Your place is here
“Art Basel Paris. Your place is here.” Just hours before the official opening of Art Basel Paris (1), prospective visitors to the fair, which brings together 211 modern and contemporary art galleries beneath the glass roof of the Grand Palais, were still receiving this invitation to attend. It followed another email in which the organizers assured visitors that “security personnel have been deployed to patrol inside and outside the fair perimeter.”
Two days earlier, extraordinary scenes of looting in the French capital had flooded social media. Needless to say, a sense of insecurity is hardly conducive to buying art. Yet cancellations do not appear to have been as numerous as might have been predicted. Many collectors have nevertheless planned to leave before the demonstration scheduled for Saturday, October 24.
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Karim Crippa
“We are in constant contact with the prefecture. Our primary concern is the safety of everyone, as well as that of the artworks,” emphasizes Karim Crippa, the new director of Art Basel Paris.
By the first afternoon of the preview, on October 20, the aisles on the fair’s ground floor were already packed.
Since last year, this major event has become the most coveted date on the international art market calendar. In the wake of Brexit, it has eclipsed the expectations long associated with Frieze in London. Art Basel Paris now also inspires greater excitement than the prestigious Art Basel fair in Basel, a city that cannot compete with the allure of the French capital.
Yet it is impossible to ignore the fact that galleries around the world have been in a state of vulnerability for roughly two years. Fewer transactions, falling prices, tough negotiations on the part of buyers… The sector is suffering, but its players are demonstrating extraordinary resilience, as evidenced by a Paris art week program more extensive than ever. One need only look at the proliferation of satellite fairs, from the Ceramic Art Fair to Design Miami, via Asia Now.
Offscreen
The most striking of Paris’s smaller fairs is Offscreen, dedicated to images (photography, film and other media), held in the magnificent 17th-century Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. Thirty artists are presented in a dramatic setting.
Not to be missed, at the end of the visit, is a screening of a video by Theaster Gates, organized by New York’s Whitney Museum in Les Magasins, a space that has remained closed to the public for 200 years.
Tracey Emin at the Trocadéro
Alongside the projection of statements by painters onto the façade of the Musée d’Orsay this week by the American artist Jenny Holzer (born 1950), the most ambitious project of this exceptionally rich week is the installation, by London’s White Cube gallery, of three monumental bronzes by British art star Tracey Emin (born 1963) on the Place du Trocadéro.
She has recently been the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London. Her sculptures, set against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, inevitably bring to mind the work of American Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). But Emin’s unmistakable touch asserts itself powerfully, just as it does in her paintings. In forms that hover between abstraction and figuration, she plays with sexual allusions.
White Cube is also showing a substantial group of small, highly spontaneous paintings in its upstairs space on Avenue Matignon (prices starting at £90,000).
Lee Krasner at Gagosian
Nearby, on Rue de Ponthieu, Gagosian has organized a small, museum-quality exhibition devoted to an important American painter, Lee Krasner (1908–1984).
Her work was overshadowed by the immense talent of her husband, Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), who died prematurely. This is the first exhibition in France devoted to her. It focuses on the 1960s, when color literally explodes across her canvases.
According to Artprice, the highest price ever achieved at auction for one of her paintings is $11.6 million, far behind Jackson Pollock’s record of $181 million.
Meanwhile, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum is taking a close look at the work of both artists in its exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous, on view through January 31, 2027.
The Invention of Abstraction
Among contemporary painters, many pay explicit tribute to earlier masters whom they regard as precursors of their own artistic concerns.
They will find much to contemplate in an exhibition organized by Saint Honoré Art Consulting, in an upstairs space on the street of the same name.
In a compact lesson in art history, 23 paintings reveal the emergence of abstraction in landscape painting from the 19th century onward.
From Camille Corot (1796–1875) to Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), immense skies, seemingly endless seas and sunsets become opportunities for dazzling displays of polychromatic virtuosity. The works are offered for sale at prices ranging from €2,500 to €850,000.
Oscar Murillo at Zwirner
In the Marais, David Zwirner is showing recent abstract paintings by the Colombian-born British artist Oscar Murillo (born 1986), a joint winner of the Turner Prize.
Murillo, whose work sparked a speculative frenzy around 2015, has since demonstrated that he is also an artist with a substantial body of work.
Since 2024, he has been the subject of exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, Wiels in Brussels and MARCO, the contemporary art museum in Monterrey, Mexico, and has created a commission for the Castello di Rivoli, near Turin.
His highly gestural painting, composed of polychromatic marks layered one over another like violent bursts, is instantly recognizable.
