After nearly a year of speculation and anticipation, Art Basel’s French art fair, officially known as Paris+, par Art Basel, has finally arrived, with its VIP day beginning on a sunny Wednesday morning.
The fair was thrumming with energy and the temporary convention center, the Grand Palais Éphémère, just across the Champ de Mars from the Eiffel Tower, was packed during the first few hours, minus the long lines that many experienced across the pond at Frieze London last week. And, to honor Paris, the fair has even added a fourth clock to its usual display that shows the time zones of its other locations (Hong Kong, Miami Beach, and Basel, Switzerland).
Dealers reported strong interest in several works, with quite a few selling by 1 p.m. In Galerie Lelong’s booth, vice president and partner Mary Sabbatino described the event as “très actif”; Marc Spiegler, Art Basel’s global director, joined the conversation seconds later, adding that he had just spoken with another dealer who had mentioned that a good way to gauge the character of collectors on hand was by how many conversations in the aisles weren’t being conducted in French.
The aisles were indeed chockful of international collectors, including Édouard Carmignac and Charles Carmignac, Grażyna Kulczyk, Pamela Joyner, Maja Hoffmann, Mera and Don Rubell, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Michael Ringier, Tiffany Zabludowicz, Ricard Akagawa, Candace Carmel Barasch, and Shelley and Philip Aarons, as were museum curators and directors like Glenn Lowry, Lisa Phillips, Massimiliano Gioni, and Alex Gartenfeld — and even former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. (Several dealers who weren’t exhibiting but instead scoping out the landscape were also on hand.)
Though the front section of the fair was a bit warmer than the back half, that didn’t deter VIPs from lingering into the afternoon, as evidenced by the line into the upstairs VIP lounge.
Below, a look at the best on offer at the 2022 edition of Paris+.
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Daniel Buren and Adel Abdessemed at Continua
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTNews When Daniel Buren debuted his Exposition d’une exposition, une pièce en 7 tableaux at documenta 5 in 1972, it further questioned what could be considered art, as several rooms in various venues were covered in stripes (exactly 8.7 centimeters wide) that alternated between white and a color. For its booth, Continua has staged an updated iteration of the project, which is for sale, on several walls. Alternating between white and parme (an almost pinkish beige), the effect still dazzles 50 years later.
That work contrasts with a 2013 piece, Le vase abominable, by Adel Abdessemed, who is currently the subject of a solo show in the gallery’s Marais space. For this commanding sculpture, a vase sits atop a base made of various electric wires and computer parts, as well as explosive elements that could go into a bomb. It’s all about showing the paradox of the world we live in, how two manmade things can be used to different ends: one to create culture, and the other to destroy it.
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Robert Ryman at David Zwirner
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Small, intimate artworks often have a hard time catching visitors’ attention during an art fair. That isn’t the case with five paintings from the late 1950s to early ’60s, by the late, great Robert Ryman, which have their own dedicated space within Zwirner’s booth and have never before been exhibited. (Pace also has on view a 2004 painting by Ryman in its booth.) Though Ryman is best known for his paintings that coalesce into striking white planes of abstraction (but, of course, are made with dozens of brushstrokes of colored paint), these modestly sized canvases teem with even more visible color.
In one untitled 1964 work, Ryman is at his finest with a tightly arranged set of thin brushstrokes in white and ochre on a brown unstretched linen. The work was an experiment for Ryman, who was just beginning to use the newly released New Master vinyl polymer paint; you get the sense that he’s testing out the waters. Nearby is the showstopper, Untitled Study (1963), in which his signature thick white brushstrokes dance across a square canvas with an underpainting of deep blue that is untouched in the lower quarter.
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Alvaro Barrington at Sadie Coles HQ
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The closely watched young artist Alvaro Barrington is at his finest in two knockout pieces from London’s Sadie Coles HQ, which saved these stellar works for Paris. Barrington has been collaborating with Notting Hill Carnival since 2019 and these two works date to earlier this year when they were painted live during a set there by Soca musician Mr. Killa. The works hum with the beats they were painted to, showing two figures set against backgrounds organized by expressionistic, painterly brushstrokes.
