In June 2025, White Cube returns to Art Basel with a major installation by Danh Vo at Unlimited. At the fair, a selection of gunpowder paintings by Cai Guo-Qiang will be on display as part of the gallery’s collaboration with the artist, alongside works by Alia Ahmad, Georg Baselitz, Enrico David, Peter Doig, Lynne Drexler, Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Richard Hunt, Robert Irwin, Isamu Noguchi, Lygia Pape, Marina Rheingantz and Kazuo Shiraga among others. Also on the booth will be works by David Hammons and Ibrahim Mahama, who are among the 36 recipients of the inaugural Art Basel Awards.
At Unlimited, the gallery unveils In God We Trust (2024), a large-scale work by Danh Vo. Reimagining the 1777 version of the US flag, the work comprises 13 stars made of steel with stripes made of firewood.
A reflection on themes of national identity, history, transformation and impermanence, the work was first displayed in autumn 2020 at White Cube Bermondsey, London. Its debut coincided with the US Presidential Elections, which ended Donald Trump’s first term and resulted in Joe Biden taking office. As time progressed, the installation was gradually dismantled, and the wooden stripes were burned in six functioning furnaces installed inside the gallery. A new iteration of the work will be shown at Unlimited.
Further Art Basel booth highlights include:
Cai Guo-Qiang’s Red Birds (2022). Inspired by a dream the artist had about his late grandmother surrounded by red cardinals, this painting is made with templates of birds cut from Japanese paper, coated with coloured gunpowder, which is later ignited. Cai’s first exhibition in London after over two decades opens at White Cube Bermondsey, London, in the autumn (26 September – 9 November 2025).
Robert Irwin’s wall-based fluorescent work #3 x 6’D – Four Fold (2015). Since the 1970s, Irwin has used subtle spatial changes to alter viewers’ perception; his installations with vertical fluorescent tubes and coloured gels create immersive, shifting colour experiences. Irwin’s final exhibition, conceived before his passing in 2023, is currently on view at White Cube Paris until 19 July 2025.
Oh ho, siamo ritornati, am deutschen Wesen, Weltgenesungsbild (Oh ho, Siamo ritornati, through the German Spirit, World-Healing Image) (2023) by Georg Baselitz. Part of a series of 20 works, this large-scale inverted double portrait of the artist’s wife, Elke, is rendered in expressive, pastel tones with sketchy black lines. Reflecting Baselitz’s autobiographical themes, it combines emotional intensity with abstract, gestural painting.
Theaster Gates’s Flag (2012), part of the artist’s ‘Civil Rights Tapestries’ series, is made from decommissioned fire hoses. These materials are tonally arranged to reflect his interest in salvaged objects and their poetic potential. The series draws on a charged moment in American history and the civil rights movement.
Hovering Sentinels (1963), a work by the late American painter Lynne Drexler, features a dynamic vertical composition with bold geometric shapes in vivid yellows and blues, contrasted by tessellated patterns in warm reds and oranges.
Richard Hunt’s Years of Pilgrimage (1999), a welded stainless steel sculpture from his ‘Plow’ series, inspired by his father’s experience as a sharecropper. Recalling a two-wheeled plow drawn by mules in rural Georgia, and symbolising the history of African American labour, this abstract form is a hybrid of personal memory, cultural heritage and formal innovation. Hunt’s first posthumous retrospective, and his first solo exhibition in Europe, is currently on view at White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 29 June 2025.
Hill Houses (Green Version) (1991) by Peter Doig. Exemplifying the artist’s initial engagement with his now-iconic cabin motif, the work merges abstraction and figuration to explore the interplay between memory, landscape and the material language of painting. The work is part of SALON, the gallery’s online secondary market programme.
