The 10 Best Booths at Art Basel Paris 2025

When is an art fair VIP day not an art fair VIP day? When it’s an “Avant Première,” according to Art Basel. On Tuesday, October 21st, Art Basel Paris 2025 opened its doors a day before its standard VIP “First Choice” day slot, welcoming the most select invitees to the Grand Palais.

According to outgoing fair director Clément Delépine, the decision came after feedback from galleries about “too many people” on the “First Choice” day. “I understand that’s a good problem to have when you run an art fair, but the galleries were like, ‘we can’t talk to everyone at the same time,’” Delépine told Artsy in an interview. “We wanted to offer them an opportunity to invite their most important clients and take time to have conversations.”

The move was announced just weeks before the fair opened, sending the art world rumor mill into overdrive about what the day would look like. Would the event be the opposite of the traditional Art Basel VIP day scrum? And how much of that ever-elusive buzz would there be?

The answer to these questions, it turns out, is that the Tuesday slot felt very much like the Wednesday slot: a bustling, busy, and yes, buzzy affair. While it took a little longer for the cavernous Grand Palais to feel busy, it had gotten there by the afternoon. Usually, some Art Basel booths are too congested to browse—this time, that was certainly rarer.

Also noticeable was serious dealmaking. Several advisors, dealers, and collectors Artsy spoke to on the ground said that the intensity of transactions and discussions had been taken up a few notches compared to years past. “An incredible start in Paris today,” Brussels dealer Xavier Hufkens reported to Artsy. “A stellar beginning—and a promising sign of what’s ahead.” This was backed up as sales began to flow in, led by a hefty $23 million Gerhard Richter painting at Hauser & Wirth’s booth.

Comparisons with Basel’s flagship June fair in Basel have been a major focus in the run-up to this Paris fair: The Richter transaction is well in excess of the top reported sale from Basel earlier this year, and it certainly felt as though there was an increased proportion of international collectors compared to the June fair.

This year’s edition of Art Basel Paris features some 206 galleries from 41 countries, with 25 newcomers among them. Galleries in the main section of the fair flexed the depth and breadth of their rosters, predominately with group presentations ranging from 20th-century masterworks through to leading ultra-contemporary names. Other sections at the fair are Emergence, which spotlights emerging galleries and artists, and Premise, which features singular curatorial proposals.

The fair, which opened at 3 p.m., veered into a celebratory spirit after just a couple of hours, when buckets of champagne on ice could be seen on the booth desks and in the aisles. From the reported transactions rolling through from galleries, it was little surprise that many were in the mood to toast.

Here, we round up the 10 best booths from Art Basel Paris 2025.

Booth B33

Peter Paul Rubens, John Currin, Jadé Fadojutimi, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Jenny Saville, Georg Baselitz, Fadojutimi, Ellen Gallagher, Mark Grotjahn, Simon Hantaï, Brice Marden, Sterling Ruby, Cy Twombly, Christo, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Rachel Whiteread, and Christopher Wool

It’s no surprise to report that Gagosian’s booth was one of the most popular during the fair’s opening hours. But what was perhaps less expected was the bold choice of artworks from different eras in the mega-gallery’s presentation. Anchoring this was the fair’s most talked-about artwork: Peter Paul Rubens’s The Virgin and Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (c. 1611–14). It’s a huge departure for a gallery known for its contemporary program.

The recently discovered painting, which was last sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2020 for $7 million, rewrote Art Basel Paris’s rulebook. The fair usually only allows works from the 20th century onwards, so Gagosian was granted a rare exemption. The painting reflects the artist’s early engagement with devotional imagery and hints at the grandeur of his later Marie de’ Medici cycle at the Louvre.

Its tightly composed scene, glowing with Rubens’s signature vitality, made an interesting counterpoint to the modern and contemporary works surrounding it. Highlights included John Currin’s Supermoon (2025), a caustic yet lyrical riff on Raphael’s Three Graces (1503–5); Auguste Rodin’s bronze Le Baiser (The Kiss) (ca. 1905–10), an embodiment of erotic intensity in motion; and Pablo Picasso’s Nu accoudé (1961), a playful deconstruction of form inspired by African sculpture. Nearby, Alexander Calder’s Red Shapes and Yellow Wires (1975) floats in delicate balance, a classic example of the artist’s mobile sculptures.

