Ascendant Art Basel Paris rewards top dealers, while smaller galleries compete for attention – The Art Newspaper

Gallerists have bet big on Art Basel Paris, and for the most dominant players this has already paid off. By the end of the fair’s new VVIP slot Tuesday afternoon (21 October)—instated to prevent overcrowding, improve visitor experience and, organisers hoped, boost sales—several of the biggest art dealerships sent out email blasts with hefty figures attached.

Leading the pack was Hauser & Wirth, which reported well over $30m in sales, most notably Gerhard Richter’s Abstrakte Bilde (1987) for $23m, while David Zwirner reportedly sold a Ruth Asawa sculpture for $7.5m. The new preview slot, titled Avant-Première, is “a very smart idea that delivered on all fronts”, says Marc Payot, the president of Hauser & Wirth. Liza Essers, the owner of Goodman Gallery concurred. “It’s a game changer. We were able to have meaningful conversations and are grateful for that moment.” She sold two works by William Kentridge to two different museums at Tuesday’s preview—a film to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark for $450,000 and a work on paper to an undisclosed US museum for $550,000.

Others wished the opening had seen even fewer attendants. Iwan Wirth, the co-founder of Hauser & Wirth, said the fair still “needs to be fine-tuned” while Philomene Magers, the co-founder of Sprüth Magers, said it was “too dense, too crowded”. Still, this did not impede her gallery from placing two paintings by George Condo for $1.8m each, with private collectors in the US and Europe. The sales coincide with the artist’s ongoing exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

By the end of day two, White Cube had sold Julie Mehretu’s 2007 canvas Charioteer for $11m and Karma placed Matthew Wong’s monochrome painting White Wave, Black Sand (2017) for $3.5m.

This rush of big-ticket sales might evoke flusher times, but the market remains “far from the frenzy of years past”, says the New York-based adviser Aileen Agopian. To her point, no figure from the past two days eclipses the $40m Mark Rothko painting brought by Pace to this fair two years ago—which did not sell.

Tried and tested artists for the top collectors

The headline figures reported by galleries likely speak less to a market rebound than they do the ascendancy of Art Basel Paris. “Nothing compares to the Grand Palais,” Agopian says. “This is the fair above all that my clients want to come to,” although she notes being inundated with more travel requests from US collectors last year, when the fair first moved into the Grand Palais.

It appears well-understood that Paris is the best place to sell top inventory to the top clients. Spotted in the aisles Tuesday were major collectors including Maja Hoffmann, Lonti Ebers and Delphine Arnault.

According to the dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, while secondary market consignments to the gallery have not returned to the heights of a few years ago, Art Basel Paris is “providing the excitement necessary for making purchases in rocky times. People are tired of holding back.” His gallery sold a 1953 sculpture by Alberto Burri for €4.2m on Tuesday and a 2024 Baselitz painting for €3.5m, but as of this writing has yet to sell the $6.5m Rauschenberg assemblage Untitled (Gold Painting) (around 1953).

Paris, in Ropac’s view, is now eclipsing Basel in terms of importance. “I hate to admit it as a German speaker, but this has become the premier fair.” The key difference, he adds, is that it is the collectors themselves—rather than just their advisers—who are present in Paris. “Ultimately, they call the shots. It is not solely a choice made by the brain, it is about the power of art.”

Sales among the fair’s blue-chip galleries were not universally stellar. The prominent dealership Acquavella reported not making a single sale during Tuesday’s deluxe preview. Included on its stand is an extraordinary early Pablo Picasso nude that is “not for sale”, a gallery spokesperson told The Art Newspaper on Wednesday.

That Picasso is one of dozens by the Spanish master dotting stands this year; Nahmad Contemporary has devoted its stand to a solo presentation of the artist’s work. The fair is rich in Richters, too, tied to the German artist’s sprawling retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Lévy Gorvy Dayan is showing a painting by the artist valued at $22.5m. Agopian notes that galleries with more contemporary programmes are also including historic works in presentations, such as two Francis Picabia works on White Cube’s stand.

Pace quickly sold the most valuable work on its stand—Amedeo Modigliani’s painting Jeune fille aux macarons (Young Woman with Hair in Side Buns) (1918)—for “just under $10m”. That work has not been included in any of the artist’s existing catalogue raisonnés but is being included in a new one published by Institut Restellini. Outside the fair, Christie’s Paris will this Friday bring to the block a monumental painting by Yves Klein valued between €16m and €24m— the highest estimate for any work at auction in Europe this year.

