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At this year’s �鶹�� lounge at Art Basel in Basel, �鶹�� will present a selection of works from the �鶹�� Art Collectionin The Power of Words. The artists whose works are featured in this presentation use text as a component of their creative practice. They employ words, letters and numbers either as direct statements or as elements subtly integrated into their compositions to convey meaning and evoke emotion.

Sylvie Fleury, ‘She-Devils on Wheels – red,’ 2019. Print on banner with engraved rivets, 45 x 210 x 0.2 cm (17 11/16 x 82 11/16 x 1/16 in). �鶹�� Art Collection © Sylvie Fleury. Courtesy Edition VFO, Zurich.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists began to place greater emphasis on text—combining aesthetics and linguistics. They challenged the traditional relationship between language and images by appropriating found words and phrases, experimenting with grammatical and typographical strategies often associated with advertising, developing unique alphanumeric codes and engaging with cultural commentary. Whether through expansive installations, word-based paintings, text sculptures, neon, LED or by adopting the book format, artists continue to harness the flexibility and impact of written language in their works to provoke thought and introspection.

In Ed Ruscha’s canvases, words are depicted with characteristic precision—at once familiar and isolated in fields of color. Ruscha understands how language carries the residue of a culture and how even the most ordinary phrase can become charged when given visual form. Tracey Emin, by contrast, uses language with a very different force. In her neon work, handwritten text exposes vulnerability in an intimate and electric honesty.

Sarah Morris adopts the bold geometric graphism of advertising, transforming streamlined letters into powerful headlines. Lorna Simpson uses text to sharpen ambiguity rather than resolve it, allowing fragments of language to destabilize the photographic image and complicate any easy reading of identity or narrative. With Shinique Smith, language becomes gestural and accumulative, suggesting coded messages created from cloth and calligraphy.

Fiona Banner, ‘Car Chases (Bullitt & French Connection),’ 1998. Screenprints, 2 parts, 127 x 169 cm (50 x 66 9/16 in), 127 x 156 cm (50 x 61 7/16 in). �鶹�� Art Collection © Fiona Banner. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery London.

Fiona Banner’s works, displayed just outside the �鶹�� Lounge, offers yet another approach. Her “wordscapes” replace image with meticulous textual description, underscoring how language can construct visual experience. By translating cinematic scenes and historical events into dense fields of handwritten text, she blurs the boundary between seeing and reading, reminding us that meaning is always mediated.

Also highlighted in the �鶹�� presentation is Katie Paterson, whose multidisciplinary practice brings poetic imagination into dialogue with scientific research. She explores deep time, planetary distance and humanity’s place within a much larger universe. Working across media and in collaboration with scientists and specialists, she developed a body of work that is both conceptually rigorous and profoundly expansive. Her projects combine technology and poetic imagination, ranging from capturing the sound of a melting glacier by telephone to mapping all the dead stars in the universe.

Included in the �鶹�� Lounge display are works from Paterson’s ongoing Ideas series, consisting of short, haiku-like texts rendered in stainless steel. Minimal in form yet expansive in implication, they invite reflection on geological time, the cosmos and the fragile state of human existence. In the context of The Power of Words, these works offer a reminder that language can do more than describe the world.

For Paterson, language becomes a way of distilling vast concepts into their essence. “In other ways it sort of really draws me towards being able to write or think in very short, succinct ways.” Her reflections resonate with a broader thread running through the presentation—the tension between clarity and openness, between what can be stated and what remains beyond articulation.

As she notes: “I love the idea that I'll never really know what audiences take from the work, because I love the idea that nobody will ever have the same thought or experience, potentially and especially with the text works with the ideas that are read or the short sentences.”

Discover more about Katie Paterson’s practice in our film of the artist in her studio.

For Jeffrey Gibson – a member of the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations who has lived in the United States, Korea, Germany and England, and is known for his multidisciplinary practice—text is both collected and transformed. Drawing from music, poetry and everyday encounters, he integrates language into his work as a visual and conceptual element: “my titles were oftentimes derived from text in poems, music or books” as in the work to be shown in the Lounge, ‘DON’T YOU WANT ME LIKE I WANT YOU,’ which is inspired by a 1980s dance hit.

Yet even as words appear direct, their meanings remain open: “when I started using words, I started thinking well they are so direct, and then you use them and you realize, no, they are super slippery.” That openness is central to how his work is experienced. The artist welcomes the “the open-endedness of some of the text, or the playing with pronouns—you could be the ‘you,’ you could be the ‘she,’ you could be the ‘they,’ you could be the ‘we.’”

Seen together, these works do not propose a single definition of language in art. Instead, they reveal its multiplicity, its capacity to declare or conceal, to clarify or complicate, to connect or distance. Words can describe an experience or expose the limits of description.

In the �鶹�� Lounge at Art Basel in Basel 2026, The Power of Words invites viewers into this shifting terrain where language is not simply read but encountered.