Booth G12

With works by Lea Lublin and Esther Ferrer

Recently, Spanish gallery 1 Mira Madrid launched a new project working with artists on their archives. Here, the gallery shares a space with that new project, entitled 2 Mira Archiv, in perhaps the most formally interesting presentation at the fair. The result is a booth of both contemporary works and archival materials that interrogates how these two artistic areas reflect one another.

Central to the presentation is the complete archive of pioneering Polish artist Lea Lublin (1929–99), whose performance and conceptual works challenged notions of the body, drawing on feminism and semiotics. Hung haphazardly and placed on shelves on the back wall of the booth are papers, photographs, folders, and ephemera from the artist’s personal materials, assembled like a compendium of biographical information.

“We organize the archive; we pick everything; we put it in quarantine, and then we start to digitize, put everything in the right place, take the correct pictures,” explained a gallery staffer, who, along with her team, was dressed in a stylish black coat and cap bearing the gallery’s logo. The complete contents of the archive are priced at €600,000 ($696,047).

Accompanying this presentation are recent geometric abstract paintings by Spanish artist Esther Ferrer, a similarly pioneering figure in the minimalist, performance, and conceptual movements of the early 1970s.

Booth C21

With works by Ali Banisadr, Jules de Balincourt Miquel Barceló, Alvaro Barrington, Georg Baselitz, Oliver Beer, Joseph Beuys, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Burri, Jordan Casteel, Tony Cragg, Lucio Fontana, Adrian Ghenie, Antony Gormley, Simon Hantaï, Hans Josephsohn Donald Judd, Martha Jungwirth, Alex Katz, Imi Knoebel, Wolfgang Laib, Lee Kang-So, Robert Longo, Liza Lou, Irving Penn, Elizabeth Peyton, Robert Rauschenberg, Daniel Richter, Tom Sachs, David Salle, Oskar Schlemmer, Raqib Shaw, Joan Snyder, Pierre Soulages Sturtevant, Emilio Vedova, Andy Warhol, Erwin Wurm, Yan Pei-Ming, and Zadie Xa

For powerhouse gallery Thaddaeus Ropac, the timing of this year’s Art Basel Paris couldn’t have been better. The booth’s standout work, the transfer-on-glaze work Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba (1983) by Robert Rauschenberg, is featured 100 years after the artist’s birth (his birthday is on October 22nd). “We always kept it waiting for the right moment to bring it up,” senior director José Castañal told Artsy. “Now is the right moment.”

Indeed, even without the additional context, the work was proving to be quite the attention-grabber. The work reprints Jacques-Louis David’s famed painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800–01) of the infamous general atop a horse, layering it with painterly gestures and Rauschenberg’s own photographs of urban scenes and architectural fragments. Its title is a palindrome, a quote famously misattributed to Napoleon referring to his exile on the island of Elba.

Elsewhere, the gallery’s jam-packed booth contains highlights in every corner, from Elizabeth Peyton’s famed depictions of British Princes Harry and William, to Alberto Burri’s Sacco e oro (1953), a fabric work that combines raw burlap and shimmering gold leaf in a single charged surface. That work sold for €4.2 million ($4.87 million) on the fair’s opening day, capping a strong day of sales for the dealer.

Booth H16

With works by Françoise Pétrovitch, Laurent Proux, Stefan Rinck, Moffat Takadiwa, and Xie Lei

Parisian gallery Semiose presents a thoughtfully put-together booth of artists on its roster. An immediate eye-catcher is a wall of luminous new paintings by Chinese artist Xie Lei depicting ambiguous scenes of intertwined figures.

In Fabula 1 (2025), for instance, two people bathed in electric blue lean toward each other in an intimate gesture, their faces illuminated by an otherworldly light. Through his fluid brushwork and glowing palette, Lei’s paintings transform the act of connection into tender, dissolving images. The artist, who also shows internationally with Sies + Hoke and HdM Gallery, has also had a solo exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

“You never know exactly what’s happening in his scenes,” said Frédérique Buttin Valentin, the gallery’s director. “There are no exact genders, and it’s really another world.”

Also of note in the gallery’s booth are new figurative bronze sculptures by Françoise Pétrovitch. Here, the French artist, best known for her painting, presents forms of solitary young women, often with closed eyes or obscured faces caught in everyday actions such as sitting or dog walking. These small, enigmatic works also contain creepy, fairytale motifs, such as large bones and ogresses.

