IT MAY BE POSSIBLE to imagine a more anticipated unveiling than Art Basel’s third iteration in Paris, but I find it difficult. From the gloom of the Grand Palais Éphémère that housed it last year on the Champ de Mars, Art Basel Paris emerged in this reprise—having taken over from FIAC—like a butterfly from its chrysalis in the freshly renovated Grand Palais, closed since 2021, which Parisians had only seen during the Olympic and Paralympic events of fencing and tae kwon do. “Comme c’est beau!” (It’s gorgeous!), I heard over and over again as I gaped at the light-filled Beaux Arts construction of iron and steel barrel vaults, tinted their hallmark shade of pale pistachio and skinned in glass.
I would see it from inside in the rain, an October deluge sluicing down the transparent panes of the nave in rivulets that made the whole world seem watery. I would see it when night swaddled the building and the blue-chip gallery booths on the lower level glowed like a glittering, roofless, labyrinthine city. And so it would go, for five days, until the lacework structure turned into a main character, all but dwarfing the art inside.
But it’s a slim minority who come to Paris in October solely for Art Basel. On everyone’s lips were the same earnest refrains: “Have you been to the Surrealism show at the Centre Pompidou? All those Remedios Varos. It’s extraordinary!” “Have you seen the Bourse de Commerce’s Arte Povera exhibition? The original Penone tree! The original Merz igloo! OMG!” Under the dome of the Grand Palais, of course, the major galleries had trotted out their de Chiricos; White Cube’s booth boasted a Dalí.
The fizz one felt is evidence of a city in evolution. I circled and flitted, in thrall to the dynamic of Paris Art Week. Already, Monday night, I wound up centuries-old steps to a Place des Vosges apartment pop-up of eight galleries, including London’s Kate MacGarry, Vienna’s Galerie Meyer Kainer, and instigator Chris Sharp Gallery of Los Angeles. Dinner at 9:45 p.m. in a “bouillon” near République was a throwback to working-class portions of tarama and bœuf bourguignon, while conversation was bookended by talk of beauty and vulnerability, as well as opinions about the encyclopedic Frederick Wiseman retrospective screenings at the Pompidou. The week would be short, and made to be lived intensely.
A little pink cupid adorns the banner of Paris Art Week’s newest addition, the Salon by NADA & the Community, whose inaugural location—in a former Baccarat crystal factory in the tenth arrondissement—resembled a panopticon. Mezzanines, stairs, and catwalk-like passages led to gallery booths—both commercial and nonprofit—that were clustered around an atrium. On the drizzly morning I visited, amid the galleries from LA and New York, I made a beeline for Shary Boyle at Montreal- and Toronto-based Patel Brown, loving her ceramic work from a residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre. I found myself inexorably drawn to the lush memory-scapes of newly Paris-dwelling painter Blake Daniels at cadet capela and to the idylls of Simon Buret at Nil Gallery, also based in Le Marais. The Nil Gallery booth, with its four artists and media ranging from copperleaf-gilded sculpted eyes to pastel and charcoal on sage-dyed silk, focused on the poetry of the tactile and tangible. “It’s our only oxygen right now,” cofounder Hugo Zeytoun told me.
A few streets away, the next morning, wrought-iron gates blocked off the entrance to Paris Internationale, now in its tenth year. I arrived ahead of the opening and climbed to the rain-washed balcony to note the milky sky over the zinc rooftops of Paris. Usually nomadic, the innovative alternative fair settled for the second time in a dilapidated telephone exchange building. In this site of roughly plastered, exposed brick, chipped, distressed cement floors, and neon lighting, I had the kinds of conversations that Paris Internationale is known for: I spoke with Madison Hames, a young Portland, Oregon, gallerist with strikingly beautiful bleached eyebrows, about a series of pale, intricate mixed-media assemblages by Bonnie Lucas from the late 1970s and ’80s, trenchant works ahead of their time. I admired the uncanny, frisson-inducing meowing robotic cats and ceramic cobras of Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann at Berlin’s Noah Klink booth. I chatted with the founders of the Marseille-based gallery SISSI Club, originally a project space, about their year of first-time fair attendance that was culminating here.