Meanwhile, Gagosian’s presentation at Art Basel Paris of a $7m Rubens painting bends the cut-off date for works shown at the fair by some centuries—and sets “a dangerous precedent that could dilute Art Basel’s brand in the long run”, says one adviser who wishes to remain anonymous.

Dealers doubling down on classic names on the fair floor is influenced by top buyers moving towards more established artists. As Agopian notes, “in a cautious market, collectors take comfort in knowing an artist is in every major museum collection”.

This is compounded by Paris’s reputation for more conservative taste when compared to London, and Art Basel’s reputation for selling classic work at higher price points when compared to Frieze, whose London editions took place last week. “When Art Basel took over Fiac, it certainly forced us to hold key works back for this fair,” Ropac says.

A tale of two VIP days

But while Art Basel Paris cements its reputation for more classic blue-chip art, it also continues to attract some of the world’s most exciting emerging galleries, which are concentrated on the Grand Palais upper level. There, a much slower start was observed. Concerns were voiced on Tuesday that collectors used the four hours of Avant-Première to visit the bigger galleries downstairs and few made it upstairs. One Paris dealer explains that there was considerable crossover between invitees, who often did not know which gallerist had invited them.

At the opening of the second day in the Emergence section, Lucas Casso, the founder of the Berlin gallery Sweetwater, stood by the solo stand of Alexandre Khondji, speaking to a curator from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Khondji’s two conceptually elliptical and formally restrained sculptures are adapted from barriers placed in horse riding arenas and priced between €10,000 and €15,000. Casso says that no collectors had yet considered the work. “Hopefully they will come up here soon to take in the view,” he adds.

Camille Houzé of the London gallery Nicoletti said on Wednesday afternoon that he had sold one sculpture by Abbas Zahedi for €15,000 on Tuesday. By the end of day two, his gallery had yet to sell enough to make back the stand costs. He adds, however, that he also chose a less commercially viable stand filled with large installations. “It’s our first time in the main section, we wanted to make a statement,” he says.

Simon Wang, the founder of the Shanghai gallery Antenna Space also notes the “slower” pace, positing that the extra preview day meant that collectors felt they had “more time” to make decisions.

These smaller galleries might not account for the bulk of the fees Art Basel is collecting from its Paris exhibitors, but they are increasingly pivotal to its brand—described as the fair’s “centre of gravity” by outgoing director Clément Delépine to Art Basel’s editorial platform in 2022.

Art Basel’s duty to help these galleries (and their larger colleagues) make sales becomes even more vital when considering that it threatens to overshadow events more attuned to the emerging market. Art Basel’s VVIP slot on Tuesday coincided with the longstanding satellite fair Paris Internationale, which Delépine once ran. Exhibitors at the latter fair were concerned that opening on the same day as Avant-Première would split the focus of collectors. Sammi Yijuan Liu, the founder of Tabula Rasa Gallery in London, says of the bigger fair brand: “They are moving into emerging territory and attempting to swallow up the whole market.”

This year, Sans Titre, one of Paris’s fast-rising young galleries, has graduated to Art Basel’s main section. By the end of Wednesday its founder, Marie Madec, said that “the start was slow, but we’re happy now”. The gallery sold sculptures by Hamish Clayton for between €3,500 and €11,000 and a painting by Aysha E Arar for €5,500. The gallery remains in discussions to sell a sculpture of a hefty metal bicep wielding a hammer by Zuzanna Czebatul. Madec says the fair’s preview system “should be improved to better accommodate smaller galleries that were more sidelined” on Tuesday.

Still, if the dealers on the main floor of the Grant Palais understand that Art Basel Paris is the best chance to get the notice of top collectors, so do their younger counterparts. In the Emergence section, the London-based dealer Alex Vardaxoglou is showing a striking and monumental presentation of a five-metre-high paper sculpture by the British artist Tanoa Sasraku, on sale for £65,000. Vardaxoglou may not have sold the work yet (as of Wednesday afternoon), but has placed enough smaller works from PDFs to recover his stand costs. Now his eyes are on the prize. “I am determined to sell this work in Paris.”

• Art Basel Paris, until 26 October, Grand Palais, Paris