Liste Art Fair: how Art Basel’s ‘younger sister’ became a launchpad for the next generation
Once a fringe alternative, Liste Art Fair BaselExternal link has grown into a vital platform for emerging galleries worldwide, showing that success on the contemporary art fair circuit doesn’t have to follow the market’s usual playbook.
With an unlimited travel budget, you could spend every day of the year at a different art fair somewhere in the world. There are now more than 300 of them, collectively sustaining an art market with an annual turnover of $59.6 billion ($47.5 billion) – down slightly from its post-pandemic peak of $67.8 billion – yet still buoyed by strong individual sales, with around 41.4 million transactions recorded in 2025.
Led by the behemoths Art Basel and Frieze, the art fair market has consolidated in the last decade. The leading fairs have either expanded or been swallowed by big investment groups. Art fairs became hubs for all the market players – dealers, curators, collectors, heads of museums, and public and private collections – except for the artists themselves.
However, one small, irrepressible independent art fair bucks this global trend. Born in the shadow of Art Basel, Liste developed into a non-profit foundation to keep the principles that guided its conception 30 years ago – namely, to offer space and visibility to young artists and galleries who lack prominent platforms to show their works to the market’s big players.
It is more than just another art fair, says Liste’s director, Nikola Dietrich. “We see ourselves first and foremost as a support system; in fact, we have different support systems,” she tells Swissinfo at her office in Basel’s Old Town.
This year’s event runs from June 15 to 21 at Messe Basel.
Nurturing new art
The fair relies on a circle of “friends of Liste” to support dealers and artists who bring more ambitious projects to Basel, or who come from less privileged countries in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. “We have unfortunately, also this year, not so many galleries from these regions because it’s getting more and more difficult for them,” Dietrich explains.
This is also an impediment for the more established galleries in Art Basel’s roster. Apart from the fair’s costs, transportation and insurance, they must also cover a full week of Swiss living costs. Dietrich says that the “friends of Liste”, with their yearly contributions, can support the presence of around 12 to 15 galleries.
Prices of booths at Liste have risen slightly in recent years and now range from CHF7,500 to CHF13,000. For comparison, booths at Art Basel range from $25,000 to over $200,000, depending on the fair location, the size of the space and the specific exhibition sector.
Novelties of Liste 2026:
The concept before the market
As a supporting platform for younger galleries, Liste’s selection process is not much different from other art fairs, but more emphasis is put on the quality and ambition of the proposals. Even galleries with long presence at Liste must apply every year.
“Rather than focusing primarily on market positioning, the selection committee evaluates carefully developed concepts that are almost like little exhibition concepts,” Dietrich says, adding that Liste receives around 300 applications a year. This year there will be 105 galleries at Liste, up from 96 in 2025.
Dietrich also has a team of “scouts” who give advice on artists and galleries. “They go to different regions of the world where I might not have the access or a deeper, more specific knowledge,” she says. “They give me input about who is really relevant to look at. It might be galleries that are opening, or galleries that are changing their program in an interesting or edgy way, or galleries that work with artists who might have been overlooked for many different reasons. The most typical reasons are because they are women, but also artists who are not in, nor have access to the centres of art production.”
Born in the German town of Radolfzell, near the Swiss border on Lake Constance, Nikola Dietrich took part in the prestigious de Appel Curatorial Training ProgrammeExternal link in Amsterdam before joining the even more selective curatorial workshop of the FridericianumExternal link in Kassel, Germany, led by the gallerist, collector, editor and curator René Block. Having worked with the postwar avant-gardes, notably with Fluxus, Block taught his pupils to “think beyond strict formats”, Dietrich recalls. From there, she took over the curatorship of PortikusExternal link in Frankfurt (“the most influential 100m2 in the contemporary art world”), before moving to the Basel Museum of Fine Arts (Kunstmuseum) where she took the position of chief-curator of contemporary art (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2018-23). Liste 2026 is the second edition of the fair under her direction.
For an established contemporary arts curator, a post as director of an art fair – with the obvious subordination to market dictums – might have limited appeal. Most of the fairs, even those in which the artistic director used to be the top position, like Art Basel, now have CEOs running the show. “I wouldn’t direct any other art fair but Liste is a very special fair,” she says. “I don’t see it as so different from my previous jobs because I was always very close to production of art.”
The age of wild gallerists
When Liste was created in 1996, not many international art fairs existed, notably Art Basel, Art Chicago, and the world’s oldest, Art Cologne. Even Frieze was then just an arts magazine.
Eva Presenhuber, one of Liste’s founders, told Swissinfo that the initial goal was to create a dedicated platform for young galleries which were not accepted for Art Basel.
