Highlights from Art Basel Paris

With standout works by Salman Toor, Louise Bourgeois and Chantal Joffe and satellite fairs across the city – here are the highlights from Art Basel Paris, before it was cancelled

“They looted the wine shop,” one woman says to her fur-coated comrade. They’re standing in front of a cubist painting which, the gallerist interrupts to tell them confidentially, is priced at £950,000. “Not the worst idea.” During the final weeks of October, artists, curators, gallerists, buyers, press and guests – characters alike – swarm the Grand Palais for Art Basel Paris. Glasses of Ruinart in hand at 23 euros a pop, they peruse the maze of modern art, illuminated by the moments of sunshine that refract through the space’s greenhouse roof as was intended when it was built at the end of the 19th century for the exhibition of the beaux-arts. 

Booths in the hundreds are carefully curated by galleries across the world. Names beneath works are known – Giacometti, de Kooning, Kusama. Empty champagne flutes are abandoned at the foot of Debuffets and Baselitzs. The Palais’ mezzanine floor is dedicated to young and rising talents, among them Yann Stéphane Bisso, Thào Nguyên Phan, Anna Clegg. Paintings, prints and photographs depict bodies, faces, still lifes and abstract shapes, as sculptures are fashioned from a vast array of objects: vintage phones in John Giorno’s dial-a-poem, a garlic press in a hanging installation by Laura Lima; a stuffed toy whale on a swing by Cosima von Bonin; a rat so real it looks like taxidermy wearing what looks like an explosive toolkit by Adel Abdessemed; a giant coagulate of wine bottle corks by Jeff Koons, which was quite horrifying.  

In the middle of a booth in the atrium of the Palais, someone has parked up their rollator. On its seat, a maroon Goyard bag – a colour match to the frame’s paintwork. “Wow! And who’s this one by?” a third party asks the gallerist, pointing to the rollator, a sculpture in and of itself. “Oh that, um, that one’s not for sale,” the gallerist says. A man in Hockney glasses reappears from a discrete partition, reclaiming his frame. Priceless. It’s a convivial celebration of people, creative produce and purchase. 

Outside, tensions in the city are high as frustrated people – young and old – are taking to the streets en masse, demanding better circumstances for education and a handle on ever-increasing living costs. Amid this discordance, in an environment decorated with thousands of artworks worth unthinkable sums of money, each piece reflects the urgency for the arts, and accessibility to them. Depictions of human experience, sociopolitical nuance, geography, turmoil, collectivism, jouissance, history and future are everywhere. 

Basel Paris’ programme was full with talks by artists and experts including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ibrahim Mahama and Zanele Muholi. A short walk away from the fair, over at the Palais d’Iéna, filmmaker Alice Diop curates an exhibition of works for the fair, presented by Miu Miu. Satellites partake in the plenty with installations of work by Leo Kaspar and Nicolas Zanoni and Cerith Wyn Evans at Dover Street Market Paris, and Nigemi Marcus-Bello at Acne Paper Palais Royal. Meanwhile, Reference Studios held salons, installations, films and performances by artists, photographers, musicians and makers including Miles Greenberg, Gabriel Moses and Eartheater. The festivities went on: Silencio, the famed Parisian club designed by David Lynch, hosted performances and parties from Space Arika to MJ Harper – some finishing as late as 6am, after-parties only then just starting. 

While pockets of the city remain abuzz with art and culture to thank, celebrating a market that sells in stratospheric sums is an undeniably complicated matter. Subsequently, Basel executives decided to call off the fair over the weekend as protests continued. Here are some of the best bits from Art Basel Paris. 

Kiss, 2026, by Georgia Gardner Gray at Regen Projects (Lead Image)

There’s a ghostlyness to this artwork by American painter, sculptor and performance artist Georgia Gardner Gray. It’s figurative and surreal and dreamlike with its floating orbs. Titled Kiss, the painting is part of the artist’s 2026 series of vibrant and contemporary scenes that touch on ideas of social construct, archetype and folklore, first displayed in an exhibition, titled Stones, at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.

Living Room, 2024, by Salmon Toor at Luhring Augustine 

Painted in 2024 by Pakistani-born, New York-based artist Salman Toor, Living Room, like much of Toor’s work, investigates vulnerability, intimacy and the realities of life for queer immigrants. The painting itself, created using oil on canvas, is small in scale at 27.9 x 35.6 cm, only adding to the sense that we’re peeking almost voyeuristically into someone’s private space, holding an eyepiece up to their world, illuminated by side lamps – a glimpse of city life, a familiarly small flat, friends or lovers living together, a plate on the table, a bottle on the floor. Toor’s work is currently on display in a solo show at the Courtauld.

Self-Portrait on a Beach in St Leonards, 2026, by Chantal Joffe at Victoria Miro

In Self-Portrait on a Beach in St Leonards (2026), American artist Chantal Joffe captures the charm of the English seaside, from its groynes to its greyish sand. Joffe’s figurative paintings – often of her mother, daughter, her siblings, her friends, at times herself – are marvellous in their scale and gestural stroke. She depicts people through essence and expression, psychological depth, over exactness.

Untitled, 2026, by Arjan Martins at A Gentil Carioca

Arjan Martins is a Brazilian artist whose work often looks at concepts of migration, the diaspora and the displacement of bodies in struggle and power imbalance. This painting is one from a 2026 series of untitled works that continues to explore colonialism and diaspora in Brazil. On one hand the composition feels celebratory and joyous, musical, but in light of the knowledge that the artist has spent his life examining the geopolitics and history the artist has spent his life examining through the visual arts, is infinitely more nuanced.

Blue Confrontation, 2006, by Louise Bourgeois at Hauser & Wirth

Tiny and easy to miss, tucked around a little corner and next to a large Jenny Holzer sculpture, Louise Bourgeois’ Blue Confrontation – watercolour, gouache, ink and etching on paper – is almost meditative. It was painted in her prolific final decade, as part of her ongoing investigation into psychological confrontation and the facing of one’s own fears, introspectively thinking about memory, healing, the self.

Au Commencement: La Pacte 2024, by Omar Ba at Galerie Templon

Senegalese artist Omar Ba is known for his dark, layered and textural paintings that subtly investigate geopolitics, conflict, post-colonial relationships and African folklore. Ba often builds up colour on top of dark backgrounds, which become a challenging and masterful symbol or metaphor of the histories he explores. This work, Au Commencement: La Pacte 2024, created using a mix of acrylic paint, oil, pen and Tipp-Ex, is part of a series that explores the myth of Kaïdara, which negotiates in destiny, moral discipline, power and spirituality. 

Two Cheese Cubes, 2011, by Wayne Thiebaud at Acquavella Galleries

Rendered in thick impasto, signature to his style, this work of Wayne Thiebaud’s is not dissimilar from much of his still life painting, often of quotidian food spreads. Here, the fromage speaks for itself. We are, after all, in France.

Swimmers at High Tide, 2026, by Katherine Bradford at Kaufman Repetto

Togetherness, community, humanity. Bradford’s painting, Swimmers at High Tide, part of a solo exhibition at Kaufman Repetto gallery, titled Lifeguards, is free and nonobjective, allowing for much interpretation through form and colour. It feels three-dimensional in depth, inviting, as safe as a local Lido, and yet referential of water as a site of connection, and its centricity to human life, across artistic movements and periods.