The mood was decidedly upbeat at Art Basel Paris’s debut of Avant Première, a new ultra-exclusive invitation-only preview for select clients that opened Tuesday afternoon. Many dealers and collectors had worried how the event, slotted one day before the official VIP preview, would go. The consensus is that the opening, running from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., simply became the fair’s de-facto VIP preview day, condensed into just four hours.
“Everybody is here, so it’s not so much an avant. It is the premiere,” Thaddaeus Ropac told ARTnews. “And it went very well, as expected, because we knew everyone was coming. There was excitement building up for Paris, and all the big American collectors are here. It’s really a very strong start,” Ropac said, adding that the gallery was more surprised by the strong performance at Frieze London than the good sales in the City of Lights.
Ropac said it sold a 1953 Alberto Burri work for €4.2 million ($4.87 million), two George Baselitz works—Cowboy (2024) for €3.5 million ($4.06 million) and Geste Winken (1995) for €1.2 million ($1.39 million)—and a 2023 Antony Gormley for £600,000 ($804,000).
For Ropac, the vibe in Paris was distinctly faster-paced and more urgent than at Art Basel’s flagship fair in June. “Here people feel they want something, they make a decision,” he said.
Of course, not everyone was in attendance. That was the point, after all. Each gallery received only six invites, with each of those getting a plus-one. Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, said the smaller crowd was “definitely much better than last year.” “Last year, we couldn’t catch a breath,” he said.
The new format seems to have paid off for the mega-gallery. By the end of the opening, the gallery had already closed a deal on the crown jewel of the presentation: Gerhard Richter’s 1987 Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), for $23 million, the highest reported sale at the fair so far. The gallery sold 12 works at Avant Première, including Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attese (1964–65) for $3.5 million, and a new George Condo painting, Femme de Monaco, for $1.8 million.
The fair did not confirm numbers by press time, but several collectors and dealers estimated the number of people invited to the Grand Palais on Tuesday at 3,000 compared to the 6,000 invited to the now-regular First Choice VIP preview on Wednesday. Including plus-ones, that means the crowd on Tuesday could have reached 6,000 people, while Wednesday’s is likely to top 12,000.
Cutting the invites in half had some obvious benefits, notably keeping the aisles navigable and ensuring that usually swarmed booths like Gagosian (where a gaggle of visitors was ogling the Rubens) and Hauser didn’t get too packed.
In the first half hour of the preview, however, you could have been fooled: the line of VIPs waiting to get in stretched from the entrance of the Grand Palais down Avenue Winston Churchill almost all the way to the Champs-Élysées. When they got in, the booths were flooded. Eventually, things thinned out.
Collectors did turn out. Art Basel Paris has become the most international of the company’s fairs, while Miami, Basel, and Hong Kong have become more regionally focused. That much was obvious on the fair floor. There were, of course, the top Europeans, among them Bernard Arnault’s daughter Delphine, Dakis Joannou, Maja Hoffmann, and Tony Salamé. The Americans were out in force too, including Beth Rudin DeWoody, Craig Robins, Tom Hill, Bill Bell, Max Dolciger, Josh Abraham, the Mugrabis, and too many others to count. (Also spotted at White Cube was comedian Jerry Seinfeld). There were also numerous Asian collectors, including Purat Osathanugrah, the son of famed Thai collector Petch. Earlier on Tuesday, Osathanugrah held a press event for his soon-to-open museum, Dib Bangkok. (It bears mentioning that Leon Black, the disgraced financier and Jeffrey Epstein associate, was also in attendance. One European dealer asked ARTnews if he was allowed to sell to the collector, only half-joking.)
That said, several galleries told ARTnews that many of their clients were still flying into Paris, with plans to attend Wednesday’s VIP preview.
Xavier Hufkens, of the eponymous Belgian gallery, told ARTnews that Tuesday’s event was a “stellar beginning” and a “promising sign of what’s ahead.” Still, he said that while the hope with Avant Première was that it would foster more conversation at a less frenzied pace, that didn’t quite work out.
“It actually was still quite busy, and we had one conversation after another,” Hufkens said. “I still thought there were a lot of people, but we were very happy. It’s quite exciting, because you never know.”
Hufkens said that he sold a Tracey Emin painting for £1.2 million ($1.61 million), an Alice Neel painting from 1946 for $1 million, and a Thomas Houseago sculpture for $575,000.
Louise Bourgeois, UNTITLED, 2005
Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Other galleries were also selling in the million-dollar-plus region. Pace sold its 1918 Modigliani for just under $10 million, and Agnes Martin’s Children’s Playing (1999) for $4.5 million. David Zwirner sold a full eight pieces for over $1 million, including a sculpture by Ruth Asawa for $7.5 million, a painting by Martin Kippenberger for $5 million, a painting by Gerhard Richter for $3.5 million, a painting by Joan Mitchell for $3 million, and a painting on paper by Bridget Riley for $2.2 million.
