This year’s Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais, offering a sweeping look at what the art world has to say right now. It’s more than an exhibition; it’s a barometer. Who is the art market really speaking to, and what does that conversation look like in 2025? The crowd, dressed in oversized sunglasses and pointed pumps, often feels as much a part of the show as the works themselves. Beyond the Palais, Basel spills into the city’s streets and nightclubs, blurring the line between fair and urban performance.
Alongside the main fair, the Public Program will see in-situ installations transform nine Parisian monuments. The fair unfolds across three sectors. Galeries traces a journey from early 20th-century icons to today’s contemporary vanguard, featuring Parisian fixtures like galerie frank elbaz alongside newcomers such as New York’s 47 Canal. Emergence hums with promise, offering a whisper of what’s next. Premise comprises nine curatorial projects that weave Paris’s historical backdrop into the fair itself. Together, they form a triptych of the art world’s past, present, and future, with the desire to leave a dent in your bank balance.
Helen Marten, ’30 Blizzards‘
Turner Prize winner Helen Marten brings her surreal, colorful world to the stage in collaboration with Miu Miu and Art Basel. Known for her expansive practice spanning writing, sculpture, video, and drawing, Marten enters performance for the first time, exploring infinity, loops, and circularity. The title references thirty characters depicted within the work, turning the number into a marker of time and motion.
Created with opera director Fabio Cherstich and London-based sound artist Beatrice Dillon, the piece will be presented as part of the Public Program at Palais d’Iéna, free and open to all. Expect an incoming storm, one that sweeps you up in its choreography and drops you somewhere new.
30 Blizzards
Courtesy of MIU MIU, photography by T-SPACE STUDIO
Codex Magazine at Pigalle Country Club
Codex Magazine lands at Pigalle Country Club on Friday, October 24th. Come for words and images by young artists, for young artists. The project began as a fanzine and has since exploded in scale and influence. Expect an interview with the club’s own managers, and only 100 copies available. The night also doubles as a listening party for artist Ragg’s new EP. Dance it out among cheetah-print walls and freshly printed pages.
Nolan Simon at 47 Canal
Body parts, glimpses of skin, and subtle gestures. Nolan Simon paints cropped moments into small symphonies of oil and humor. After debuting at Art Basel last June, the artist returns to 47 Canal’s booth with his same sharp wit. His Punch and Judy series, filled with champagne glasses and cucumbers, continues his play with perception and representation.
Drawing from photography, Simon reinterprets real-life stills, channeling Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” into painterly form. His works twist the notion of the poor image through traditional portraiture—subtle, ironic, and self-aware.
Punch and Judy series
Courtesy of NOLAN SIMON
tank-gong-bell, 2025
Courtesy of NICOLETTI
Abbas Zahedi at Nicoletti
English artist Abbas Zahedi, trained in medicine with an MA in Contemporary Photography and Philosophy, merges sound, sculpture, and spirituality. Showing with Nicoletti, Zahedi builds cyclical, sonic environments that tune the body to their rhythm.
His pared-down installations embrace absence, asking viewers to listen beyond the work itself, into the environments where loss reverberates. With works held in the Tate’s permanent collection, Zahedi’s presence at Basel marks another step in a practice that blurs the line between the physical and the philosophical.
Paul Sietsema at Marian Goodman Gallery
If you find yourself in the 3rd arrondissement this week, between cafés and post-Basel wine, stop by the Marian Goodman Gallery to see Paul Sietsema’s latest. Showing outside the fair, Sietsema continues his study of art as communication, reflecting on the economy of meaning during a week steeped in cultural currency.
From forged Pollock knockoffs stamped with fake provenance to muted CDs sealed under paint, Sietsema probes the material and the conceptual in equal measure. Two 16mm films round out the show, examining how media and materials overlap and what they reveal about each other.
Sans titre, 1923
Courtesy of GALERIE ERIC MOUCHET
Ella Bergmann-Michel at Galerie Eric Mouchet
A key figure in the German avant-garde, Ella Bergmann-Michel (1896–1971) appears in the Premise section. Her works translate sound into form, treating text as composition. A former Bauhaus student who left the institution for being “too restrictive,” Bergmann-Michel’s early experiments are essential viewing for fans of Futurism and Dada.
