France finally has a fair at the Grand Palais again in the form of Art Basel Paris, which made its debut outing at the iconic structure after two editions in a temporary space. As sunlight shone through the building’s glass roof, crowds of people packed into the aisles, braving long lines to get in.
Dealers reported notable sales during the first day, with many gallerists expecting more to follow throughout the week. A few of the 195 exhibiting galleries did opt to bring more conceptually minded work—a rarity for any art fair—and that caused them to stand out among the crowd. Others sought to introduce their artists to a European audience.
As Mary Sabbatino, vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong & Co., told ARTnews on opening day, “The Grand Palais is magical—you’re bathed in light and in art history. [Art Basel Paris] is more historical than Miami and more up-to-the-minute and diverse than Basel. Paris has its own energy and identity.”
Below, here some of the best booths at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Paris, which runs through Sunday.
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Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Taka Ishii Gallery
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews On the heels of presenting a monumental painting at this year’s Venice Biennale, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger has a more intimately scaled piece in the booth of Taka Ishii, which currently has a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist in Tokyo. This five-panel work resembles an altarpiece, with hinges that allow it fold shut. When closed, this piece shows a semi-abstract landscape in gold. When opened, the painting, titled Look into The Abyss of The Nihility of The Absence of God and Truth and See the Creative Will There and The Horizon of Infinite, shows at its center six nude figures (rendered in embroidered thread) that dance around a tree, a direct reference to Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 1530 allegorical painting The Golden Age . Toranzo Jaeger has recast Cranach’s all-white group of dancers as a multiracial group of people.
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Renée Green at Bortolami
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Can’t get enough of Toranzo Jaeger’s hinged paintings? Bortolami’s stand has more of them by her, but the centerpiece of this booth is Renée Green’s knockout conceptual installation Seen (1990). The wooden structure resembles a stage: there’s a spotlight on one side pointed at a projector screen. (If you don some booties, you can even climb the stairs and stand center stage.) But this construction is more than a platform—it also looks like an auction block, its floors lined with words referencing the stories of Josephine Baker and Sarah Baartman (known during her lifetime as Venus of Hottentot). These two Black women offered entertainment for white European audiences, the former as a dancer in Parisian cabarets, the latter as an “exhibit” in freak shows.
In both texts, these women are compared to animals. Baker’s text, for example, begins, “Like a strange creature from a distant world, she walked or rather waddled in her knees bent and spread apart her stomach was sucked in, her body contorted. She shook and shimmied constantly, moving like a snake.” Baartman’s reads, “Positive facts: her nasal bones: ‘In this respect, I have never seen a human head so similar to that of monkeys.’”
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Bianca Bondi at Mor Charpentier
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Mor Charpentier has on view Exotic Elixir (2024), a stunning sculpture by Bianca Bondi that the Paris-based South African artist made during her residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. In a medicine cabinet, Bondi has placed artificial and real plants, empty and half-used vials of medicine, gauze, and more. She applied salt to these objects, to see what chemical reaction would transpire. In several instances, the salt has crystallized, obscuring the objects beneath. A medicine cabinet like this is supposed to open to reveal its contents. This one refuses to let its objects be entirely visible, even once its doors are unfolded.
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Kei Imazu at ROH Projects
Image Credit: Maxmilíano Durón/ARTnews The fair’s Emergence section, for young galleries, hits its peak with ROH Projects’s booth. Kei Imazu, a Japanese artist who is now based in Indonesia, has taken over the stand’s entire back wall with a sculpture made of 3D-printed ABS plastic that has been hand-painted with oil in pastel tones. At the top is the skyline of Jakarta, shown at a small scale; below the horizon there’s a representation of all that lies beneath the ground, here shown at an enlarged scale, that acts as the history of the planet, with animals and fossils, leaves, and the arteries of the groundwater made unmissable.