Perrotin, located directly across from Hauser, also had a strong evening. The gallery said it sold eight works by Maurizio Cattelan, including a small animatronic sculpture of a drummer boy that sat on top of one of the booth’s walls and occasionally banged its drum, priced between €150,000 and €180,000 ($174,000–$209,000). It also sold a work by Takashi Murakami for $550,000.
Nahmad Contemporary created drama around their booth the old-fashioned way: they didn’t send out any preview PDFs to collectors. And so their shrine to Pablo Picasso—nine paintings from throughout his career presented in a museum-like space—was a surprise (though not a complete one to anyone who knows the Nahmad family’s long history with the artist’s work). And, in an unusual move at an art fair, no paintings were placed on the outside of the booth, only the artist’s name. You had to go in to savor them.
Two stood out: a portrait of Françoise Gilot, Femme assise dans un fauteuil (1947), that last sold at auction in 1997 at Sotheby’s New York for $1.9 million and has apparently been owned by the Nahmad family for decades, and Femme au corsage bleu (Dora Maar), 1941. The latter painting last changed hands at auction in 1989 in Sotheby’s New York, for $1.8 million, but a portrait of Dora Maar from the same time period sold at Christie’s New York in 2017 for $45 million.
The quality of some of the art on view was high enough to renew concerns that in creating the Paris fair, Art Basel cannibalized itself: will galleries stop saving their best material for Switzerland? Hauser’s Payot doesn’t see that happening anytime soon.
“Not that this doesn’t happen in Paris, but collectors come to Basel with a clear intention to buy,” he said, adding that the booths are bigger in Basel, allowing the gallery to show off its full program. “Paris is phenomenal,” he added, while noting that the city’s many attractions, from top restaurants to world-class museums, can be a distraction. “People come to Paris for Paris.”
The shorter opening hours on Tuesday also meant some visitors didn’t make it upstairs to the Emerging and Premise sections. But even so, several of the dealers presenting there told ARTnews that they sold works, or had pieces on hold.
Tanoa Sasraku, and one of her artworks at Art Basel Paris.
Courtesy the artist and Vardaxoglou Gallery, London
Alex Vardaxoglou, of the namesake Vardaxoglou Gallery in London, which he started in his living room five years ago, said he was thrilled with his first fair day. He claimed to be showing the largest artwork at Art Basel: a monumental, five-meter-tall monolithic, free-standing sculpture by UK artist Tanoa Sasraku called Mascot (2025), priced at £185,000 ($248,000). Sasraku is also featured in a new solo show at the ICA in London, and Vardaxoglou said he is very close to placing her monumental piece, which is about her late father. He also sold most of the artist’s smaller works at the preview.
“It’s my first time at Art Basel, and I feel like this is the best kind of possible start,” he said.
Belgian art collector Alain Servais made a beeline for the upstairs galleries and found that many dealers had made a lot of presales. “One thing dealers told me, that they won’t tell you,” Servais said, “is that their pre-sales were better than expected. They were surprised.”
The Avant Première also extended the length of the Paris fair to another half day, which can mean some added costs for galleries, but most said they appreciated the extra time. The early opening also brought the fair dates closer to Frieze for foreign—and especially American—travelers trying to fit in both cities.
“I think everybody was happy,” Servais said.
Upstairs, the good news kept coming at London galleries Nicoletti and Seventeen, who split the costs of their combined, standout booth. Oswaldo Nicoletti, founder of his eponymous gallery, also echoed others who said visitors were more international at the Paris fair than at Frieze last week.
“Both galleries have made good sales already, to very good collections,” Nicoletti said. The overall pace stayed “relaxed” at the Tuesday premiere, but “very productive and qualitative. I think tomorrow will be a little more hectic,” he observed.
Both galleries are showing a must-see presentation of installation, sculpture, sound, and painted works. Nicoletti sold one work by Abbas Zahedi for £15,000 ($20,000), and a painted “altarpiece” on carved wood by Josèfa Ntjam is on hold. At Seventeen, David Hoyland said he sold two Justin Fitzpatricks for €16,000 ($18,600) “instantly.”
Still, broadly speaking the current art market tends to be on the slower side, Hoyland said. “The deals are still there. It just takes longer. It feels like everyone’s realized that they don’t have to panic and they can think about what they want and have a conversation, and actually look at the work, and still get it,” he continued. “So this ‘market cooling’ just means people get to think about stuff more.”
New York-based art advisor Tanja Weingartner said the new, more deliberate pace is a good thing.
“For art advisors, crises like this one are an opportunity. This is the time to buy. This is the time to really go into the deep end,” Weingartner told ARTnews. “When the market is frothy, you don’t want to mess around. So now all the gamblers and the party people are gone, and you can actually focus on artists’ perspectives and concerns and have a conversation again.”
