France finally has a fair at the Grand Palais again in the form of Art Basel Paris, which made its debut outing at the iconic structure after two editions in a temporary space. As sunlight shone through the building’s glass roof, crowds of people packed into the aisles, braving long lines to get in.
Dealers reported notable sales during the first day, with many gallerists expecting more to follow throughout the week. A few of the 195 exhibiting galleries did opt to bring more conceptually minded work—a rarity for any art fair—and that caused them to stand out among the crowd. Others sought to introduce their artists to a European audience.
As Mary Sabbatino, vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong & Co., told ARTnews on opening day, “The Grand Palais is magical—you’re bathed in light and in art history. [Art Basel Paris] is more historical than Miami and more up-to-the-minute and diverse than Basel. Paris has its own energy and identity.”
Below, here some of the best booths at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Paris, which runs through Sunday.
Hunter Reynolds at P·P·O·W
On an exterior wall of P·P·O·W’s booth is one of the fair’s most poignant works, Hunter Reynolds’s Ray Navarro’s Bed of Mourning Flowers (1990/2018), whose title refers to one of the many artists who died of AIDS-related complications. (Ray Navarro is best remembered for dressing up as Jesus Christ at the ACT UP protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral months before his death in 1990.) Reynolds’s seemingly simple work contains snapshots of flowers bouquets that have been stitched together into a tapestry. Those flowers are, in fact, the ones that Reynolds would purchase ahead of a funeral of memorial service for a friend lost to AIDS. At the time, these deli flowers were especially ubiquitous in New York, and because of the vast number of artists and friends who died due to governmental indifference to the AIDS crisis, they were an economical way to mark these people’s passing. That was especially true of those lost whose families, ashamed to have a gay son, refused to give their child dignity in death by hosting a funeral. In many ways, this is Reynolds’s AIDS Quilt.