Hundreds of art fairs convene every year in New York, London, Hong Kong and beyond. When it comes to contemporary art, however, Art Basel’s flagship event — held in its hometown — is still the largest in size and scope, bringing together 290 galleries from across the globe this year.
The fair has faced in-house competition since 2022 because of Art Basel Paris. Last year’s successful Paris edition instilled doubts in some minds about the future of the fair in Switzerland, gallerists said.
Yet because of its size, the quality of the works and the caliber of buyers, “Art Basel Basel,” as the Swiss fair is known, is still viewed as an important marker of collector tastes and the overall health of the market.
Here are five works at the fair that exemplify current market trends.
Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac
Georg Baselitz — the postwar German artist famous for painting figures upside down — died on April 30, aged 88. “Baselitz was and is a giant in art history,” and “we are in the mourning period,” said Thaddaeus Ropac, founder and director of the gallery (which is headquartered in Paris, with branches in London, Salzburg, Austria, Milan and Seoul). He added that he had known Baselitz for four decades and put on some 30 solo shows of his work.
Ropac acknowledged that, since the artist’s death, “we definitely have more demand” from collectors. Ropac’s long-planned booth at Art Basel will carry multiple works by Baselitz, including “Ach, Mädchen Grün” (2010), an expressionistic upside-down portrait of the artist’s wife, Elke, wearing nothing but high heels, priced at 1.2 million euros (or $1.39 million). The work sold on June 16. (In 2024, it fetched less than half of that price, or $567,000, at Christie’s. It had then been bought back that year by Ropac Gallery, the original sellers.)
How does death affect price? “The passing of an artist limits the access to work, and therefore makes it more valuable,” Ropac said, but noted that this was not always the case. Even with major artists, it depends on whether “the estate or the foundation has a stock that they’re able to sell,” he said. Interest wanes if there is not enough available art for an active market, he explained.
To date, the auction record for a work by Baselitz was $11.24 million for a wooden sculpture in 2022. Would it be fair to expect his market to appreciate? “No question,” Ropac said.
Kentridge: the Goodman Gallery
The South African artist William Kentridge, 71, is famous for his large-scale charcoal drawings, prints and hand-drawn animated films. In addition to his visual art practice, Kentridge also directs plays and operas. He is currently in the spotlight with a new staging of the Monteverdi opera “L’Orfeo” at the Glyndebourne Festival in the English countryside.
A set of designs for the production — made with repurposed tools found in his studio and garden, titled “Three Dryads” (2025) — is on display (and on sale for $165,000) on the Goodman Gallery booth. The gallery, which has represented Kentridge for three decades, turns 60 this year. With offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, London and New York, it is one of the most prominent galleries based in Africa.
In 1982, Goodman became the first gallery from Africa to be admitted to Art Basel, said its director and owner Liza Essers (who bought and took over the gallery in 2008). Yet attention was a long time coming. “Only in the last 10 years has the world really started taking note” of art from the Global South, she said, referring to developing countries located in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. Today, she added — thanks to exhibitions and acquisitions of non-Western art at major Western museums, and the growing number of non-Western museums, fairs and biennials — the market for artists from those parts of the world has grown.
Still, Essers said, “historically, the art world has been organized around this center-periphery model.” Since taking over the gallery, she has fought not to be “pigeonholed” as a gallery representing African art.
“I think we’ve got to move away from those distinctions,” she said, adding that to label an artist’s work as African, Chinese or Brazilian is “undermining,” because artists are individuals to be judged on merit, not flag bearers of countries or regions.
Her gallery, which until 2008 represented only South African artists, now works with artists from all over the world, including Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Shirin Neshat (an Iranian-born artist based in New York) and the American artists Carrie Mae Weems and Hank Willis Thomas.
Essers said the Goodman Gallery was “significantly” reducing the number of fairs it showed at because of rising costs, such as shipping art and renting a booth. Yet, she said her gallery’s sales were holding up. “People are still seeing value” in the work of prominent artists like Kentridge, who remains affordable compared to other artists of his generation and renown, she added.
