Art Basel 2025: What This Year’s Global Trends Mean for Gallery MAR Collectors

August 23rd, 2025

Each summer, the art world converges in Basel, Switzerland for what has become the ultimate global barometer of taste, talent, and trajectory: Art Basel. The 2025 edition was no exception, offering a powerful preview of the evolving priorities in contemporary art—from who’s being collected to how the work is made and experienced.

For Gallery MAR and our collectors, this year’s Art Basel confirmed a set of values we already hold dear: supporting emerging voices, valuing sustainable practices, uplifting diverse narratives, embracing immersive experiences, and exploring the exciting overlap between new and traditional mediums.

Below, we explore five key takeaways from Art Basel 2025, and how these trends are already reflected within our Park City gallery walls.

1. A Spotlight on Emerging and Mid-Career Artists

Left to Right: Samantha Da Silva, “Lunar Veil,” mixed media, 40″ x 30″ | Havoc Hendricks, “Authentic Idol,” mixed media, 49.5″ x 37.5″

This year’s Art Basel made it unmistakably clear: collectors are eager to discover the voices who are shaping the next chapter of contemporary art. There was a distinct energy surrounding mid-career and emerging artists, whose fresh perspectives and confident experimentation captured attention across the fair’s many halls.

At Gallery MAR, we are proud to elevate artists like Havoc Hendricks and Samantha da Silva, whose practices exemplify the daring and depth that defined this year’s emerging artist spotlight. Hendricks’ geometric precision and monochromatic restraint speak to a minimalist aesthetic that feels intensely modern. Several of his mixed media works, utilizing LED illumination, transforms light and reflection into material, turning simplicity into spectacle.

Samantha da Silva, by contrast, leans into the raw, expressive potential of natural pigments, salt, and iron oxide. Her surfaces are richly weathered, evoking earth, time, and impermanence. Da Silva’s work is as much about process as product, a deeply personal exploration of place, identity, and material memory. These are artists on the rise—but already offering the kind of resonance that lasts.

2. Sustainability and Earth-Conscious Practices

Left to Right: Bridgette Meinhold, “Imperceptible,” encaustic, 20″ x 20″ | R. Nelson Parrish, “Hesse Cairn,” bioresin and wood, 12″ x 11″ x 4″

Art Basel 2025 placed clear emphasis on climate-conscious collecting. From the materials artists choose to how galleries handle shipping and presentation, sustainability was no longer a sidebar—it was center stage. This moment mirrors the growing awareness among collectors who want their investment to reflect not only aesthetic values, but ethical ones.

At Gallery MAR, we are proud to represent artists who align art-making with environmental stewardship. R. Nelson Parrish, for example, fuses fine craft precision with natural materials like reclaimed wood and bioresin, creating sculptural paintings that pulse with energy while honoring the land from which they came. His practice is not just eco-friendly—it is a meditation on how art can live in harmony with nature.

We also celebrate the eco-conscious practice of Bridgette Meinhold, whose ethereal mountain landscapes are painted with encaustic (beeswax) on reclaimed wood. Her commitment to sustainability extends beyond materials—she regularly collaborates with environmentally focused nonprofits and foundations, using her art as a means to advocate for climate awareness and ecological preservation. Through both form and mission, Meinhold exemplifies art with purpose.

3. Diverse Cultural Narratives and Global Voices

Left to Right: America Martin, “Campfire,” mixed media, 59.25″ x 59.25″ | Horacio Rodriguez, “Designer Molotov Cocktail,” ceramic, 11″ x 1″ x 1″

One of the most vibrant throughlines at Art Basel was the rich diversity of artistic perspectives. Artists of color, Indigenous voices, and creators rooted in diasporic identity took center stage—signaling a sustained shift toward a more inclusive and authentic art landscape.

Gallery MAR has long celebrated the powerful narratives that arise from cultural hybridity and personal heritage. America Martin, with her bold, Colombian-inspired compositions, reclaims archetypal forms and reinterprets them through a contemporary, feminine, and Latinx lens. Horacio Rodriguez, whose ceramic-based work explores themes of border identity, religious iconography, and the Latin American experience, brings sculptural intensity to questions of belonging and migration. Their works offer more than visual intrigue—they are invitations to listen, to feel, and to connect.

4. Immersive and Experiential Works

Left to Right: Hunt Slonem, “Dragon Arum,” glass, 10″ x 7″ x 6″ | Miles Glynn, “Westernish No. 149,” mixed media, 50″ x 40″ x 3″

Another headline trend this year was the turn toward experiential, tactile, and often multi-sensory artwork. LED installations, kinetic sculptures, and artworks that play with light and texture offered collectors a dynamic, physical interaction with art. It’s a shift from passive viewing to active experience—a theme that resonates deeply with many of our collectors at Gallery MAR.

Artists like Hunt Slonem bring this vision to life through their luminous sculptural work. Slonem’s playful forms—rabbits, birds, butterflies—are reimagined in glass, chrome, and LED-lit wall sculptures, giving his signature motifs a sense of movement and spectacle. These are works that transform a wall into a glowing field of energy and light.

New to the Gallery MAR family, Miles Glynn brings his own immersive energy. Known for his layered mixed-media compositions and textural Western portraits, Glynn merges photography, painting, and storytelling in a bold, dramatic style. His works are cinematic and tactile—designed not just to be seen, but to be experienced.

These are pieces that don’t just hang on a wall—they shape a space.

5. The Digital-Analog Dialogue

Left to Right: Jylian Gustlin, “Fibonacci 515,” mixed media, 48″ x 48″ | Jylian Gustlin, “Fibonacci 507,” mixed media, 24″ x 24″

Even as the initial NFT boom has settled, digital art and technology-inspired practices continue to shape the visual language of contemporary art. This year at Art Basel, the most compelling digital works were those that hybridized traditional technique with tech-savvy innovation—emphasizing process, complexity, and the human hand within the digital.

Gallery MAR’s Jylian Gustlin remains at the forefront of this conversation. With a background in computer science, Gustlin integrates algorithmic structure with classical figuration, building layers of visual code into her expressive, abstracted forms. Her work exemplifies the bridge between tradition and technology—something that collectors increasingly crave in a rapidly evolving world.

Art Basel 2025 proved that the future of art is expansive, inclusive, and intentional. The trends shaping the global conversation—rising voices, eco-conscious creation, cultural richness, immersive experience, and digital hybridity—are already alive in the work we curate every day at Gallery MAR.

For our collectors, this means you don’t need to fly to Switzerland to be on the pulse of the contemporary art world. The future is already here—in every canvas, sculpture, and illuminated surface in our Park City gallery.

Visit gallerymar.com or step into the gallery to discover the artists shaping tomorrow—today.

Written by Veronica Vale