At this year’s UBS lounge at Art Basel in Basel, UBS will present a selection of works from the UBS 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.

she-devils on wheels image

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). UBS 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.

Ed Ruscha, ‘Vanish,’ 1972. Oil on linen, 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in). UBS Art Collection © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

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.

Lorna Simpson, ‘Details,’ 1996. Portfolio of 21 photogravures with text, 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in) each. UBS Art Collection © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

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). UBS Art Collection © Fiona Banner. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery London.

Fiona Banner’s works, displayed just outside the UBS 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 UBS presentation is an artwork by 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.

A dimmer switch that adjusts the brightness of space
Katie Paterson, ‘Ideas,’ 2021. The Kings Buildings Campus. Photography credit: John McKenzie.

Included in the UBS 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.

I make artwork that’s really broad that crosses mediums, crosses disciplines and in many ways thinks about the depths of space and time. … I think a lot of my work is bringing the micro and macro together and kind of creating, bringing sometimes quite immense ideas…into a recognizable form or something that we can relate to.

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.

Jeffrey Gibson, ‘DON’T YOU WANT ME LIKE I WANT YOU,’ 2020. Acrylic on canvas, glass beads, artificial sinew, inset to custom wood frame, 177.2 x 151.8 cm (69 3/4 x 59 3/4 in). UBS Art Collection © Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York.

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 UBS 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.

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