Jakarta is one of several cities at the forefront of both climate change and extractive policies that threaten its ecosystem. Each year, the sea levels around Jakarta rise between 1 and 15 centimeters on average, meaning the city could be completely underwater by 2050, according to researchers. At the same time, the densely populated city—around 10,000 people are packed in per square kilometer—has continued to develop rapidly, straining its groundwater supply. As Jakarta gets inundated with more water from the sea, it is losing its supply of drinking water, a worrisome fact that hangs over this powerful work, even if it is not outright represented.
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Julio Galán at Luhring Augustine and Kurimanzutto
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Ahead of a two-venue exhibition at their Chelsea spaces next year, Luhring Augustine and Kurimanzutto each have a work by Mexican artist Julio Galán at their booths. While revered in Mexico, Galán, who died in 2006 at 47, is today lesser known in the US and Europe. These two galleries are hoping to change that. His paintings often looked at how identity is created, both by oneself and by society. Queer overtones recur throughout. At Luhring Augustine, there is Los cómplices (1987), an enigmatic painting in which Galán depicts himself as a charro. This domestic scene has a surrealist inflection to it: to Galan’s right is a table above which several cups float, while just beyond the table is a horse. The Kurimanzutto painting, on the other hand, shows a crucifixion scene in which Galán is both Christ on the cross and one of his followers helping with his descent. Nearby the artist has inscribed “Contingo no tengo medio” (With you, I am not afraid).
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Hunter Reynolds at P.P.O.W
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews On an exterior wall of P.P.O.W’s booth is one of the fair’s most poignant works, Hunter Reynolds’s Ray Navarro’s Bed of Mourning Flowers (1990/2018), whose title refers to one of the many artists who died of AIDS-related complications. (Ray Navarro is best remembered for dressing up as Jesus Christ at the ACT UP protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral months before his death in 1990.) Reynolds’s seemingly simple work contains snapshots of flowers bouquets that have been stitched together into a tapestry. Those flowers are, in fact, the ones that Reynolds would purchase ahead of a funeral of memorial service for a friend lost to AIDS. At the time, these deli flowers were especially ubiquitous in New York, and because of the vast number of artists and friends who died due to governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis, they were an economical way to mark these people’s passing. That was especially true of those lost whose families, ashamed to have a gay son, refused to give their child dignity in death by hosting a funeral. In many ways, this is Reynolds’s AIDS Quilt.
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Wanda Pimentel at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Wanda Pimentel was one of Brazil’s most important female artists during her lifetime, though she has only recently begun to receive proper recognition. In 2017, she had a survey at São Paulo’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo and made an appearance in the Hammer Museum’s “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1980.” Her ascent continues with this booth, where an untitled 1968 painting from her “Envolvimento” (Involvement) series can be found. In it, there are a pair of white legs set in front of a several sets of discomfiting stairways and passageways that seem to lead to nowhere. Near the top of the canvas is a tape measure that gives a distorted sense of scale, further increasing the tension present in the work. Made during Brazil’s dictatorship, the “Envolvimento” paintings act as sly commentaries on the country’s fragile political situation. They remain resonant today.
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Cameron Rowland at Maxwell Graham
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Ahead of its inclusion in a group exhibition at the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Cameron Rowland’s Blood (2024) is making a stop at Art Basel Paris. This large-scale sculpture continues Rowland’s usage of Minimalist aesthetics to uncover the hidden histories of objects. Those objects may seem banal, but Rowland proves that they are steeped in systems of power that have long been used to police and oppress Black people in the US. Consisting of several orifices organized in a grid, Blood is a wall that will be used to train dogs on certain scents, be it a person’s clothing or perfume or even drugs and explosives. The top portion of each hole unscrews—a scent can be placed in there. Below it, one can place a treat used to train a dog.
In an accompanying caption, Rowland details the history of how hunting dogs were first bred to track the scent of those who had been wounded. These dogs were then imported to US colonies, where they were used to track enslaved people who attempted to escape to freedom. The dogs were eventually rebranded as “negro dogs” and “[t]hey became a key component of the slave patrol,” Rowland writes. Today, these scent walls are still used “to locate contraband, suspects, and fugitives,” Rowland writes. “Police use dogs to attack those who they claim are resisting arrest. Police continue to use dogs to inflict racial terror, injury, and death.”
