Art Basel Paris Receipts: Gold and Garter Belts

Art Basel Paris 2025 23–26 October 2025

After years of renovations, Art Basel’s Paris fair finally arrived at the Grand Palais.

Renamed Art Basel Paris from Paris+ par Art Basel, this year’s fair features 195 galleries, up 26% on last year. It was expected to be busy, even from the very first entry time at 10am on Wednesday (there are four tiers of VIP at Art Basel Paris: two for each of the two preview days), but the passageways were even more crowded than anticipated.

‘This year stands out as the strongest Paris fair to date,’ said Thaddaeus Ropac, founder of the eponymous gallery. ‘Beyond this being a fantastic return to Le Grand Palais—which of course makes a big difference—the energy here and the attendance is outstanding.’

Royalty including Princess Maria-Anunciata von Liechtenstein, Queen Rania of Jordan, and Natalie Portman (who played Queen Amidala in the Star Wars films) were spotted, along with American actors Chloë Sevigny and Owen Wilson.

Sales highlights at the blue-chip galleries included David Zwirner placing Victor Man‘s painting K (2014) for €1.2 million ($1.3 million), while Hauser & Wirth sold the almost two-metre-tall Mark Bradford work Not Quite in a Hurry (2024) for $3.5 million and the Louise Bourgeois work on paper La Forêt Enchantée (Up and Up!) (​2006) for $2 million.

Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot said the fair was a reminder ‘there still is no substitute for experiencing works of art in person’. To that end, their artists Rashid Johnson, Thomas J Price, and Frank Bowling are showing at galleries and museums around town.

Gagosian brought secondary market pieces—including works by Pablo Picasso and Tom Wesselmann—to the fair, as well as contemporary artists including Amoako Boafo, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Ewa Juszkiewicz. At their nearby rue de Ponthieu gallery, they presented works by contemporary Belgian painter Harold Ancart.

Gagosian’s senior director Serena Cattaneo Adorno said this divide-and-conquer approach was ‘highly specific to Art Basel Paris thanks to the proximity of the Grand Palais to the gallery at rue de Ponthieu.’

Though galleries largely brought big-money works by big names to the fair’s first edition two years ago, there was a noticeable change this year, with fewer checklist works—mercifully, only one Anish Kapoor disc was spotted.

Lisson Gallery sold three works by Colombian artist Olga de Amaral for prices ranging from $350,000 to $800,000 and Carmen Herrera‘s painting Untitled (Habana Series) (1950) for $380,000, as well as works by several other artists.

Smaller galleries also made sales, with Istanbul‘s The Pill selling its whole booth by Nil Yalter as an installation to an institution. It was part of the Premise section, a new part of the fair where nine galleries showed ‘highly singular curatorial proposals’, most of which looked a lot like what was outside the backroom where the Premise galleries were relegated. Bombon, from Barcelona, however, brought archival comics featuring a trans detective. They sold Nazario’s Anarcoma (1985) for €5,100 ($5,500).

‘People have been very curious,’ The Pill founder Suela Cennet said about the new section, but also ‘very clear’ about what its aims were.

The emerging galleries this year were placed in the balconies overlooking the main body of the fair, such that they were always in view if you were to look up from the ground floor.

‘The placement is fantastic,’ said Sophie Tappeiner, founder of the eponymous Austrian gallery. She showed framed works by photographic artist Sophie Tun that were hung on top of metres-tall backdrops that helped her booth stand out.

Sales were ‘not excellent, but good,’ Tappeiner said, noting she’d sold two of the smaller works (37 x 45 cm) for €6,500 (U.S. $7,060) without tax and one of the larger works (192 x 140 cm) for €25,000 (U.S. $27,150) without tax by 6pm on opening day. That being said, she was impressed by how many institutions had passed through and stopped to chat.

Lehmann Maupin partner Isabella Icoz was impressed by the first day of the fair, the first time the gallery had shown at an Art Basel fair in Paris. The last time they were in the Grand Palais was for FIAC.

‘This feels much more buzzy on opening day,’ Icoz said. ‘We’re meeting more new and very interesting people here than we did at FIAC.’

Icoz found the energy to be more exciting than that of all the other fairs her multinational gallery has done in the past few years, seeing many more walk-ins, and also ‘reactivations’—people who’ve long conversed with the gallery but never bought. To that end, Do Ho Suh‘s thread on paper work Body Building (2023) went to a first-time buyer based in Paris, and Self Portrait (2023) sold to a first-time buyer in the United States.

While Lehmann Maupin found they had a lot of clients going to both Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, there were whispers among gallerists that the Americans hadn’t gone to London. The pre-fair events reflected this, too, concentrated from Monday onwards, instead of two days after Frieze’s opening, like last year.

The sheer number and variety of collectors who came to Paris ‘seems to be specific to this fair,’ Icoz said. —[O]

Main image: Art Basel Paris 2024 (9–13 October 2024). Courtesy Art Basel.