Art Basel Paris returns for its third edition with two big changes: It will be held for the first time in the newly renovated Grand Palais, and its name, formerly Paris+ by Art Basel, has been simplified and brought in line with the organization’s other art fairs.
Open to the public Oct. 18-20, 195 galleries will display their wares, an increase of 27 percent from last year, since the Grand Palais can now accommodate more dealers than the former venue, the temporary Grand Palais Éphémère.
A new section will debut, too: Premise, for focused presentations of older works that can include those made before 1900, the usual cutoff point for art to appear in the Art Basel fairs. Nine galleries will participate.
“In a way, it’s year zero,” Noah Horowitz, the chief executive of Art Basel, said of the fair’s reset.
Despite the larger number of exhibitors this year, Horowitz noted that it was still the smallest of the four Art Basel fairs (the others take place in Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland) and had the smallest booths. Space is still at a premium.
“The selection process for Art Basel Paris was in many ways the most excruciating process I’ve ever borne witness to, only because of the extra amount of demand and the relative paucity of space,” Horowitz said. “There are incredible galleries, all very well deserving, that are not in the show.”
The setting is a lure for exhibitors and fairgoers alike. “The Grand Palais has been missed by many,” said Clément Delépine, the Paris fair’s director, of the glass-roofed landmark. “It’s one of the most beautiful venues to ever host an art fair.” (Closed for renovations since 2021, the building formerly hosted the art fair FIAC.)
One gallery that made it through the selection process, Lehmann Maupin, is a stalwart of Art Basel’s other fairs and will exhibit for the first time in the Paris edition. The gallery has spaces in New York, London and Seoul.
“Art Basel’s V.I.P. team manages to bring in the best collectors,” said Rachel Lehmann, Lehmann Maupin’s co-founder. “You can transact at a higher dollar amount.”
The gallery’s presentation focuses on the artists it represents who are concurrently involved with museums all over the world. “The museum connection solidifies the resonance and relevance of an artist,” Lehmann said.
The multimedia maker Teresita Fernández, who lives in Brooklyn, will be represented at the fair by stone sculptures from her “Bardo” series and copper relief panels from her “Soil Horizon” series; she is currently part of a two-person exhibition at SITE Santa Fe.
Kader Attia, who has a studio inside the Louvre as part of the museum’s “Les Hôtes du Louvre” program, will have his sculpture “Mirrors and Masks” (2023) shown at the Lehmann Maupin booth. The work is a wooden mask covered with pieces of mirror, on a metal stand.
Attia, who splits time between Paris and Berlin, was born to Algerian parents in Paris and grew up in the city’s suburbs. “It’s highly philosophical, but it’s playing with the ideas of colonialism, psychology and philosophy,” Lehmann said of “Mirrors and Masks.”
Another gallery from New York that, like Lehmann Maupin, is showing at Art Basel Paris for the first time is Ortuzar, formerly Ortuzar Projects. It will put on a solo booth of Takako Yamaguchi, a Japanese-born painter who lives in Los Angeles. The works include “Font” (2024), done in oil and metal leaf. Yamaguchi’s paintings take around a month and a half to make.
“We tend to do solo booths at fairs,” said Ales Ortuzar, the gallery founder, who shows at events including Art Basel Miami Beach and Frieze New York. “Walking around an art fair can be a visual onslaught. I can’t take in all that information.”
His decision to exhibit in Paris next week was driven by who attends. “We could sell these paintings at the gallery — we have a waiting list,” Ortuzar said. “But great people come to the fair, the best museum directors and collectors. That’s an opportunity.”
He added that most of the Yamaguchi works will not be presold (galleries sometimes display pieces at fairs that are already spoken for). “We have to give people a reason to come,” Ortuzar said. “You want to be able to see things you can’t see in a PDF and to learn about an artist you’ve never heard of.”
The gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, from London, will be showing for the third time at Art Basel Paris and will feature a suite of untitled, abstract paintings by the Senegal-born artist Libasse Ka, who now lives in Brussels.
Ka, 26, is typical of the younger cohort the gallery represents. “I enjoy the process of finding someone who’s barely an adult, and they just need some structure,” said the gallery co-founder Vanessa Carlos. “I’m known for developing artists from the ground up.”
For Carlos, events like Art Basel Paris are a no-brainer. “I can’t complain about fairs,” she said. “We meet the huge majority of our clients there, and it’s a huge part of our sales. You get a lot of eyeballs on the work.”
She added, “I think the main problem with Basel Paris is competing with Paris — there’s so much amazing stuff to do.”
That competition could include local galleries like Sans Titre (French for “Untitled”), located near Centre Pompidou in the Marais neighborhood. For the first two years at Art Basel Paris, it participated in Emergence, the section for showing younger artists, and now it will be in the main Galleries section.
Marie Madec, the gallery’s founder, said that she would show work by a handful of artists including the German installation-maker Agnes Scherer, who splits time between Salzburg, Austria, and Berlin. Scherer’s “Trousseau Dérangé” (“Messy Trousseau”) (2022) is a fanciful canopied bed made of paper and felt-tip marker, liquid ink, gouache and colored pencil.
Speaking of Scherer, Madec said, “she uses material that could be found in any home and makes something extraordinary.”
Delépine, the director of the Paris fair, notes that Sans Titre is one of 64 galleries showing at the fair — roughly a third of the total — that has a space somewhere in France, and that having substantial French representation is part of Art Basel’s agreement with the French Ministry of Culture and the City of Paris.
The art world’s thoroughly international character comes through nonetheless. “I run a French gallery, but I don’t represent a single French artist,” Madec said, though she noted that some of her artists do live in France.
For some galleries, Art Basel Paris represents a convenient commercial outlet and a chic place to transact. But for others, it serves as a lifeline.
Marfa’, a contemporary gallery in Beirut, Lebanon, will exhibit for the third time at Art Basel Paris, showing the painter Seta Manoukian, who was born in Lebanon and now works in Los Angeles. The works on view will include “Thread that goes on…” (2019).
Located by Beirut’s port, Marfa’ was founded in 2015 by Joumana Asseily, who described the challenges of running a gallery in a region engulfed in armed conflict.
“It hasn’t been easy,” said Asseily, a Beirut native, in a phone interview from the city. “One day you can open the gallery, and the next day there’s a disturbance and you have to close.”
Most of her artists are based in Beirut or are Lebanese artists living elsewhere. Despite the violence and uncertainty, she said that her hometown was “boiling with creative energy.”
Given the historic ties between France and Lebanon, the decision to show at Art Basel Paris was an easy one in terms of accessing the best collectors.
“Paris is the most important place for us,” Asseily said. “We speak French. I have friends and family there. It makes sense.”
But she also said that she was not tempted to simply move her operation there.
“People ask me, ‘Why not open a gallery elsewhere?’” Asseily said. “I always say no. There’s something here that makes us want to continue — a drive, a creativity here that needs to be shown. We feel we’re doing something meaningful.”
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