“The idea emerged from the feeling that we needed to try to do something different to grow as galleries,” Rosales told ARTnews. “We thought, instead of saying that a fair does not work for us, we should try to do something else ourselves.”

Even the fair’s name fits that spirit, taking it from the common art world adage “see you in June,” a reference to Art Basel, as well as being a play on Death in June, the name of a neo-folk band led by English musician Douglas. Upon the suggestion of a “well-placed” colleague, they add “Art Fair” to their project’s title.

The fair’s bunker was recently transformed into an exhibition space by Pritzker Prize–winning firm Herzog & de Meuron, and that is reason enough to visit. The elevator ride down three levels builds the suspense of seeing the wares brought by the 12 participating galleries, nearly half of them for the first time: Cento (Glasgow), Lagune Ouest (Copenhagen), Magician Space (Beijing), PALAS (Sydney), and Property Holdings Development Group (Hong Kong).

“It’s actually our first fair ever, and we could not be more excited,” Cento cofounder Grace Johnson said. The gallery is presenting a solo show of British artist Rhett Leinster, whose work incorporates paper he makes himself and pigment that he often grinds himself. These pieces draw inspiration from images found online that Leinster transforms into something else, like a bird that now looks like a landscape.

This year’s fair also decreased in size, having four exhibitors fewer than in 2023. “We could decide to cut the program in half, give each other more space, and just do the project with five galleries,” Rosales said, noting that the fair has a cost-sharing model that prioritizes the exhibitors’ needs.

Tokyo-based dealer Yugari Hagiwara (of Hagiwara Projects) is showing small works by British artist Gabriel Hartley, whose layered and textured paintings and ceramics call for slow contemplation. “I did well last year, so I am happy to be back,” Hagiwara said.

In her VI, VII booth, Rosales is showing Yu Shuk Pui Bobby video’s Genetic Salon I & II (2021–22), which questions perceptions around gender, the body, and identity, as well as a series of digital prints on porcelain inspired by Hong Kong memorial placards (ceramic tiles with portraits of the dead loved ones left at their graves). Rosales has also brought three abstract compositions by Norwegian painter Jorunn Hancke Øgstad, who uses fabric dye, resin, and plastics to mimic watercolor, spray paint, and print processes.

Frankfurt-based gallery Parisa Kind has returned to the fair, with a presentation that includes figurative ink-on-canvas works by German artist Isabelle Fein and a new series of abstract paintings by Benjamin Echeverria, who has recently begun depicting large dots, using the lids of paint cans to determine the shape of his patterns. 

What explains the loyalty of returning exhibitors? There is a certain sense of intimacy that pervades the fair. “It is a pretty cool fair,” said Frankfurt dealer Jacky Strenz, who has curated her booth as an homage to artist Lin May Saeed, who died in 2023. In her practice, which spanned various mediums, Saeed dedicated her work to advocating for the respect of animals. 

“We are a great group of galleries,” Kind said. “We hang out all the time. There is no competition between us. We help each other out. It does not feel like old friends getting together—we are old friends getting together.”

The Danish painter (1864–1916) remains relatively obscure, though his inclusion in a number of international exhibitions at venues from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, has garnered him a growing, almost cultish following. And that following will likely only grow, especially in the United States, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently purchased his 1907 painting, Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30, for a record $9.1 million at Sotheby’s last year.

“It’s really beautiful to show such a historical, well-known artist, who is still kind of an unexpected surprise,” said dealer Carlo Knoell, who recently closed his eponymous gallery to join Hauser & Wirth as a senior director.

Hammershøi was also an anomaly for his time. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly Johannes Vermeer, Hammershøi veered into his own way of making, which feels fresh even today. Described as a painter of “silence” and melancholy, Hammershøi renders stark gray interiors. Pared-down versions of what he observed in the rooms of his Copenhagen apartment, they lean toward the surreal.

Titled “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence.” and featuring 16 works, the exhibition shows off Hammershøi’s signature stark restraint and  somber gray palette. On view are a few actual masterpieces that are a rare treat to see in person. Hammershøi’s paintings feel very much alive.