Booth M46

With works by Mira Mann

At first glance, the booth of Cologne tastemaker DREI seems to take us backstage into a dressing room featuring a mirror populated with ephemera.

Presented in the Emergence sector, dedicated to emerging artists and galleries, the panoramic installation is in fact Mira Mann’s objects of the wind (2024), a densely and intricately arranged setting in which drums, books, and photography tell a layered story. The work pays tribute to the Korean contract nurses who migrated to West Germany between 1966 and 1973. By showcasing significant objects in their narrative, the artist reinterprets their collective practice of pungmul—a tradition of drumming, dancing, and singing—as an act of care, protest, and belonging.

Rooted in archival research and conversations with former nurses, Mann’s installation traces the women’s stories alongside Korean folktales such as Barigongju (Princess Bari) and Shim Cheong, connecting mythic journeys of devotion to the realities of migration and labor. The sound of drumming, played through boomboxes, emerges as both a gesture of solidarity and a form of sonic resistance, countering the stereotype of quiet, compliant workers.

“They are known for these kinds of dressing room mirrors,” said Drei director Dennis W. Hochköppeler, referring to the artist’s work. “This work is the largest of its kind.”

objects of the wind (2024) was originally featured in the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, and is priced here at €65,000 ($75,405).

Booth A46

With works by Tetsumi Kudo, César, Eric Baudart, Anita Molinero, Hélène Delprat, Julien Des Monstiers, Richard Nonas, Zoran Music, and Simon Hantaï.

Parisian stalwart Galerie Christophe Gaillard’s focused presentation showcases both milestones of post-war art and contemporary experimentation, bringing together artists central to the gallery’s program.

An immediate standout is Simon Hantaï’s Tabula (1975), which foregrounds the artist’s famed folded-canvas method which has had an enduring impact on European abstraction. Further highlights include a selection of works by French sculptor César, who radically transforms vehicles and junk materials. In Compression (1978), for instance, the artist folds and flattens pipes, bumpers, and other moped parts into a cube that resembles an abstract collage of crumpled planes and bright factory paints.

Also of note is a group of recent paintings by Hélène Delprat, who recently closed a solo survey at Fondation Maeght. A particular highlight is the diptych TODAY XXV (2025), where she combines two visual vocabularies that recur throughout her practice—chaotic figuration and strict geometric order. On the left, a grotesque, animated figure seems caught, like a volcano, mid-eruption. The right panel, in contrast, presents a rigid grid of red and black, a disciplined counterpoint to the emotional turbulence beside it.

Booth C16

Misheck Masamvu, Clive van den Berg, William Kentridge, Sue Williamson, David Goldblatt, Ghada Amer, Zineb Sedira, Leonardo Drew, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Kapwani Kiwanga, Mikhael Subotzky, Atta Kwami, Yinka Shonibare, and El Anatsui.

Goodman Gallery is renowned for its specialty in artists from Africa and its diaspora, and here, it showcases its leading artists to the nines.

Central to its presentation are El Anatsui’s sculptural installation Eto (2025), composed of bottle tops and metallic fragments, and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s pencil-on-wood panel work Scene 19 (2024). The latter, hung on the exterior of the booth, reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of memory and selfhood through a scene of a woman standing in a natural landscape, stretching a translucent sheet between two poles.

The booth also features a group of works by William Kentridge, including the sculpture Fat Cat (2025), a bronze of a literal fat cat with a simplified, geometric face standing proudly atop a wooden box—a political statement made with the artist’s signature wit. Additional highlights include paintings by Ghanaian modernist Atta Kwami, such as Untitled (Red, White, Blue, Black) (2008), a vibrant composition of intersecting planes and rhythmic color.

“The quality of attendees at Art Basel Paris is unparalleled,” founder and director Liza Essers noted of the opening day. “The fair continues to provide a platform for Goodman Gallery to bring important international artists to a truly global stage, and today has been incredibly effective for serious conversations. Kudos to the Art Basel team for facilitating a space and time to enable important exchange with major collectors.”

