One of the most anticipated moments in Art Basel’s annual program is the unveiling of the year’s institutional-grade pieces in the Unlimited sector in the Swiss edition. Starting in 2019, the fair brought that same art-history-in-the-making scale and sense of wonder to its flashier Miami Beach edition with the parallel section, Meridians—an oasis of ambitious curator-driven presentations in the fair’s kaleidoscopically vibrant oceanside setting. Curated this year by Yasmil Raymond under the evocative title The Shapes of Time, it brings together a multigenerational and international group of artists whose works explore different conceptions and perceptions of temporality.
Drawing from George Kubler’s pioneering 1962 book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, which proposed a new understanding of art history beyond the notion of style, the works on view range from more formal and symbolic representations of time to allegorical and emotionally charged correspondences and interactions. While some of the larger-scale works presented this year reflect on the artistic process as an open-ended, phenomenological event that unfolds across temporal dimensions, others examine the physical phenomenon of time and its observable effects, as captured through mechanical photography, video and, more recently, computer-based systems. We’ve chosen five time-defining works you shouldn’t miss in this year’s presentation.
Five artworks not to miss in Meridians
Jesús Rafael Soto’s ‘Pénétrable’
- RGR Galeria, M12
While Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto has enjoyed a long-overdue international resurgence over the past year—including renewed enthusiasm from both collectors and institutions—the most compelling dimension of his practice remains his large-scale installations, conceived from the outset as multisensory catalysts for a synthetic spatial experience. At PAMM in Miami, it has become something of a rite of passage to step through Penetrable BBL Blue (1999-2000), moving through hundreds of thin blue PVC strands suspended from a gridded canopy as if wading into a swell of ocean light, activating the work and one’s own sensory register through movement.
This year at Art Basel’s Meridians, visitors will encounter an earlier and exceedingly rare iteration of the series: Penetrable (1992), presented by Galería RGR. Measuring 500 × 400 × 500 centimeters, this monumental installation is among the last of the roughly 30 versions Soto created from 1967 until his death. Composed of suspended, flexible, translucent PVC tubes, it invites the viewer to step inside and become an active participant in the artwork, dissolving the line between observer and object. To encounter it now in Miami is to experience not just a sculpture, but the reawakening of a pivotal chapter in kinetic art in which Soto probed the intertwined notions of time and space, movement and perceptual instability and the unescapable relativity that binds them.
Built from hundreds of thin, translucent plastic or metal tubes hanging from a frame, the Penetrables expand into vast geometric volumes. By inverting the pedestal, Soto released sculpture from the ground and invited spectators to complete the work by passing through these towering forms, opening them to an entirely new experience of space and time that unfolds collectively, encouraging viewers to navigate these dimensions freely and playfully through shifting, fluid paths. “My concept of space is very different from that of the Renaissance,” the artist once said, “where man was in front of space, he was the viewer, the judge of that space… [With] the Pénétrable, I reveal that man… is part of space. And this is the sensation of those who enter them and the feeling of joy and elation that you witness is similar to getting in the water and being completely liberated from gravity.”
This seminal monumental work lands in Miami following its inclusion in several major institutional retrospectives across Europe—including the Abbaye Saint-André in Meymac, the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto—before disappearing into storage for more than two decades. Its reactivation in 2023 as the centerpiece of Soto’s solo exhibition “The Instability of the Real” at Galería RGR in Mexico City marked a significant rediscovery, reaffirming its historical and sensorial impact for a new generation.
Paint on metal and PVC tubes, 500 x 400 x 500 cm.
Gerard Landa Rojano | RGR Gallería
Luisa Rabbia’s ‘The Network’
- Peter Blum, M4
New York-based Italian artist Luisa Rabbia is unveiling in Miami one of her largest and most symbolically dense paintings to date—a new canvas that opens like a luminous portal into otherworldly dimensions, offering an expanded spiritual and mythical awareness of the very essence of human experience beyond the earthly and time-bound realm. Drawing inspiration from the emblematic representation of working-class struggle and the collective’s emancipatory force in Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il quarto stato (The Fourth Estate) (1901), Rabbia’s more-than-five-meter-long triptych depicts a new kind of collective—one linked by an intricate root system that binds each figure together. Here, the protesting crowd is made up of women, led by a central figure reminiscent of the multi-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, their regenerative feminine energy radiating outward in luminous auras, offered as a possible form of redemption in an age of political and social divisiveness, where humans have lost all sense of empathy and solidarity.
Her use of hands in morphing colors and shifting forms across the canvas deepens the viewer’s intimate contact with the work and what it represents. Rabbia appears to build the image physically, finger by finger across the surface, as a way of processing both memory and vision. “I am interested in visual expressions that seek a language of kinship, both socially and ecologically,” the artist explains in a statement. “In a world of fragmentation, I am seeking a discourse that connects and could possibly raise sentiments of empathy.”