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Kehinde Wiley at Templon
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The last several years have been nonstop for New York–based artist Kehinde Wiley, from painting Barack Obama’s portrait to designing an American Express Platinum Card to a bevy of major shows, including a survey at the National Gallery in London that opened last December, a collateral event at the Venice Biennale, and currently a solo show in the heart of the Musée d’Orsay.
At Templon, Wiley’s French dealer, the artist has on view a large oval shaped painting that’ll stop you in your tracks. Related to the works that are still on view in Venice and titled Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye), the painting shows a Black man with his eyes closed, seemingly reflecting as he reclines on a white-sheeted bed amid throngs of flowers. Nearby is another 2022 bronze by the artist titled The Virgin Martyr Cecilia.
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Caroline Achaintre at Art:Concept
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews London-based artist Caroline Achaintre’s first love is tapestry and she’s long been working with the ancient technique of tufting, a quite physical form of craft that challenges assumptions of the delicate nature of so-called women’s work.
In her art, she creates large-scale, wall-hung works that ooze out various colored threads—yellows, golds, browns, blues, whites, oranges, and more—to great effect. In the new work on view here, Croaker (2022), two snake-like forms meet to create a mask-like shape.
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Maxwell Alexandre at A Gentil Carioca
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews One of the few true installation works taking over a booth at Paris+ is by Maxwell Alexandre, the rising Brazilian artist who will open a solo show at the Shed in New York next week. Titled “Novo Poder” (New Power), the artist’s signature sheets of paper hang from the ceiling, affixed by silver binder clips to create a slight labyrinth in the booth. (The installation is similar to his solo show at the Palais de Tokyo last year.)
The paper that Alexandre uses to make his art is intentionally chosen; called pardo, it also refers to a skin tone within Brazil’s racially stratified society. Around half the works depict various Black Brazilians whom Alexandre has encountered while growing up in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro.
The other portion of the works on view show large-scale empty gold frames. Together the works nod to the continued exclusion of not only the artworks of Black artists from museums, but to how Black people have historically not been considered the main audience for museums—or fairs for that matter.
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Peter Uka at Mariane Ibrahim
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews Created especially for Paris+ is this stellar piece by Peter Uka, who had a solo show at Mariane Ibrahim’s Chicago space in 2021 that then traveled to New York earlier this year for display at the Flag Art Foundation. Uka’s works often search for a certain nostalgia that point back toward the artist’s childhood in Nigeria, everyday moments of the kind that often aren’t recorded.
In Uka’s hands, these scenes are blown-up to the proportions of history painting, as with Skate (2022), showing the close-up of an old-school TV in which five Black people are seen joyously roller skating in a park. Their clothing is richly hued in ultra-saturated greens, blues, reds, and more that gives it the dynamism of the task at hand.
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Marlon de Azambúja at Instituto de Visión
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews In the Galeries Émergentes section is a magnificent sculpture by Marlon de Azambúja that dominates this intimate booth. A collection of string lightbulbs hangs from the ceiling against yellow-painted walls and a yellow carpet, which nod to the famed lightbulbs of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the specific hue of yellow that Hélio Oiticica used, respectively. These are no ordinary lightbulbs, though, as they don’t glimmer with light. Instead they’ve been concertized and are no longer function.
What then makes a lightbulb—its shape or its function?
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Pierre Alechinsky and Jean Dubuffet at Galerie Lelong & Co.
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The centerpiece of Lelong’s booth is none other than a major sculpture by Jean Dubuffet, L’Aléatoire (conceived 1967/1968 and executed in 2022). Standing nearly 10 feet tall, the work is done in Dubuffet’s signature style of abstracted figures with various shapes floating about in reds, blues, and whites. Also on view nearby is a stellar painting by the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, who is currently the subject of a solo show at the gallery’s avenue Matignon space, his first in France.
Just to the right of the Dubuffet is Pierre Alechinsky’s Pas autrement (1964), which was one of the final works he made in oil before switching to acrylic. Alechinsky, whose 95th birthday happens to coincide with the VIP preview of Paris+, made this expressionistic throng of devilish looking heads over a decade after CoBrA, the influential avant-garde movement that was based in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, disbanded in 1951. It still carries traces of the movement’s influence, which he once called his university. Ahead of its presentation here, it was cleaned and conserved; the work has never looked fresher.