rather than a straightforward survey, Hauser & Wirth’s presentation reads as a carefully constructed environment — one where balance, tension and continuity play out across decades of artistic production.
Art Basel 2026 Hong Kong, 27th-29th Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
Hauser & Wirth, Booth 1C21