Huyghe at Esther Schipper
One of the highlights of the Berlin-based Esther Schipper Gallery’s booth this year is a large LED screen with a shifting sequence of wonky and not altogether distinguishable images. This is “Of Ideal” (2019 — ongoing), an installation by the French artist Pierre Huyghe, who explores the overlap of nature and technology.
To make the work, Huyghe asked an individual to think about their memories and experiences while a medical scanner captured their brain activity. The scans were fed to a trained artificial neural network — a machine learning algorithm designed to simulate the human brain — which then created thousands of visual interpretations of the scans. Visitors will see these “mental images,” the gallery said, and real-time images generated by a computer on site will be added to the work.
It may sound like a tough sell to present a screen-based installation at the world’s biggest contemporary art fair. But Esther Schipper, the gallery’s founder, said there is healthy collector appetite for installations by major contemporary artists who work with technology.
Schipper said she had worked with Huyghe for nearly three decades, and that he was “a cornerstone” of the gallery program and had collectors all over the world. His market is further upheld by the fact that “he is not producing a lot of works,” she said. (The gallery would not disclose the price.)
Picabia at Hauser & Wirth
Francis Picabia was a major artist of the first half of the 20th century, yet he was also a chameleon: hopping from one art movement to the next, and never staying for very long. As a result, his market has historically been more niche than that of his better-known contemporaries, like René Magritte and Max Ernst.
Now, as collectors increasingly invest in artists from the first half of the 20th century — particularly the Surrealists, with whom Picabia associated briefly — Picabia’s stock is rising. A 2016-17 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art helped a lot. Six years later, a Picabia painting from 1929 sold for a record $10.98 million at auction.
The Hauser & Wirth gallery — which has for three decades been dealing in Picabia works — is taking “Untitled” (1941), a wartime female portrait, to Art Basel (as well as hosting a Picabia exhibition in its main space, in London). Priced at 2.5 million euros ($2.9 million), it belongs to a group of portraits “based on photography that was printed in risqué magazines,” Sarah Allen, a partner and head of research at Hauser, said. The raven-haired beauty in the portrait “is a superlative example of Picabia at the height of his powers,” she added, though she noted that paintings such as these, produced late in life by the artist, who died in 1953, were long rated less highly by art historians.
“A lot of these works have been tucked away in private collections for many decades, and it’s rare to have an example of such high degree of finish and quality,” she said. The painting was acquired by a French collection soon after it was completed, then became part of a private Paris collection which was now selling it, the gallery said.
Dyson at Pace
At this year’s Venice Art Biennale, which opened in May and runs through Nov. 22, one of the larger installations in the central exhibition (“In Minor Keys”) is a wood, steel, graphite, glass and acrylic sculpture and sound installation titled “Tougaloo” (2026) by the American artist Torkwase Dyson.
Her gallerists, Pace, are highlighting her inclusion in the Biennale by presenting another Dyson work at Art Basel: “A Line and Memory 2 (Hypershapes)” (2026), a smaller-scale sculpture inspired by the skyline and waterways of Chicago. (The piece was sold on June 16. The gallery did not disclose the price.) Pace is also staging a solo exhibition of Dyson in New York.
For any gallery, having artists in the central Biennale exhibition is worth noting.
“The Venice Biennale is the biggest stage we have in the art world every other year, and the selection of those artists by the curators of the Biennale is a huge kind of validation, just like having a great museum show is,” Marc Glimcher, Pace’s president and chief executive, said. “The gallery wants to wave the flag when the flag is flying.” (Pace announced this month that it was downsizing, letting go of 50 artists and 50 staff members.)
He said that for a long time, female sculptors faced powerful odds, because “outdoor sculpture was a real men’s club activity.” Women have “reclaimed” outdoor sculpture, and Dyson exemplifies that, he said.
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