With around 200 booths, Art Basel Paris brings together major works and emerging perspectives at the Grand Palais through October 25. While the fair's high-profile market offerings draw attention, several standout presentations are found upstairs, where artists explore memory, identity, technology and material in unexpected ways.
Painting, sculpture and layered histories
At Ortuzar, mid-1970s abstract paintings by Miyoko Ito use geometric forms and finely layered colour to create luminous gradients. Xavier Hufkens presents Tatiana Trouvé's bench-like sculpture, cast in aluminium from remnants of earlier works and studio materials.
Yares Art features Helen Frankenthaler's Ivory Rose (1987), where vivid strokes of magenta, orange and green stand out against a stained ground. In another historical presentation, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery brings Derek Jarman's tar paintings from 1989-91, combining tar with personal and found objects.
Upstairs, Cem Örgen's works at The Pill transform industrial design into reflections on bodily vulnerability and the structures of contemporary life. Carl-Edouard Keïta looks to Côte d'Ivoire's post-independence era, drawing on fashion and cultural references to reconsider how the period is represented.
Art engaging with the present
A shared presentation by Chapter NY and Soft Opening connects Mary Stevenson's dreamlike paintings with Ebun Sodipo's layered archival works, linking personal and collective memory to possible futures. At Seventeen, Nina Davies examines how dance circulates in the age of AI, using sculptural installations and staged narratives.
Meriem Bennani's A Knife uses a suspended blade and a simple moving mechanism to create an unsettling, darkly humorous encounter. Meanwhile, Eli Kerr's presentation pairs abstract sculptures in varied materials with a stepped, black-painted structure inspired by a ziggurat.
Together, these booths show how contemporary art can turn history, technology and everyday materials into new ways of seeing. Such cross-disciplinary approaches may help shape a more open and imaginative cultural landscape.