This powerful, monumental work marks a further evolution of her fearless and intimate exploration of otherworldly realms and the afterlife, tracing and identifying parallel currents with terrestrial existence. Through the intuitive and luminous character of her painting practice, Rabbia channels an enhanced awareness of a spiritual, universal dimension that continually intersects with our worldly life, resulting in images of striking vibrancy—like epiphanies animated by mysterious energetic forces revealing individual struggle as part of a broader cosmic order.
Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum
Kennedy Yanko’s
‘Intimacy of Thrones’
‘Intimacy of Thrones’
- Library Street Collective, M17
Following the momentum of a major show split between Salon 94 and James Cohan gallery, alongside an exhibition of her visceral two-dimensional abstractions at Pace Prints, the St. Louis-born, Miami-based artist Kennedy Yanko is presenting a new work from her ongoing “poetry of the ruin,” a practice that reveals the beauty found in matter’s relentless transformation across time and space.
Yanko’s ascent in the art world began in Miami with an unforgettable presentation at the Rubell Museum during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021. Since then, she has developed an artistic language that merges the legacy of American abstraction, Arte Povera and the ready-made into hybrid sculptural bodies. In her work, found scrap metal—mechanical remnants from heavy industrial vehicles—fuses with sensual layers of paint molded into something akin to veils.
Accompanied by a highly evocative title, Intimacy of Throes (2024) takes the form of a rectangular metal container that Yanko cut, bent and reshaped with torches, creating a striking tension between roughness and velvety smoothness. The metal surfaces are weathered with rust, dents and peeling paint; their edges are twisted and torn. Draped among the metal forms are folds of deep green, pliable material that spill, twist and gather like fabric caught mid-movement. The contrast between the rigid, corroded metal and the smooth, fluid green shapes creates a dynamic interplay of forces.
Through this piece, the artist continues to explore the boundless potential of abstraction and the alchemical possibilities of raw materials themselves, embracing them as partners in a choreographed dance or sensual exchange between matter and maker. “I want to immediately disrupt the conversation around metal as being something that’s industrial,” Yanko says. “It’s actually from nature. It’s made from manganese and calcium. It’s no different than a flower when you look at its atoms.”
This deep physical engagement with material and its forces allows Yanko to translate sensation into structure—the vis elastica that propels particles toward their destined form. It is the same centripetal force that holds all elements together and becomes the catalyst for any existence in time and space. In this sense, her sculptures serve as powerful metaphors for our own condition and our ever-shifting relationship with the physical world, which shapes us as much as we try to shape
Courtesy of the artist and Library Street Collective
Ward Shelley’s
‘The Last Library’
- Freight+Volume, M9
Different sci-fi narratives have imagined what the last library of humanity might look like—whether chronicling our departure into another dimension or documenting the final collapse of a species under irreparable drought. The last library envisioned by Brooklyn-based American artist Ward Shelley is Written in Water—a large-scale walk-through sculpture made entirely of paper, ink and wood, fully furnished with fake banned books and invented secret documents. It offers a pointed commentary on today’s fractured state of truth.
Known for his “performance architecture,” Shelley invites visitors at Meridians to physically move through these fragile records of humanity, histories made of ink and paper, ready to dissolve in the first flood, yet drawn and traced through the intimate connection between human minds and hands. They evoke the genuineness of lived perspective, the multiplicity of narrators and the endless possibilities of times and spaces to be inhabited and documented, now further expanded and increasingly blurred by artificial intelligence and digital realms.
Courtesy the artist and Freight+Volume
Anne Samat’s ‘Origins of Savage Beauty’
- Marcus Straus, M17
A hymn to the resilience of materials as vessels of memory and tradition—the touch of fabric, the weaving of hands rhythmically moving together in a ritual passed down through generations—Samat’s maximalist installations reinterpret the traditional Borneo artform of Pua Kumbu weaving. She revives this ancestral link in today’s mass-material culture by combining rattan, beads and thread with rakes, keychains and other mass-produced items sourced from 99-cent stores.
The result is a series of totemic, monumental installations that invite the viewer into a renewed encounter with materiality, memory and beauty. In Meridians, her The Unbreakable Love…Family Portrait (2025) appears as an evocative and intricate orchestration of textile-woven elements, each forming a towering, totemic figure. These vibrant, ritual-like presences evoke mythic guardians or ceremonial beings, already existing beyond the time and space of the materials from which they are composed.
Samat’s exuberant, labor-intensive sculptural assemblages blend traditional Southeast Asian weaving techniques with contemporary pop-cultural, symbolic and personal narratives, unfolding into a fluid and idiosyncratic journey through the power of materials and craftsmanship to connect past, present and future. Her art is a hymn to the “origins of savage beauty,” part of a practice that transforms the scarcity of humble materials and techniques into an aesthetic engine. Embracing an artisanal mode of thinking, she allows the materials to express themselves, treating art-making as a process where intuition, touch and material intelligence carry as much weight as concept, which is already embodied in the materials themselves, along with their histories of production, circulation and consumption.
Mixed media; 9.75 x 5.8 x 3.5 m in The Origin Of Savage Beauty.
Photo by Inna Svyatsky/Courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery
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