ART FAIRS:Art Basel Paris 2026
For its fifth edition, Art Basel Paris, places Paris at the heart of the fair as an essential part of its artistic and cultural identity. Bringing together 211 leading international galleries, including 64 exhibitors operating spaces in France, the 2026 edition reflects the depth of Paris’ gallery ecosystem while extending the fair’s presence into the city’s museums, institutions, public spaces, and creative communities.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art Basel Archive
The 2026 edition of Art Basel Paris brings together 183 galleries in the Galeries sector, 16 solo presentations in Emergence, and 12 historically focused projects in Premise. Thirty-two galleries participate in Art Basel Paris for the first time, while six galleries graduate from Emergence to Galeries. A record 12 joint booths, bringing together 24 galleries, will create new dialogues between distinct programs and artistic perspectives.
Galeries sector brings together 183 Modern, post-war, and contemporary art dealers from France and beyond, showcasing their programs via solo, duo, and group presentations spanning 20th-century masters, contemporary blue-chip artists, mid-career practitioners, and emerging voices.
Far from being defined by a single, unified conception of contemporary art, the Parisian art scene is shaped by the intersection of practices, backgrounds, media, and individual experiences. Painting, installation, performance, literature, dance, and moving image converge to question the ways in which we inhabit the world, represent ourselves, and construct our identities.
Through the works of artists born or based in Paris, including Pol Taburet, Julien Creuzet, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Annie Ernaux, Gisèle Vienne, Tarek Lakhrissi, Neila Czermak Ichti, and Xie Lei, a portrait of Paris emerges as a sensitive and plural artistic landscape — one in which the intimate often becomes a way of speaking to the collective. The following gallery presentations bring these perspectives into dialogue with broader international practices:
Mendes Wood DM present a curated selection featuring new works by French artist Pol Taburet. The gallery will also present poetic, materially complex sculptures by French artist Julien Creuzet, whose practice, combining steel, copper, resin, composite materials, and electrical wires, engages installation and ecology. His institutional momentum includes an upcoming solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz in 2027. Other featured artists are Lucas Arruda, Laís Amaral, Alvaro Barrington, Sanam Khatibi, and Paula Siebra.
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi returns to the Galeries sector with a presentation around intimacy, photography, and literature. These themes are explored in fourteen photographs shot by French author and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux and her husband Marc Marie, which became the basis for their book ‘L’Usage de la photo’ (Gallimard, 2005). Taken together, the images trace an affair that began in January 2003, unfolding alongside Ernaux’s treatment for breast cancer. The photographs record the domestic aftermath of intimacy — clothes discarded after sex, chairs out of place, remnants of shared meals — arrangements Ernaux found painful to erase.
Galerie Allen present new work by French poet and artist Tarek Lakhrissi, which finds its form in a multi-media chrysalis that argues that the state of becoming is as complex and relevant as the final transformation. Other works in the booth include paintings by Jacqueline de Jong, whose work brings together humour, eroticism, and violence in a visual language that moves between figuration and abstraction; and Jason Dodge’s sculpture Topaz inside of an owl, which presents an owl lying on a cardboard box. The work invites a reflection on hidden interiors, material value, and the limits of observation, allowing an apparently still object to suggest an unseen narrative.
Previously exhibiting in the Emergence sector, The Pill present a curated booth exploring the body as a site of transformation shaped by time, contact, and lived experience. Bringing together three artists across generations, including Paris based painter Apolonia Sokol and Turkish artist Cem Örgen, the presentation will move between processes of birth, aging, erosion, and repair across video, painting, collage, and sculpture.