Her geometric yet tender works are dreamlike, balancing precision and abstraction. Post-war, she evolved from Abstract Expressionism to Op Art, later moving into film and illusion, creating mirages that still feel startlingly contemporary.
Gina Fischli at Chapter NY & Soft Opening
New York’s Chapter NY and London’s Soft Opening join forces for their Basel debut, presenting Swiss artist Gina Fischli. Her runway of animal sculptures transforms familiar domestic figures into cheeky, smushed-together forms that are both humorous and haunting.
Known for exploring pets as symbols of wealth and affection, Fischili builds from fabric scraps and found materials, animating the discarded into stories of desire and attachment.
Antonie, 2025
Courtesy of SOFT OPENING
Stephanie LaCava at Hotel Grand Amour
Author Stephanie LaCava appears in conversation with writer and critic Alice Blackhurst on October 25th, hosted by After 8 Books at Hotel Grand Amour. With her new book Nymph fresh on the shelves, the discussion promises to be one of the week’s highlights.
LaCava, who began her career at American Vogue, has become a leading voice in the New York literary scene. Her novels capture intimacy and estrangement through the rhythm of a thriller, exploring the search for truth and connection. Dinner and a drink at Grand Amour are the perfect way to close the evening.
Kayode Ojo at the Galerie Balice Hertling
Balice Hertling presents Black Swan Moan, the second solo exhibition by New York–based artist Kayode Ojo, on view in Paris this season. Known for his shimmering sculptures made from ready-made objects of luxury and desire, Ojo transforms fast-fashion finds into intricate compositions that blur the line between elegance and excess.
His work examines the allure of consumer culture—how objects seduce, elevate, and ultimately reveal our social fantasies. The exhibition invites viewers into a world of mirrored surfaces and fragile glamour, where beauty and materialism intertwine. With Black Swan Moan, Ojo continues to assert himself as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art, turning the language of consumption into poetry.
Self-portrait, 1996; THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, New York, Gift of JO CAROLE and RONALD S. LAUDER and COMMITTEE ON PAINTING
Courtesy of GERHARD RICHTER 2022 (03032020)
Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton
This landmark retrospective is dedicated to Gerhard Richter and traces over sixty years of the artist’s groundbreaking work. Featuring 275 works, from early photo-based paintings to vast abstractions and glass sculptures, the exhibition offers the most comprehensive insight yet into Richter’s restless pursuit of image, memory, and perception.
Curated by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota, it transforms the museum into a living archive of artistic evolution, where realism and abstraction continually blur. Following major retrospectives of figures like Basquiat and Rothko, this exhibition underscores Richter’s enduring influence on contemporary art and his ability to question the essence of seeing itself. A true Paris highlight, it stands as both a celebration and a meditation on the power of painting to capture the complexities of human experience.
Objets Trouvés at the Beaux-Arts de Paris
Harry Nuriev unveils Objets Trouvés at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, presented by Galerie Sultana in collaboration with Aurélie Julien Collectible as part of Art Basel Paris. The large-scale installation transforms the historic chapel into a living space of exchange, where visitors trade personal objects—each redefined as a work of art. Guided by Nuriev’s philosophy of Transformism, the project turns everyday materials into symbols of renewal, exploring the beauty of letting go and the poetry of circulation. A highlight of the Art Basel Paris Public Program, Objets Trouvés invites the public to witness art as a collective act—fluid, human, and constantly evolving.
Courtesy of MARCEL DUCHAMP PRIZE 2025
Photography by PARIS MUSÉES / GUILLAUME BLOT
Marcel Duchamp Prize 2025 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
For its 2025 edition, the Marcel Duchamp Prize finds a new home at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, where the works of this year’s four nominees—Bianca Bondi, Xie Lei, Eva Nielsen, and Lionel Sabatté—are on view through February 22nd, 2026.
Curated by Julia Garimorth and Jean-Pierre Criqui, the exhibition transforms the museum’s collection galleries into a stage for experimentation and dialogue between contemporary creation and modern art history. As one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art prizes, the Prix Marcel Duchamp celebrates artistic innovation and French art’s global resonance. This year’s presentation is freely accessible, inviting a wider public to engage with the vitality of today’s scene. The winner of the 2025 edition will be announced on October 23rd, during Paris Art Week at the MAM.
Words: JULIA SILVERBERG