Meanwhile, in a similarly striking venue, the eight levels of an empty parking garage with an Art Deco facade and Brutalist interior housed the third iteration of the hyper-specific Offscreen, which presented still and moving images only, alone or in installations. An ascending concrete spiral ramp, unspooling like a film reel, offered a dim vantage point for avant-garde work. My architect partner stood fixed before a rare series of Gordon Matta-Clark photos just before the crowning glory of film clips by Chantal Akerman, this year’s honoree and the subject of a show at the Jeu de Paume. And I tucked into my memory bank Lita Albuquerque’s sketches for the Washington Monument Project, discreetly concealed in a corner.
Options proliferated. While Art Basel partner Miu Miu orchestrated round-the-clock activations at the Palais d’Iéna, with models strutting down the Art Deco double staircase and in and out of a soaring installation by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, I traipsed to the vernissage of French painter Apolonia Sokol’s solo exhibition at the new Paris branch of Istanbul gallery the Pill, founded by Suela J. Cennet. For her first solo show in her home country, the feminist painter displayed a massive Guernica-inspired work and a painting of herself lying in the grass with men’s shoes hovering above her, in a take on the biblical tale of Susanna and the Elders. In the rain-slicked Place de Valois in the first arrondissement, the much-anticipated opening was a juxtaposition of refined eighteenth-century architecture, the hazy pinks and cream-colored hues of natural wine, and small dogs in tiny sweaters. Sokol, in an embroidered coat, checked on the status of a performance piece as the fringe art glitterati shouldered their way in, leaving a wake of bises and “chéries.” What I see in this duo of women is the new crop of artists and the future of galleries in Paris. And as I left, more were coming in. It seemed the most hip and incandescent opening in Paris.
Those who wanted to could fling themselves to the outskirts of the city by centrifugal force. An exhibition of James Turrell drew art patrons to the Gagosian outpost near the modest airport of Le Bourget—a Jean Nouvel–touched midcentury Minimalist industrial venue. On Friday night, the sprawling, liaison-creating incubator—boasting more than 250 artist studios—of POUSH in Aubervilliers drew hordes to the former perfume factory for a DJ set that lasted until 4 a.m., and while the black-clad set milled in the courtyard, I threaded my way upstairs, where artists hosted small wine confabs by candlelight.
By the weekend, as questions flooded my WhatsApp about how to navigate the elegant behemoth for which everyone had come, I had a bottom line: Always see Bianca Bondi, this year at Mor Charpentier with an alchemical medicine cabinet. Always see kurimanzutto, which held works by Gabriel Orozco and Nairy Baghramian, among others. But perhaps most of all, at Art Basel in the Grand Palais this year, the upstairs balcony sections were the most interesting. That’s where the Emergence section featured solo artists, like the thoughtful, risk-taking program of Jakarta’s ROH Projects, with a pastel-hued 3D-printed wall display by Kei Imazu that harkened to ecological disaster. That’s where the new Premise section held the Pill’s inaugural presence, with a spotlight on the feminist grande dame Nil Yalter, and where Juliette Roche’s blue- and purple-haired women sold at Galerie Pauline Pavec, summoning the late artist from the shadows. In the J wing, Paris’s hip High Art gallery housed two projectors in “dialogue” around a dinner table, while in the G wing, Anne Barrault brought welcome whimsy with a video by Marie Losier and the witchy, protective marionettes of Liv Schulman.
The weakly conceived Oh La La! program (an attempt to make the fair seem less commercial) nevertheless led to sightings of Sergei Eisenstein’s erotic drawings at Ellen de Bruijne Projects on Friday and Saturday and the beaded phallus of Bruno Pélassy at Air de Paris.
On Sunday morning, two little girls played, drawing on sheets of paper scattered on the mosaic floor of one of the Grand Palais’s busy crossings. Their makeshift playground was thronged with the ghosts of a thousand footsteps. Clearly, Art Basel Paris is rain, architecture, and light. It’s the exhibits happening around it. It’s one part international art fair and two parts everything else you bring to it, including your capacity to have your breath taken away.
