Across some 200 booths at Art Basel Paris this year, there is a lot to take in. As the Swiss company’s French fair matures, galleries have begun to bring more and more top-tier, high-priced works, which in turn has made it less a place to discover something new than a place for six-, seven-, and even eight-figure works to be sold. And during the Avant-Première VVIP preview on Tuesday afternoon, exhibiting galleries reported quite a few sales, which they would add to by the close of business Wednesday.
While the fair can be a bit market-darling-heavy on the ground floor, be sure to visit the upstairs, where some of the best works on view can be found. And if nothing strikes your fancy, you can at least look up and take in the beauty of the Grand Palais’s green-painted, steel-and-glass ceiling.
Below, a look at the best booths at Art Basel Paris, which runs through October 25 at the Grand Palais.
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Miyoko Ito at Ortuzar
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews In one corner of its booth, New York’s Ortuzar gallery has two striking abstract paintings from the mid-1970s by Miyoko Ito. Loosely associated with the Chicago Imagists, Ito has seen a posthumous resurgence in the past decade spurred in part by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s 2017 survey of her work. (Ito attended the University of California, Berkeley, the home of that museum, in the 1940s and awarded her a diploma while she was imprisoned at the Topaz camp during World War II.) The works on view at Ortuzar’s booth show off her striking use of geometry; the dry application of thin layers of paint allowed her to achieve dazzling gradients.
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Tatiana Trouvé at Xavier Hufkens
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews I haven’t stopped thinking about Tatiana Trouvé’s work since I saw her site-specific commission at the Upstate New York property of collectors Jill and Peter Kraus over the summer. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to learn that the bench that had drawn me into the center of Xavier Hukens’s booth (somewhere in the middle of the fair’s blue-chip axis) was by Trouvé, who is also currently the subject of a solo show at the Brussels gallery. This bench-like sculpture is part of her series on “The Guardian,” an unseen figure who is also the protagonist of her Kraus work. This bench is made from the fragments and skins of past work and the detritus of her studio (Styrofoam and blankets) that are then cast in aluminum and painted by hand. I didn’t dare sit on it, but somehow, I don’t think the Guardian would have minded.
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Helen Frankenthaler at Yares Art
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The spur of Art Basel’s fair is home to many of the secondary market galleries who have on view a range of historical works from the 20th century. But only one work from that section leaves an impression: Helen Frankenthaler’s Ivory Rose (1987). The purplish ground, achieved via the artist’s favored method of staining her canvas, contrasts with the thick paint that she applied on top: straight brush strokes of pure magenta, two circles of red-orange, an even vertical glob of slime green, and sprinkles of white. These two planes of color are a wonder. If only, I had the $1.6 million that the gallery is asking for.
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Cem Örgen at The Pill
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews If you, like me, would rather see something new than a gallery’s inventory—essentially high-priced backstock, the action really gets going upstairs at Art Basel Paris. At Istanbul’s The Pill, Cem Örgen, who will have a solo show at the New Museum early next year, is showing two formally intriguing works. The artist studied industrial design at Bilgi University in Istanbul, and with these works, he subverts the functional aspects of his training to think about the fragility of the body. Horses (2024), for example, is a steel chair that can’t be sat upon; it takes its name from a small drawing affixed to the front of the logo of the artist pencil company Faber-Castell, showing two mounted warriors at battle. Open Surgery (2024), on the other hand, is made of Alucobond, a material that is typically used as the outer skin for buildings to help with insulation and acts as a fire retardant. The form of the work mimics the electrical wires that course through buildings and streets in our hyper-connected world. To these, he has added two silicon pads that are used in medical schools to train doctors on how to suture a wound. The tactility of Örgen’s sutures serves as a metaphor for the vulnerability that is just a slight movement in the wrong direction from bursting open in today’s media-addled society.
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Carl-Edouard Keïta at Cecile Fakhoury
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews For his latest body of work, Carl-Edouard Keïta has turned his attention to the post-Independence period of his native Côte d’Ivoire. “It was a hopeful time,” he told ARTnews Wednesday morning. Using a Cubist-inflected sense of geometry to render the figures in his various scenes—from sporting events to dance clubs—Keïta draws on the past to offer a searing critique of the present. Les muses de l’Hôtel Ivoire (2026), for example, shows two Black women, elegantly dressed in ’70s garb, next to a traditional African sculpture. The artist saw that work at the Salon Art + Design fair in New York and was surprised to learn that it was from Côte d’Ivoire. Rendered at a 1:1 scale, it is the same height as the women. His research also led him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, where he learned that it owns a dress designed by Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé in 1970 for a Texas socialite; the dress, for some reason, is titled Côte d’Ivoire. He has given that dress to the woman on the left, while the woman on the right wears a dress of his own design, an intervention into how an Ivorian woman from that era would dress herself.