Booth: C39

With works by Kim Yun Shin, Jae-Eun Choil, Haegue Yang, Jina Park, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Daniel Boyd, Gala Porras-Kim, Korakrit Arunanondchai, and Elmgreen & Dragset

Heavyweight gallery Kukje is known for platforming some of Korea’s most well-known and exciting artists, but this booth is a reminder of its international scope.

“Since the inaugural edition of the fair, Kukje Gallery has been the sole Korean gallery to participate in Art Basel Paris,” a gallery spokesperson told Artsy (though several international galleries with Korean outposts are in attendance). “Through these diverse perspectives, Kukje Gallery aims to reaffirm its role as a vital bridge within the international contemporary art landscape.”

At the center of the presentation is Song of My Soul 2006–145 (2006) by Kim Yun Shin, a pioneer in modern Korean sculpture who was overlooked until recently. Kim, in this painting, uses bold color and texture to express vitality and spiritual unity, in line with her characteristic awe for nature. Jae-Eun Choi’s When We First Met (2024), meanwhile, reflects on cycles of life and order in the universe through a composition of pressed wildflowers collected near her Kyoto studio.

Also featured in the booth is Haegue Yang’s mixed-media wall piece Wired Feelers and Dichoptic Viewing – Trustworthy #370 (2018), which reconfigures the patterned linings of security envelopes into intricate collages.

Elsewhere, the booth shows works by international artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset, Korakrit Arunanondchai, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Booth C15

Woth works by Alma Allen, Laís Amaral, Lucas Arruda, Patricia Ayres, Alvaro Barrington, Neïl Beloufa, Paloma Bosquê, Heidi Bucher, Varda Caivano, Guglielmo Castelli, Adriano Costa, Julien Creuzet, Bendt Eyckermans, Sonia Gomes, Eunnam Hong, Leah Ke Yi Zheng, Sanam Khatibi, Vojtěch Kovařík, Mimi Lauter, Patricia Leite, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Paulo Monteiro, Paulo Nazareth, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Antonio Obá, Precious Okoyomon, Lygia Pape, Rosana Paulino, Marina Perez Simão, Solange Pessoa, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Maaike Schoorel, Paula Siebra, Marcos Siqueira, Kishio Suga, and Pol Taburet.

Most galleries at large art fairs opt for group-led presentations, but few do them as well as Mendes Wood DM. The São Paulo–founded gallery put forth a mix of Brazilian and global voices, emphasizing conceptual rigor, material invention, and critical dialogue. The booth underscores the gallery’s founding principles: art as a platform for radical thought and cross-cultural exchange.

The gallery’s presentation ranges from handmade, intimate pieces to bold and monumental works. Highlights include works by artists such as Sonia Gomes—whose textile-based sculptures reclaim the expressive potential of humble craft materials—and Julien Creuzet, whose hanging green and purple sculpture, composed of fibrous intertwined fabrics, forms a loose, elongated structure that resembles a cascading cluster of leaves.

At the center of the booth is another standout: Paulo Nimer Pjota’s large painting Jorge e Pai (2025). Rendered almost entirely in shades of blue, the work centers on a seated, nude female figure holding a child, a contemporary echo of the traditional Madonna and child motif. The figures here are outlined and textured with fine dotted and stippled marks, giving the impression of embroidery.

Also giving passersby cause to stop on the fair’s opening day were an assortment of suspended soft sculptures made from plush toys, fabric, and organic materials by Precious Okoyomon, who currently has a solo show at the gallery’s Paris space. “They are made with teddy bears that she collects, sources, and taxidermied wings on,” explained associate director Luiz Guilherme Rodriguez. Hanging delicately, these hybrid sculpted creatures blur the line between tenderness and violence.

Booth B25

With works by Marcel Broodthaers, Giuseppe Penone, Anri Sala, Nairy Baghramian, Thomas Struth, Tacita Dean, Julie Mehretu, ÁLVARO URBANO, and Steve McQueen.

Marian Goodman Gallery’s presentation is the kind of art fair booth that reminds visitors how impressive Art Basel’s galleries are. The refined selection of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations on view reaffirms the gallery’s decades-long engagement with international and institution-shaping practices.

“This marks the 30th anniversary of the gallery in Paris, and we are delighted to present works by artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Giuseppe Penone, Anri Sala, Nairy Baghramian, Thomas Struth, Tacita Dean, and Julie Mehretu, who have been central to the gallery program,” managing partner Junette Teng told Artsy.