The air hangs thick in these foggy, blurred scenes, so much so that this stillness feels not dismal but hopeful. In their cold stillness, these paintings are heaving. Some works show nearly empty rooms, like Interior in London, Brunswick Square (1912), in which the London fog seeps in to the three paned windows, while others show a woman, usually Hammershøi’s wife from behind, the nape of her neck the only skin exposed. She often stands still, to the side of a table, as she does in Interior with a Writing Desk (1900), showing rays of light diffusing the tension of the scene as the woman appears to read a letter. The gallery space’s history as a 19th-century silk ribbon factory adds to the ease of the display here, a comfortable home in which to take it all in.

By Tuesday evening, after a full day split between roving the fair floor at Art Basel and reporting on the city’s first digital art fair, the Digital Mile, I had a choice to make: do I follow Art Basel’s VIP crowd along the well-trodden party path (Perrotin et al.) or stick with the new kids on the block from the NFT, crypto, and generative AI world? Unfortunately, I tried to do both.

My first port of call was a party hosted by four galleries—Mendes Wood DM, Crèvecoeur, Sylvia Kouvali, Taka Ishii—in the bar L’Avventura, located on the roof of a giant concrete parking lot by Basel’s main train station. As I made my way there, I bumped into The Baer Faxt‘s Josh Baer, who told me he’d seen it all before and was heading back to his hotel to catch some Zs before an early flight Wednesday morning. I arrived at 9:30 and took the elevator to the top floor, where I caught collector and New York socialite Paul Judelson standing at the entrance, taking a break from the swarming bar. Sharp suits, designer dresses, buckets of lip filler, a handful of kooky characters sporting crazy outfits, and loads of booze; it seemed like any other Art Basel party, just younger with a stunning sunset view across the city from the terrace.

Anastasia Krizanovska, Crèvecoeur’s gallery manager, told ARTnews that she hoped the bash would be “more relaxed, free, and easy” than the other blowouts at Basel. George Newall, cofounder and director at Winter Street Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard, certainly looked at ease surrounded by beautiful women on the terrace. Inside by the bar, art consultants Ellen De Schepper and Laura De Beir told me they were digging the vibe because it wasn’t as crowded as Les Trois Rois.

“We were invited by Alix [Dionot-Morani] from Crèvecoeur who is showing lots of Sol Calero and artists we like, who we bought for our clients in Belgium,” De Schepper said. “We love Mendes Wood DM – they’ve thrown very cool parties in Paris and Brussels.”

Thomas Rom, the art adviser and 15-year Art Basel veteran, meanwhile, was planning his exit to Hotel Merian over the Rhine where the Young Boy Dancing Group was performing. “I want to see Young Boy because I want to connect back to my queer community and see something that feels like it captures the moment,” he told me. “It’s going to be more fun than any other place tonight.”

Rom may have been right; L’Avventura’s dance floor was spartan (although it was still relatively early) but I didn’t have time to hang around and see the horseplay unfold, if any.

I knew the Digital Mile cohort were already at the Merian, watching Young Boy, so I took the elevator to the street with the intention of walking across the Mittlere Brücke bridge to the hotel. But I was waylaid out front when a tightlipped trio from Masterworks offered me shotgun in their cab, on the condition that I wouldn’t quote them. They drove to the center of town to the Gothic revival Elisabethenkirche, where the Perrotin party was in full force. With the queue surprisingly short, it seemed like a good opportunity to pop my head and cover all bases.

Host Emmanuel Perrotin played a DJ set dressed in a bright-blue hoodie, reportedly due to an earlier tuxedo malfunction, before French-Korean DJ-singer Miki Duplay captivated the audience with a bizarre routine that straddled something between burlesque and beatbox. Pedro Winter (Daft Punk’s former manager), Samuel Boutruche, Andy 4000, and b2b (never heard of them) also performed to the crowd. DJ Jacques and his neo-tonsure haircut were the headline act.

German gin company Monkey 47 sponsored the event in partnership with Art Review so the alcohol was flowing, and I’d say the punters were a touch more refined and older here compared to L’Avventura. Silver foxes Rafael Pic (Quotidien de l’Art’s editor in chief), Martin Guesnet (Artcurial’s European director), and Thierry Peyroux (from the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs) added a dash of sophistication.