White Cube present works by Georg Baselitz, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Giovanelli, David Hammons, Marguerite Humeau, Suleman Aqeel Khilji, Ibrahim Mahama, Giorgio Morandi, and Francis Picabia, among others. Highlights include Tracey Emin’s visceral painting Waiting For A moment of You (2025). Featuring a reclining female figure, the work evokes the fragility and imperfection of human existence and echoes the artist’s presentation at the Parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme. The booth will also include Ibrahim Mahama’s textile and metal work “Nyamuthia” (2025-26); two gold paintings by Georg Baselitz titled Große schwarze Volksflügel (Large Black Popular Wings) and Gold ohne Hemd (Gold Without Shirt) (both 2025); and a sculpture by 2026 Turner Prize nominee Marguerite Humeau titled “Venus of Planina, A 37-year-old female human has ingested an olm’s brain” (2024).
This year, “Premise” moves into the larger Salon Seine, giving greater space and visibility to research-led presentations that revisit and expand established narratives of art history. mergence presents 16 solo booths dedicated to emerging artistic practices across the balconies of the Grand Palais’ central Nave. The 2026 edition is marked by significant renewal, with 12 first-time participants and broad geographic representation from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. Many presentations are newly commissioned or produced specifically for the fair, with a focus on installation-based and cross-disciplinary practices. Highlights from the 12 first-time participants to Emergence include:
KIN present a solo booth of works by Angharad Williams (based on a chapter from the Welsh artist’s 2023 book “Eraser”. Five large-scale oil paintings depict schools of trout in various formations, while a new video work casts viewers as the chapter’s narrator in the moments before they bite into a live fish, breaching the boundary between desire and consumption. Shot in first-person perspective, the video is inspired by the logic of POV gaming, fantasy, and inner worlds.
P21 makes its debut at Art Basel Paris with a solo project by South Korean artist Haneyl Choi. Titled “Sleepwalking”, the presentation comprise four mixed-media sculptures that treat the body as a site of transformation and instability. Drawing from Choi’s own experiences with sleepwalking and teeth grinding, the project coincides with the October opening of his solo show of the same name at Art Sonje Center in Seoul.
Oskar Weiss present a solo project by Zurich-based Italian artist Lorenza Longhi, whose practice investigates pop culture’s influence on fine art. The booth’s floor will be covered with a site-specific silkscreen and PVC work, inspired by an ancient Roman mosaic and debris from the artist’s studio. The booth will also include Longhi’s largest painting to date, as well as a gift bag concealing a spy camera, serving as a comment on surveillance in late-stage capitalism.
Beyond the fair itself, Art Basel Paris extends across the city through an expanded Public Program, with major commissions and presentations at the Petit Palais, Palais d’Iéna, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, Beaux-Arts de Paris, Avenue Winston Churchill, Square Jean Perrin, Place Clemenceau, and the Jardin de la Nouvelle-France.
The program is complemented by the return of Oh La La!, a two-day rehang allowing galleries to transform their booths with new and thought-provoking works on Friday and Saturday. This year’s edition of Oh La La! will be art-directed by French actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu around the theme “Myths and Legends”.
Conversations moves into the Auditorium of the Grand Palais for the first time, bringing artists, museum directors, curators, collectors, and cultural figures together for a program of discussions and one-on-one encounters.
This year’s edition builds on the momentum of Art Basel Paris 2025, which welcomed more than 73,000 visitors and representatives from over 240 museums and foundations. With its international gallery roster, growing network of institutional partnerships, and expanded presence across the French capital, Art Basel Paris 2026 further develops its role within one of the world’s most dynamic cultural ecosystems.
The 2026 edition reflects the breadth and plurality of Paris’ contemporary art scene, where international and French artists, galleries, museums and cultural institutions intersect. Across the fair and the city, practices move between painting, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, literature, dance, film, and new media. The result is an edition that looks beyond the traditional boundaries of the art fair to explore the many ways in which art is produced, presented, experienced, and collected.
Photo: Art : Concept, Courtesy of Art Basel
Info: Art Basel Paris 2026, Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris, France, Duration: 23-25/10/2026, Hours: 11:00-19:00, Admission, www.artbasel.com/
