Art Basel reclaims its name and rediscovers the Grand Palais: a monumental fair

It has regained its former institutional home, the imposing Grand Palais, and definitively enshrined its new name, Art Basel Paris, the multi-location fair that from city to city marks the annual calendar for the entire art world and creates a series of corollary events.

This Paris edition gathers 194 international galleries among which 51 are at their first participation, the result of the choices implemented in these three years of direction by Clément Delépine, who has an eye for research galleries represented by the Emergence section. At the same time, however, he has opened up to the past with Premise, which has 9 galleries involved on as many curatorial projects built on works created before 1900, that is, in the “distant” nineteenth century, and where even Klimt can be admired-and purchased.

But it is the heart of the monumental glass and steel structure of the Grand Palais that houses the emblazoned galleries, those that dictate the lines of the market, such as Hauser & Wirth, which opens with a Joffrey Gibson that seems “detached” from the series presented at the U.S. Pavilion at this Venice Biennale. There is also a portable sculpture by Luise Bourgeois: a bronze spider that is smaller in size than those recently seen in the two Italian retrospectives (Galleria Borghese in Rome to Museo del Novecento in Florence). The same gallery unsettles with a Suprematist painting by Malevich, detonator artist of the Russian avant-garde, whose price it does not disclose. He is echoed not far away by Gagosian with names such as Gerard Richter, Philip Guston, Picasso and a large canvas by Helen Frankenthaler from 1966 that can also be seen in Italy at this time, both in the gallery of the same in Rome and in the major exhibition dedicated to her by Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

The British galleries make a good case for sculpture with Tony Cragg at Lisson and Anthony Gormely and Mona Hatoum at White Cube. Great credit must be given to those who over the years have kept their own exhibition line intact, legible and coherent, such as New York-based Matthew Marks with proposals always shot through with a note of irony, such as Katharina Fritsch’s St. Michael in green polyester. Likewise, David Zwirner focuses on sacred monsters of contemporary painting: from two extraordinary canvases from the 1960s by Gerhard Richter to Luc Tuymans, via the South African star - also admired in Venice in the 2023 solo show at Palazzo Grassi - Marlene Dumas whose quotations range from 2 to 10 million euros. Marian Goodman pays homage to sophisticated French artist Annette Messager with a 2017 wallpaper and some more recent works on paper; a similar choice for Paula Cooper, which presents Sophie Calle’s photographic series of Sleepers (1979) on the outer wall.

Italy’s Galleria Continua also has an eye for the French artists it represents: from a large Daniel Buren from 2024 to a “maquette” by Eva Jospin to an installation by Adel Abdessemed: Bristow is a steel bench equipped with a full-size pigeon and placed literally in front of a large-format charcoal that occupies the entire wall.

Staying in Italy, or rather in Naples, Lia Rumma draws a line with the large exhibition on the Are Povera that has just opened at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Foundation with names such as Gilberto Zorio, Ettore Spalletti and Michelangelo Pistoletto, while Alfonso Artiaco presents the result of his own research that he has been pursuing for years with the beautiful confrontation between Ann Veronica Janssens, Jana Schröder and Veronica Bisetti

Remaining in photography, the dialogue proposed by the Swiss gallery Mai 36 between masters such as Luigi Ghirri, to whom it dedicates a small room, and Thomas Ruff and the sophisticated painting on suede by Poppy Jones is very interesting.

New York’s Jack Shainman gallery focuses on the hallowed names of “black” art, such as the recycled aluminum tapestries of Ghanaian El Anatsui, the family portraits of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye or Nigerian abstractionist Odili Donald Odita.

By virtue also of a Venetian Biennale that revitalizes the global South, it is interesting to note the presence of important South American galleries such as Brazil’s A Gentil Carioca and Luisa Strina. In particular, the latter is particularly in line with the curatorial choices of the Biennale that is still in progress, with works by Anna Maria Maiolino, a Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2024, and Sonia Gomes, one of the artists chosen by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine for the Vatican Pavilion. Also popping up among the emerging artists is Mexico’s Labor, who captivates with an extremely radical plant installation.

And surprises come, of course, from the younger galleries in the Emergence section, which-intelligently-dedicate the entire space to a single artist such as Nuri Koerfer, a 40-year-old sculptor, presented by Berlin’s Lars Friedrich Gallery.

Rarer is the choice of a solo-exhibition in the strongest galleries, but among them the beautiful stand of the Blum gallery dedicated to the very recent acrylics of the young Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, capable of creating a universe of dreamlike graphism. The same approach for the Christian Berst gallery, which presents Carlo Zinelli (1916-1974) an artist whom even Italy has only recently rediscovered.

There is undoubtedly a “Basel effect” that touches the entire city, not only with an entrenched system of talks, exhibitions and collateral fairs, but also with the major auction houses that this week offered for auction suchincanto extraordinary pieces such as a 1968 cut by Lucio Fontana at Christie’s(Spatial Concept - Waiting, 1968) or a version of Monet’s Water Lilies already fetched $60 million in New York and exhibited at Sotheby’s Paris branch.

Finally among the “satellite” occasions that have now become a fixture-partly because they are set up in the splendid hôtel particulier that belonged to Karl Lagerfeld-is Basel Design, which welcomes the most important galleries in the sector and this year also celebrates the Italian Gaetano Pesce, who died in April 2024 at the age of 84 (Salon 94 Gallery, New York).

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