With anticipation and excitement Art Basel Paris proved to be a success, showing that the Art market for secondary and primary Blue Chip and Emerging artists remains strong and that Paris has made a contemporary art comeback.
Noteworthy sales:
Pace Gallery sold Robert Motherwell’s painting Je t’aime No II(1955), which had an asking price of $6.5 million, on the second day.
David Zwirner sold a painting by Joan Mitchell, Border (1989), for $4.5 million to a private collection on the first day. (The major exhibition “Monet–Mitchell” is now showing at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.)
Hauser & Wirth sold a George Condo painting for $2.65 million on the first day.
kamel mennour sold two Alberto Giacometti bronze sculptures: Composition (1927–28) for €2.75 million (about $2.7 million), and Figurine (1953–54) for €1.45 million (around $1.43 million), both on the first day.
Thaddaeus Ropac sold Georg Baselitz’s painting Ohne Titel (Landschaft) (1970) for $1.7 million on the third day.
Many major artists saw sales across multiple booths, such as George Condo, whose painting Eyes Wide Open (2022) sold for $1.55 million on the first day by Sprüth Magers. And Alex Katz, whose retrospective at the Guggenheim opened last week, had works sold by Gladstone Gallery (Split 9, 2022, for $1.5 million) and Thaddaeus Ropac (Iris 5, 2019, and Yellow Buttercups 1, 2021, each for $700,000).
The sentiment that galleries had brought pieces they could flex with was evident with David Zwirner, which, in addition to the Mitchell painting, also sold Robert Ryman’s Untitled (1963) for $3 million; Luc Tuymans’s Bouhouche (2007) for $1.35 million; and Josef Albers’s Study to Homage to the Square: Aurora(1957) for $1 million.
- Xavier Hufkens sold a Roni Horn cast glass sculpture for approximately $1.3 million; and a painting by Alice Neel(whose retrospective is currently at the Centre Pompidou) for $1.2 million.
- Almine Rech sold Scott Kahn’s oil painting The Curtains Parted (2022) for $1.2 million–$1.5 million.
- Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois sold three large paintings by Peter Stämpfli for €1 million–€1.3 million (about $980,000–$1.28 million).
- Tim Van Laere Gallery sold Adrian Ghenie’s Studio Scene 6(2022) for €1.2 million (about $1.18 million) to a private collection in the U.S.