BASEL.- Cassidy Toner’s new works take center stage at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Awarded the Manor Art Prize 2025, the US-born, Basel-based artist (b. 1992, Baltimore) presents an entire body of new work in Cassidy Toner. Besides the Point. On View are nearly two dozen ceramic sculptures, a sprawling wall drawing, a video piece, and an installation featuring cast objects in synthetic resin and tin—all created especially for the exhibition.

Witty, sly, and full of surprises—In her work, Toner levels an ironic, critical gaze at the art world’s dealings, expectations, and systems of value. With a healthy dose of humor and an acute self-awareness, she undermines the supposed logic of the art industry. The title Besides the Point combines the English-language phrase “beside the point” (i.e. “irrelevant”) with the word “besides” (meaning “additionally”). Toner deliberately focuses on the supposedly trivial and incidental, making them the overarching ubject of her exhibition.

With her ceramic works in the first exhibition gallery, Toner delves into received notionSs of figurative sculpture. Her works cheekily reference ideals in sculpture, such as when she showcases classical statue supports, an element normally taking on a mere auxiliary role in relation to the sculpture it has been made to reinforce.

The artist’s video work En Garde (2025), filmed at the Kunstmuseum Basel, focuses on the everyday lives of gallery invigilators. Toner is interested in how they balance protecting artworks with mediating visitor experience. She combines repeated actions and rehearsed roles to create an idiosyncratic homage to museum guards. Her comedic work was inspired by I, an Actress (1977) by George Kuchar, an avant-garde film in which an actor keeps restarting a scene during rehearsals.

Toner brings together small-format cast works in the final gallery. This installation examines the idea of the unfinished, following the artistic non finito principle. By
spotlighting failure and incompletion, Toner again questions what we deem to be “finished” or “valuable” in art.

Besides the Point is Toner’s most extensive institutional solo show to date. An accompanying artist book, Hands on, will be published in fall 2025 as part of the exhibition. This volume presents a series of smartphone photographs taken by Toner between 2014 and 2024. In these images, Toner’s hand interacts with the people and objects shown on advertising posters displayed in public space. Her actions subvert the original messaging, playing with the intentions of the advertising world.

Cassidy Toner received her bachelor of fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, in 2014 and her master of fine arts from Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel FHNW in Basel in 2018. Her awards include the Werkbeitrag deS KunStkreditS Basel-Stadt (2018), Kiefer Hablitzel Preis (2021), and Manor Kunstpreis 2025. Toner has shown in solo, duo, and group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich (2023), Swiss Institute in New York (2020), Kunsthalle Basel (2019), Kunst Raum Riehen (2019), C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts in Dresden (2019), and Centre Art Contemporain Yverdon (2019). Since 2017, she has directed the independent Rheum Room curatorial space in Basel.