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Mary Stevenson and Ebun Sodipo at Chapter NY and Soft Opening
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews (2) This year’s edition of Art Basel Paris has a record 12 booths shared by two galleries. My favorite comes from Chapter NY and London’s Soft Opening. Both galleries have work on view by London-based artists whose work couldn’t be more different stylistically, though each artist’s practice deals with memory in its own way. Mary Stevenson’s Surrealist-inflected paintings explore psychological spaces: Red Chairs (2026), for example, shows five chairs floating in an almost star-like shape. The number five relates to her being one of five children and the way her siblings’ relationships encircle one another. To achieve this ethereal effect, she applies thin layers of paint to rabbit-skin-glue-primed linen. By contrast, Ebun Sodipo presents found images from her archive, which ranges from the art historical to the filmic to social media. She then mounts these onto Mylar and fixes them in time via two pourings of resin. By looking back at our collective memory, Sodipo proposes new futures for Black trans people.
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Nina Davies at Seventeen
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Seventeen, London I’m still not quite sure what to make of the two sculptures by Nina Davies in the presentation by New York’s Seventeen gallery. Both works, which hang from a single metal coat rack, are multi-part pieces that examine how dance “is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed” in our current moment, per a release, specifically through the lens of AI. One work features a real-life dancer whose makeup and mannerisms make them seem AI-generated; during the video, Davies gives them movement instructions, written as though she were prompting an AI bot. The other presents a fictional podcast episode in which an investigative journalist details her findings on a bank break-in in which the thieves “physically reproduced AI-generated imagery to evade detection,” per a description from Vancouver’s Western Front, where the works premiered earlier this year. The devices these videos play on are stuffed into bags along with clothes, as well as sculptures of off-kilter Coke cans and disfigured hands, a nod to how AI-generated images often struggle to accurately render hands and brand logos.
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Meriem Bennani at Lodovico Corsini
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Don’t get too close to Meriem Bennani’s latest sculpture. More minimal than much of her previous output, A Knife (2026) presents a simple machine that moves a knife suspended from the ceiling up and down in a menacing fashion. Sculptured by Bennani, the knife seems as if it could drop at any second; the wooden armature below the knife, in fact, includes some marks where the knife seems to have landed. The sharpness of the knife contrasts with a rod that holds strands of blonde hair that resemble a feather duster. As ever, there’s an enigmatic humor to Bennani’s art that’s enticing—no matter how dangerous.
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Rosario Aninat and Simon Shim-Sutcliffe at Eli Kerr
Image Credit: Choreo The first Canadian gallery to participate in Art Basel Paris, Montreal’s Eli Kerr came to the French capital with a knockout booth. Because the booth is in the Emergence section, staged on the balconies that loom over the fair’s main floor, Kerr said he and the Berlin-based artist duo Rosario Aninat and Simon Shim-Sutcliffe chose to present something cinematic. Their booth has been overtaken by a sleek, black-painted bleacher inspired by a ziggurat. On this structure, they have placed around 15 discrete abstract sculptures that juxtapose different materials: cast tin and cast copper; padauk wood and epoxy clay; hand-blown glass and newsprint; Nero Assoluto granite, Belgian bluestone, and vulcanized rubber. Inspired by a recent research trip to China, where they encountered Neolithic objects, these pieces can be read as funerary objects that, in their amalgamation of materials, aim to meld heaven and earth. Each work also comes with a 35mm black-and-white photo (not on view) that acts as its certificate of authenticity.
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Derek Jarman at Amanda Wilkinson
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Tucked away in a corner of Art Basel Paris’s ground floor is the Premise section, for “highly singular curatorial proposals,” according to the fair’s website. The highlight here is London-based Amanda Wilkinson Gallery’s booth of Derek Jarman’s “Tar Paintings,” which he made between 1989 and 1991. Influenced by Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy, Jarman brought an inherently alchemical sensibility to the way he transforms the sundry materials he covers in tar. When he started the series, Jarman was also at work on The Garden (1990), which features a scene in which someone is tarred and feathered. In that context, these aesthetically pleasing works take on a more serious tone, becoming a commentary on how HIV-positive people were treated during the AIDS crisis. Perhaps the most evocative of the works on view is Clothes (1989), featuring the blue overalls the artist would use for gardening, several found photographs, a set of clunky old metal keys, and other indiscernible objects. Onto this he has sprinkled feathers.