I soon lost track of time, and before I knew it, the clock struck 1:30 am. Regrettably, too late to hang with the digital art guys at the Merian, but not too late for a nightcap at Les Trois Rois. Always a good place to harvest some gossip from slack-tongued art dealers merry off a day’s dealings at Art Basel. After a 10-minute walk I arrived at the hotel to find a line of expectant people snaking along the sidewalk. I did try to skip the queue on account of being a hack, but the concierge, tipsy on authority, refused me. I even tried to sweet-talk German soccer legend and avid collector Michael Ballack into getting me in but he was having none of it.

“Don’t bother, darling,” an Argentine artist told me on her way out, “it’s super boring in there anyway.”

Short on patience due to a lack of sleep, I took her word for it, accepted defeat, and caught a cab.

Below, a look at the best on offer at Liste, which runs through June 16 at the Messe Basel.

As Art Basel enters its public days, Cruse spoke to ARTnews about the challenges of staging such a monumental art fair while the market is in a questionable state and interest rates are high, why Art Basel continues to be successful, and offers the slightest of hints at what might be in store for next year’s edition.

ARTnews: Opening day has come and gone. What can you tell me about the energy on the ground?

Maike Cruse: The energy has been great. You know the art market here in Basel has proven to be very resilient. We were very confident going in, but what we’ve seen so far has really exceeded our expectations, and, I think, also the expectations of many of the galleries. The pace is much more normal, as opposed to last year when little bit more cautious behavior than what’s happening right now.

That’s good to hear. There has been lots of talk about the market softening or losing its froth, euphemisms to say that people aren’t buying as much as even a few months ago. Many people were unsure what to expect, especially with the fair being so close to the May auctions in New York, which had less than stellar results. 

Absolutely. We were all aware of this and, as I said people were nervous going into the show, I think. But as we see, the market is about human-to-human relationships and about unique objects. And so those relationships can also change and develop very fast and that’s what’s happened here.

What were some of the approaches that you took this year considering that overall feeling of trepidation regarding the market?

We basically do what we’ve always done. We observe the art market very closely, and we adapt to it. That really involves more long-term planning as opposed to just reacting to the current state of the art market or what people are saying. The goal this year was to really further rejuvenate and diversify the fair. We have 285 galleries coming from 40 countries, and 22 of these galleries are newcomers to the fair, which is quite a high number. So it’s really interesting to see so many new faces and all new approaches on the show floor and so many high quality booths.

We also extended the citywide program this year by bringing [Agnes Denes’s] Wheatfield: A Confrontation (2024), where it takes up nearly the entire Messeplatz, as well as bringing the Parcours sector, which [this year] is curated by Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute, closer to Messe Basel on Clarastrasse, the regular shopping street that connects the Messeplatz and the Rhine. There’s also a music and performance program at the Hotel Merian, which is very exciting.

What are some of the more under the radar things that people shouldn’t miss at the fair?

I think for me one of the big highlights of the show are the more tightly curated works in the Statements sector. This year presents very emerging artists like the Sandra Poulson from Angola with Jahmek Contemporary Art or the Norwegian-Sudanese artist Ahmed Umar, who brought 15 sculptural works that represent personal prayers; [Umar] is represented by a first-time participant to the fair, OSL Contemporary. The Features sector is also wonderful. There, we are showing 16 historical projects like Parker Gallery’s presentation of works by Gladys Nilsson or oil paintings by artist Irène Zurkinden, who was born in Basel, by the New York gallery Meredith Rosen Gallery.

Are you already thinking about next year, about things that you might want to change?

Oh yes, I’ve been thinking about next year for quite a long time [laughs], but I can’t tell you anything specific yet. I have a lot of ideas, I can say that. I’m really waiting to analyze what the re-contextualization of Parcours presents and how the [Denes] project works. I really look at every single detail, the conversations program, Hotel Merian, and then we really look into how we can further improve it or what new inventions we will bring next year. It’s too early to say, but there are a lot of ideas in my head.

The fair happens every year. How much prep time is involved in that on your end?

Here’s an example. When I first came on I had the idea to change the Parcours sector right away. And I’m so glad that I immediately had the thought and the support because it needed to be an implemented immediately for it to really work. It took the whole year. So, you really have to start changes well in advance, maybe one and a half years before the next show.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk, especially here in the States, that Art Basel Paris, launched in 2022, might be more attractive, particularly to American collectors, than Art Basel’s Swiss fair. What makes the two fairs unique?