“I had the idea for the fair when my gallery, Walcheturm (Zurich), was rejected by Art Basel, which I now understand was because we were simply too young. Inspired by an alternative art fair in Cologne called Unfair, I suggested that we do something similar. We named it Liste because galleries are essentially on a waiting list for Art Basel.”
The art scene in Zurich in the late 1980s and early 1990s was quite different from today. As Presenhuber recalls, “many people were excited about contemporary art, but galleries targeting this segment were only starting to open. There was a sense of awakening in the air, and it was very exciting. People also held art shows in their apartments. For example, [Swiss art curator and critic] Hans Ulrich Obrist showed Fischli/Weiss in his kitchen in St Gallen. There were also secret bars where the art crowd would go for drinks.”
Eva Presenhuber and the young Zurich gallerist Peter Kilchmann teamed up with veteran Basel-based curator Peter Bläuer, who found the original venue for their show: the Warteck, a former brewery that had become a creative hub for art, craft, design and performance in the 1990s. During the fair week, the tenants cleared their studios, workshops and offices to make space for the galleries.
Art Basel frowns
“The buzz around the inaugural edition and its success exceeded everybody’s expectations. David Zwirner, Gavin Brown or Neugerriemschneider, who are today among the most important art dealers in the world, were all there,” Presenhuber says. All these galleries, as well as Presenhuber and Kilchmann, have thrived since and are now Art Basel fixtures.
“Initially, Art Basel wasn’t particularly happy about us founding Liste, and I was afraid they would blacklist us,” Presenhuber says. “However, after the first year, they realised that Liste eased the pressure on the main fair to accept young galleries too early, as they often lack the necessary financial stability. In a way, Art Basel and Liste perfectly complemented each other.”
So much so that Liste soon became a vital part of the Art Basel ecosystem. “Collectors coming to Art Basel went to Liste to make discoveries,” Presenhuber says. “In 1997 Art Basel launched their own young-gallery initiative called Statements. With smaller booths, solo shows and specialised projects, this new format immediately attracted many of our original participants, becoming a sort of bridge from Liste to Art Basel.”
Seizing the space
The Covid-19 pandemic marked a turning point for the fair. The year 2020 was a blank, and amid the cautious reopening of 2021, Liste moved from the Warteck to a huge exhibition space next to Art Basel: Hall 1.1 of Messe Basel.
“Covid was one reason, but the Warteck building posed some difficulties of its own,” Dietrich says. “Every year we had to negotiate with all the different tenants to move out for ten days.”
“Obviously for the visitor it was a lot of fun,” she says. “But for the placement of the galleries, the slots were very uneven. Some would find themselves hidden in the basement or under the roof, which was very hot in summer.”
Since moving into the exhibition halls at Messe Basel, Liste has been able to offer galleries a different spatial experience. The generous scale of the halls allows them to develop more ambitious installations and exhibition-like presentations, something that many participants have particularly appreciated.
“In the halls, there is the possibility to work with the architecture in different ways, so that the art can really come into its own,” Dietrich says.
In the first years, the fair was organised around a circular architectural structure that created a distinctive centre and worked very well for that period. Over time, however, Dietrich and her team began to rethink the layout, opening up the structure.
Dietrich describes excitedly how she occupies the premises. “One of the advantages of the halls is that they allow us to continuously rethink how the fair is organised,” she explains. “We opened up the circle and discovered new possibilities for presenting art. Suddenly, there were end walls and new sightlines, which led us to develop what we simply call the ‘Wall’ – ten-metre-long walls curated by non-profit and hybrid art spaces.
Geopolitics matters
As far as the art market is concerned, politics is rarely an impediment for business. Artwork displaying political messages rarely provoke much outrage. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 had an impact in Basel and sparked a response.
While many Russian galleries and collectors were sanctioned, Liste also decided to drop two Russian galleries from its roster and offer their booths to two Ukrainian galleries.
Julia Voloshyna, who founded the Voloshyn gallery together with her husband Max, told Swissinfo that “2022 was a defining moment not only professionally, but in terms of what we believed art could do in a time of crisis”. Some of the artists exhibited by Voloshyn were on the frontlines of the war.
“We are deeply grateful for the connections Liste has made possible with collectors, curators, and fellow galleries from across the world,” she says.
When Swissinfo first met the Voloshyns in 2022, they were constantly traveling between countries, working on exhibitions and projects across Europe and the US while keeping the gallery programme active despite the circumstances – the gallery in Kyiv had to be closed at the start of the invasion and re-opened only in April 2023. Since then, they have opened a new space in Miami and built strong ties between the Ukrainian art scene and the international market.
And what about the Russians? “I didn’t receive any application from there,” Dietrich says.
Edited by Catherine Hickley/sb
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