The Best of VOLTA Art Fair in Basel

Having entered its third decade, VOLTA amplifies the buzz at Basel this week, with the fair’s 2026 edition presenting 78 galleries from 26 countries and a special initiative exploring the evolving market for contemporary Aboriginal art. As a sibling to London’s Affordable Art Fair and British Art Fair in the Ramsay Fairs group, VOLTA offers a counterpoint to the high glitz around the corner at Messe Basel, instead focusing on smaller galleries and accessible entry points for new collectors. 

Recent analyses such as UBS & Art Basel’s Art Market Report have once again underscored the resilience, and thus strategic opportunities, of the lower end of the market, which has managed to withstand shocks felt more broadly this year. With galleries hailing from as far as Japan, Mexico, Australia, Brazil and Côte d'Ivoire invited to participate, fairs like VOLTA play an important part in the broader ecosystem.

Here are The Art Journal’s choice of works to look out for:

Alejandra Aristizabal, Wolf & Nomad

Alejandra Aristizabal, Singularity, 2024, natural fiber, 190 x 125 cm. Courtesy Wolf and Nomad

On display at Miami-based gallery Wolf & Nomad’s booth, Colombian artist Alejandra Aristizabal’s sculptural textile practice explores the ways in which a culture's identity is reflected in its natural materials. 

The artist works primarily in fique, a fibre native to the Andean highlands, which has been used by Indigenous communities for centuries due to its exceptional tensile strength. The plant’s economic importance was cemented during Colombia’s nineteenth century industrial boom, when it was used to make the sacks to export Colombian coffee beans, and it remains a key material in agriculture and rope manufacture today. 

Here, at VOLTA, the material’s industrious strength moves into the realm of opulence. In her wall-based work, Singularity (2026), Aristizabal presents tightly bound bundles of fique draped over oversized tacks, like oversized curtain tassels. The muted colours and formal restraint reinforce the material’s self-sufficiency while pulling on a tension of ‘quiet luxury’.

GL Brierley, A Modest Show

GL Brierley, Untitled, 2005-6. Courtesy the artist

John Robinson’s large ‘self-portraits’, which see his face literally masked by images from art history, will no doubt draw the most attention at A Modest Show’s booth, but London-based artist GL Brierley’s small oil paintings on paper are the real stars here.

The artist’s bawdy scenes capture indistinct figures in flagrante, morphing in and out of coital poses in varying states of orgiastic frenzy and lethargy. Sometimes the nondescript, claustrophobic rooms are empty, as if the climactic event has already passed. Picture Tala Madani’s Shit Mom, whose sludgy figures leave excremental streaks in their wake as they go about their daily business, if she did a porno in a seventeenth century Dutch painting, and you won’t be far off.

Naomi Hobson, Rebecca Hossack

Naomi Hobson, Take me to the river, 2026, acrylic on canvas, 160 x 140 cm. Courtesy Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

Of Southern Kaantju heritage, Naomi Hobson’s multi-disciplinary oeuvre documents her community’s navigation of traditional norms and contemporary realities within her ancestral land – the remote community of Coen, Cape York, in far North Queensland, a tiny township of some 300 people. 

Set in a terrain of rainforest, open wooded country and abundant river systems that snake down to the Great Barrier Reef, this landscape and its marked political history charge Hobson’s colourful abstract compositions with spiritual presence.

Established as a gold mine in 1876, Coen became an epicentre of the Cape York gold rush. Colonial policies such as the introduction of police reserves and the expansion of the pastoral industry saw the free movement of Indigenous people disappear, as they became confined to reserves and cattle stations within their traditional lands. Hobson’s dense compositions are powerful evocations of such complexities – the river systems that thread through the region’s topography express abundance and bounty, while the image’s confinement within the frame suggests a certain sense of entrapment.

Vanessa Valero, Wolf & Nomad

Vanessa Valero, Montanas, 2026. Courtesy Wolf & Nomad

Fellow Colombian textile artist Vanessa Valero’s hand-tufted tapestry, Montanas (2026), also on view at Wolf & Nomad, similarly explores nature as both physical, spiritual and inner terrain. Moving between scales, her scenes could be vast or microscopic, organism or landscape. Deeply influenced by her training in Scandinavia, Valero’s intuitive command of colour, scale and material results in textile works that translate the distinctive quality of sunlight as it shifts and transforms our perception of landscape throughout the day.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Knight Fine Art

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Awelye, 1995, synthetic polymer paints on Belgian linen, 66 x 44 cm. Courtesy Knight Fine Art

Given the fair’s celebration of Aboriginal art this year, any presentation would be incomplete without the presence of one of its masters, Emily Kame Kngwarraye, following the major exhibition of her work at Tate Modern last year. 

Having only begun painting in earnest in her early seventies and having never left her community, despite attracting fame during her lifetime, Kngwarraye’s role as an Anmatyerre elder and custodian of her clan Country, Alhalkere, remained central to her practice. Rooted in the ceremonial traditions of the Dreaming and the body-painting iconography of the Anmatyerre women’s Awelye ceremonies (which played a critical role in the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1976), her paintings allude to the land, its ancient tales, spiritual forces, its minutia and its vastness.