Well, first I have to say that we’ve profited very much from Paris. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do it. [Laughs.] Every fair that works well for our galleries really broadens our network. We profit from that and vice versa. So since we launched the show in Paris, we have many more French collectors also coming to Basel. And that happens all over the place, especially since we opened Miami Beach [in 2002] and Hong Kong [in 2013]. Each fair attracts a different kind of crowd. The Paris show is more concentrated. It’s a little bit smaller. But of course it’s taking place in the major art metropolis of Paris. We’ll have around 190 galleries, and a third of those are from France. In Basel, we have 285 galleries, 60 percent  of which are European, with the rest coming from other countries from all over the world.

The program in Basel [this year] is very ambitious and complex. It won’t exist like this for a second time. It’s very modern and broad—and it should be. Basel is where we come from. It’s our mother fair, our flagship. It’s our center.

“We are witnessing a broadening of our collecting globally with new buyers entering the market, and securing a baseline of support for business alongside core audiences that continue to collect,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz said during a press conference. “At the same time, we recognize that the art market is undergoing a period of recalibration. … There is clearly a degree of caution in the market these days. However, I will say, given the energy in the halls today, that the art market is very much still here, and very strong.”

The fair’s opening teemed with people, and big sales seemed to follow. An untitled work by Ashile Gorky from 1946–47 sold for $16 million at Hauser & Wirth’s booth. Meanwhile, a Yayoi Kusama sculpture presented by David Zwirner in the Unlimited sector sold for $5 million.  

Museum directors and collectors, such as Charles Carmignac, Emma Lavigne, and Fabrice Hergott, were spotted walking by a new version of Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1984). First shown in New York’s Financial District, the work reappeared at the fair as a long rectangular patch of wheat stems. Fairgoers could walk through a path cut into Denes’s Wheatfield, making it a hit early on.

Below, a look at the best art on offer at the 2024 edition of Art Basel Basel, which runs until June 16.

Stefanie Hessler, director of the Swiss Institute in New York, curated this year’s iteration, and it focuses on themes of circulation and transformation. As fairgoers wander the city streets in search of the Parcours installations, it behooves them to pay close attention to distilleries, shops, and bridges for such art interventions.

To learn more about her approach to curating Art Basel’s public art sector, ARTnews spoke with Hessler ahead of the fair’s opening.

ARTnews: I know this is your first time curating Parcours, which was previously overseen by Samuel Leuenberger. What was your approach to curating Art Basel’s public art sector?

Stefanie Hessler: Yes! Parcours is accessible to the public without a ticket to the fair. And it really—this year, especially—will engage a lot of locations in the city along Clarastrasse, the street leading from the fair building toward the river Rhine. Alongside it, there are 22 projects in all sorts of different venues and locations, from empty storefronts—a former pharmacy, a former bakery, an empty restaurant, and a shop in a shopping center—to a functional hotel, a food court, a car ramp leading underneath the Congress Center, and a bunker, as well as some outdoor locations such as a public park and flags on the bridge leading over the river. It’s really interesting to think about public space in a way that is more expansive and about how people perceive artwork differently when they visit it in non-art spaces.

How has the public sphere influenced your curatorial approach?

For this project, in particular, it was important for me to have artworks that respond to the sites. There are certain challenges that come with exhibiting works in non-art spaces, but also really exciting challenges that make us engage and interact with art differently than we normally would.

Tell me about some of the most notable projects.

All of the works engage the sites they’re shown at. For example, Alvaro Barrington is creating a structure inspired by his grandmother’s house in Grenada and the Caribbean where he grew up. This “distracter” will, on the outside, be clad with paintings that he’s making for this occasion, and on the inside it will house the products that are usually on sale in the shop. There will also be an artwork in the window and large wallpaper in the back of the shop. Outside of this project, the shop is called tropical zone, and it specializes in importing products from Africa to Basel, Switzerland.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is making flags with pirate symbols that are going to line the bridge leading over the Rhine. He is of course interested in communication structures and how different symbols change meaning over time as they transfer from one culture to another. The pirate symbol has been, in the Western imagination, this symbol of a romantic outlaw, but it’s also been appropriated by the fashion industry. The pirate skull and crossbones, as well as lesser-known symbols, are printed on flags, with newspaper article backgrounds. This, combined with its location on the Rhine, which has played such an important role in the history of Europe, refers to travel and the circulation of information.