At auction, his large canvases trade for around €100,000.
Salon 94
Against all odds, Paris is welcoming yet another gallery, this time in the very chic Palais-Royal.
In New York, directly opposite the Guggenheim Museum, Salon 94 occupies a vast mansion. Its new European outpost in Paris, however, is one of the smallest spaces of its kind: a precious jewel box of just 30 square meters.
It is showing work by the American artist Deborah Roberts (born 1962). A native of Austin, Texas, Roberts explores representations of young Black girls through her collages. Drawings are offered for sale starting at $40,000.
A Modigliani at Art Basel
As for the fair itself, at the Grand Palais, what is most striking is the exceptionally high quality of the works presented in the more “classic” realm of modern and contemporary art.
One booth, that of Almeida & Dale, is devoted entirely to the great heroine of Brazilian modern painting, Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), with works priced between $1.5 million and $27 million.
Another, presented by New York’s Nahmad Contemporary, surveys every period of the career of Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), the French champion of Art Brut, with prices ranging from $1 million to $20 million.
At New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a large wall is occupied by a remarkable abstract painting from 2009 by the celebrated German artist Gerhard Richter (born 1932). The three-meter-long canvas offers a sophisticated interplay of translucent greens that, as so often in his work, cover other layers of paint. It is offered for $11 million.
But in a category of its own, the painting commanding what is almost certainly the highest asking price at the fair, more than €100 million, is Lolotte, a female nude painted in 1917 by Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920).
It is presented on the booth of Pace Di Donna Schrader, a joint venture of New York dealers.
David Schrader, one of the gallery partners, explains the price: “This work has never appeared on the market. Modigliani painted 23 nudes, 13 of which belong to museums.”
The artist’s auction record stands at $170 million, achieved for a Reclining Nude in 2015.
The Power of Cézanne
Just a few yards away, still inside the Grand Palais, the exhibition Cézanne et nous examines the profound influence of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) on modern and contemporary art.
Meanwhile, at least two booths at Art Basel Paris offer the opportunity to acquire works by the artist from Aix-en-Provence, despite their rarity.
As is well known, in his youth Cézanne was particularly close to the writer Émile Zola. A small canvas dating from the beginning of his career depicts his childhood friend. Zola kept the painting until his death.
Here it is presented by Luxembourg + Co., the gallery based in London and New York. It is a concentrated expression of Cézanne’s extraordinary power, offered for $6.7 million.
A little farther along, in the space of the renowned New York dealer Acquavella, a small painting offers a particularly revealing glimpse of the very end of Cézanne’s life.
It is a study of bathers dating from the 1900s, rendered in shades of blue and green. The female figures are barely sketched in.
As was his habit, Paul Cézanne makes the radical choice of treating the white of the canvas as a color in its own right.
Elmgreen & Dragset
The fair also allows galleries to showcase the newer talents they represent.
At Art Basel Paris, the Berlin- and Paris-based gallery Max Hetzler is presenting the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset (born in 1961 and 1969), who were the subject of a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2023.
Often with a mischievous sense of humor, the two artists convey their visions of society primarily through sculpture.
For the gallery’s Marais space, they have created three extraordinary installations. One of them, occupying an entire room, depicts Michael Elmgreen at life size as an exhausted boxer in a ring. An image of the artist’s condition. Asking price: €450,000.
Already Sold
From the very first day of the preview, numerous “classic” contemporary paintings, in other words works regarded as safe bets, had sold for substantial sums.
Among them was a figurative painting from 1965 by Gerhard Richter, sold for $10 million at Hauser & Wirth, and a Concetto spaziale by Lucio Fontana, a 1953 perforated canvas punctuated with Murano glass, sold for €1.8 million at Thaddaeus Ropac.
But the same was true of highly sought-after younger artists, such as Yu Nishimura (born 1982).
A large painting of a blurred landscape, evoking a sense of silence, as though in a dream, sold for €250,000 on the booth of the accomplished Parisian gallery Crèvecœur.
Nishimura is currently the subject of an exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, through January 2027.
Yet Art Basel Paris is more than a museum. For more affordable prices, visitors should head to the fair’s first floor.
At the booth of Brussels-based Ludovico Corsini, for example, large canvases by another Japanese artist, Fu Nagasawa (born 1999), who explores the vocabulary of Eastern ornamentation in a dreamlike style, sold for €6,400
(1) The fair at the Grand Palais opened to its first VIP guests on October 20. It opens to the general public on October 23 and runs through October 25. www.artbasel.com/paris/
