For the 2026 edition of Art Basel, Petzel is pleased to present works by artists integral to the program, with established histories to the gallery, and new to its roster. Artists on view will include Ross Bleckner, Cosima von Bonin, Charline von Heyl, Isabella Ducrot, Derek Fordjour, Sean Landers, Maria Lassnig, Jorge Pardo, Joyce Pensato, Seth Price, Pieter Schoolwerth, Tschabalala Self, Emily Mae Smith, Nicola Tyson, and Emma Webster.

Highlights include both new and significant works by Ross Bleckner, Cosima von Bonin, Derek Fordjour, Sean Landers, Pieter Schoolwerth, Tschabalala Self, Emily Mae Smith, and Emma Webster, in addition to historical works by Charline von Heyl, Maria Lassnig, and Joyce Pensato.

Drawing on the exhibition presented at Petzel earlier this year, historical works by Maria Lassnig will be on view. In Januskopf / Tag und Nachtgedanken (Janus Head / Daytime and Nighttime Thoughts), 1987, dual-faced and bifurcated, Lassnig maps the psychological pressures of a self divided. Rooted in her foundational theory of "body awareness"—the practice of painting what is physically felt from within rather than observed—the works stage the body as a site of perception, conflict, and existential inquiry.

The significant work The Last Eyes, 2000, will be on view as Joyce Pensato's major retrospective, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in December 2025, travels to the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, where it will be on view from October 10, 2026, through April 4, 2027. Committed throughout her career to what she described as the baleful transmutation of American cartoon culture, Pensato deployed her fast, assured, gestural hand to shed lighton the arguable darkness lurking within familiar Pop iconography. In The Last Eyes, she reduces a recognizable cartoon form to its barest gesture: six looping ovoids rendered in raw black enamel, smeared and dripping across a white ground. Combining the historical strategies of gestural abstraction with the iconic force of Pop, the work distills her practice to its essential power: image as psychic residue.

In Emily Mae Smith’s new work, Straw Woman Problem, 2026, Smith stages her anthropomorphic broomstick’s latest metamorphosis—the scarecrow. Transposed from field to interior, the scarecrow figure has been removed from the agricultural world it belongs to, and the birds it was meant to repel now circle freely. Smith approaches both broomstick and scarecrow as political bodies, rooted in class, in land, and in labor, which become something else entirely in this fantasy of inversion. The figure’s pose evokes devotional imagery and the passive expanse of the female nude—at once monumental and vulnerable, transforming the understanding of hierarchical meanings we inherit from art historical conventions. The title riffs on both the "straw man fallacy,”a rhetorical device of deflection, and on the long tradition of dismissing women's intelligence, as brainless as the scarecrow itself. The work locates these threads as intertwined, the suppression of argument and the suppression of a body, both enforced through recategorization.

Following her solo exhibition Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone at Petzel this spring, Emma Webster presents Suckling Soil, 2026, a new painting in which she constructs the scene from a subterranean vantage point, positioning the viewer beneath the earth's surface amid an entanglement of exposed roots. To create the work, Webster employs her signature process of building three-dimensional dioramas in virtual reality before translating them to the painted plane—integrating digital and analog tools to advance the genre of still life.

Sean Landers presents new paintings that continue his ongoing fusion of two long standing series: his wildlife portraits and his aspen tree carvings. His portraits of a panda and bear along with paintings featuring animals among birch trees extend the existential prose Landers has been carving into bark since his earliest days as a graduate student at Yale. As with all of Landers' animal subjects, the creatures inhabit an existential awareness, gazing back through the viewer with a familiar yet cryptic aura—their eyes, almost human, staging an encounter with the uncomfortable truths that underpin both artmaking and mortality.

Nicola Tyson's painting Twins, 2025, presents paired figures with loosely rendered faces carrying the wide-set, blank-eyed affect characteristic of Tyson's "psycho-figuration." In this work, Tyson adopts a looser approach, painting directly onto the canvas with a deliberate, unpremeditated nonchalance—a humor and confidence that speaks to the depth of her engagement with the medium, while registering a deep existential unease about the contemporary context for the human figure, its representation, and its troubled relationship to its environment. The result is at once playful and unsettling, resisting easy categorization while returning the viewer to the constructions of their own unconscious. The work is presented following Tyson's ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, NEED, 2026, her first drawing exhibition since her 2017 retrospective at The Drawing Room, London.

Ahead of his solo exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY, opening on August 9, 2026, Petzel presents new paintings by Ross Bleckner in which dense clusters of flowers dematerialize into fields of blurred color and motion. Suspended between recognition and dissolution, the works embody Bleckner's ongoing meditation on beauty, transience, and the limits of perception. Pieter Schoolwerth debuts Descending, 2026, in which his signature layering of painterly gestures generates a sense of vertiginous momentum, collapsing figure and ground into a field of pure, suspended energy. Seth Price presents PROTIS VELITOR, 2025, a work that operates at the intersection of digital imaging and painterly surface, conflating the synthetic and the organic into a space that resists fixed interpretation. Ahead of her major retrospective at the Madre Museum in Naples, Isabella Ducrot presents works from several of her series, including Bella Terra, Tendernesses, and Dresses.

The works mentioned here will be on view at Petzel's Booth A3 during Art Basel, June 18–21, 2026.