Another one that I’m really excited about is by Ximena Garrido-Lecca, who is an artist from Peru researching the oil-rich coastal town of Lobitos, known for petroleum extraction. In recent years, there has been a discussion about whether this town will be turned into a tourist resort. And Ximena made these sculptures from ceramic and steel, combining a traditional material and technique also used in pre-Columbian cultures with steel used in industrial processes like petrol extraction. There are also references to Minimalism. These sculptures are installed inside an artisanal distillery in Basel, creating a beautiful connection between the distillation processes for liquor and oil.

This is a pretty big undertaking, with a lot of moving parts. What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced?

It’s been such a joyful process thinking about these projects in all of these very diverse spaces. It’s like a puzzle finding the right match between the artists, galleries, and venues. Many of the artists also came for site visits so that we could have direct conversations, and look at potential places where their works could make sense and how they would be installed. We visited so many sites and offer such amazing selection for the 22 projects. Most people were really excited about partnering with us.

There are some really unique pairings. What are you most looking forward to?

I’m excited about Parcours night on Wednesday, where we’ll have three performances from 8 pm until midnight. The first performance is a major new commission by Madeline Hollander, a former choreographer and visual artist, who has taken inspiration from the Carnival tradition in Basel. During my visits to the city, I came across these spaces used by the Basel Carnival crews to practice their instruments and so on, some of which are in bunkers underneath the city. Madeline was inspired by the invisible forms of circulation underneath the city, and she made a connection between the people practicing for Carnival underground and the sewer system—these hidden infrastructures and performances [happening below the city]. For Parcours, she cast seven manhole covers to be passed back and forth by 14 dancers, while they’re leading a procession from the fair to the Rhine, in Basel’s cleaning crew outfits and masks made out of confetti, which the cleaning crews have to clean up after Carnival each year.

That performance will be followed by a karaoke bar night at the Merian Hotel, organized by Wendy’s Wok World, the alter ego of Sam Lui, an artist who’s been interested in the principles of Cantonese cooking. She’s collaborated with the Savory Project, which is a bar in Hong Kong, to create three specialty cocktails that will be available during the night. Visitors can perform two songs chosen by Wendy that reflect some of the works and concepts in her practice. There’s also a performance by Chuquimamani-Condori, hosted by Jan Vorisek and Mathis Altmann.

“We were all waiting. We were watching the auctions very intently, and they did well. We didn’t know how this was going to go,” Samanthe Rubell, the president of Pace, told ARTnews.

Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz similarly noted the art market’s “period of recalibration” and the atmosphere of caution these days. However, he said in a press conference that the energy of the crowd on Art Basel’s first day was evidence that “the market is very much still here, and very strong.”

Horowitz may not be far off. By the end of Tuesday, it was apparent that not only had the worst been averted, but there was enough sales activity to consider the day successful. Dealers told ARTnews with some surprise that, unlike previous years, more purchases were made in-person, rather via presale PDFs, suggesting a real desire to experience artworks in person and all that the fair and its surroundings have to offer.

Perhaps the most direct, and colorful, message about the market’s resilience was sent to press by Hauser & Wirth cofounder Iwan Wirth. “In spite of the ‘doom porn’ currently circulating in the art press and along gossip grapevines, we are very confident in the art market’s resilience and the first day of Art Basel has confirmed our perspective,” Wirth said in a statement.

“The advantage of the market returning to a more humane pace is that the most discerning international collectors are committing here and now to the very best of the best,” he continued.

There were certainly collectors galore taking advantage of that “more humane pace”—in other words, a time for good deals—including mega-collector Steve Cohen, who made the rounds with a colleague dressed in paraphernalia from the New York Mets, the baseball team Cohen bought in 2020. Despite Cohen’s prodigious art collection, he is not a usual sight at the fair.

Other dealers too were seeing some excitement in the air. By afternoon, news spread through the crowded halls that David Zwirner gallery had sold a Joan Mitchell diptych titled Sunflowers (1990–91), for $20 million. (ARTnews has heard disputing reports from well-placed sources that the actual selling price was closer to $18 million.)

“I would call that a very strong fair,” Zwirner told ARTnews, before pointing to works throughout the booth repeatedly saying “sold.” 

He continued, “And it really happened today. People want to see [the works], experience, talk about them. So, it’s happening here, much more this year than last year.”

Zwirner noted that, in some cases, advisers came on behalf of collectors from all over the world and used FaceTime or messaging to close deals.

“There’s been a narrative out there that the art market is weak and I feel like, when we do well, other galleries do well,” he said. “I assume this will be a very successful fair for the galleries. If the art market is not performing well in the auction environment, that’s one problem, but it’s certainly performing well right here.”

Zwirner also sold Gerhard Richter’s 2016 Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) for $6 million, and Yayoi Kusama’s giant Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (2023) for $5 million in the fair’s Unlimited section.

For what it’s worth, secondary market markups seemed more reasonable than usual. At Gagosian’s booth, an Ed Ruscha painting, Radio 1, which last sold at Sotheby’s in May of last year for $2.1 million, was on offer for $2.8 million. Also at Gagosian, Andy Warhol’s Hammer & Sickle (1976), which last sold at Sotheby’s in 2017 for $5.5 million, was on offer for $8.5 million.

“Overall, most galleries are better off today than they were in 2019,” Alex Forbes, the vice-president of galleries and fairs at Artsy, told ARTnews, referring to the last pre-pandemic fair. “It’s always important for folks to zoom out and take in the longer trend, rather than just focusing on year to year. In my view the art market in particular tends to respond to uncertainty more so than, necessarily, the ups and downs of the S& P 500.”

The European Central Bank’s decision to cut interest rates last week, offers some of that needed sense of stability, according to Forbes. ”I’m optimistic in the long run, particularly as we’re coming out of maybe the period of peak anxiety around possible runaway inflation,” he said.

Despite the top line successes, many dealers told ARTnews of a “slow down” in sales at the fair, with dealers taking longer to close sales and having to “work harder” with their clients to get pieces sold.

A New York–based art adviser who wished to remain anonymous told ARTnews that a market slump, and what she called “disastrous” auction sales, have given her access to excellent artworks that were out of reach a few years ago.

“They will call you up, and before they didn’t have the time, because they had like 50 people calling them,” she said. “They are doing a really good job. They are the only people in the art world who put their money where their mouth is, [and] they are working harder.” When asked, the adviser echoed others who said primary prices have not changed, or gone down, despite concerns they have gotten too high.

“We do the very best we can, and when things do get quieter, it’s always also a moment of opportunity of getting even closer to the relationships you have, and build more there,” Marc Payot, president and partner of Hauser & Wirth, told ARTnews, while nevertheless noting sales are taking more time at the fair.

Basel is the mega-gallery’s home turf, and it had one of the fair’s stronger presentations, including mostly works by women and two artists of color.

“We have always done well when the market was not as hot,” Payot said, because the slower pace allowed them to spend more time “building relationships” with clients and artists. Despite any market cooling, by day’s end, the gallery said it sold more works Tuesday than on the first day of the 2023 fair.

In terms of sales, Hauser & Wirth placed its most expensive work brought to the fair, Arshile Gorky’s, rare 1946–47 large work on paper, Untitled (Gray Drawing (Pastoral)), for $16 million. The gallery also sold Jenny Holzer’s red granite benches to an Asian museum for an undisclosed sum, Blinky Palermo’s Ohne Titel (Untitled), from 1975, for $4 million, and Louise Bourgeois’s Woman with Packages (1987–93) marble sculpture for $3.5 million. Coinciding with their museum-caliber Vilhelm Hammershøi show in their new gallery space in Basel, a 1906 painting by the Danish painter, depicting a woman pinning up her loose hair, was sold for an undisclosed amount.

On Wednesday, the gallery reported selling the large Philip Guston painting Orders for $10 million, and Georgia O’Keeffe‘s serene white moonscape Sky with Moon for $13.5 million. (The price for the O’Keeffe is notable, considering that it sold for $3.5 million at Christie’s in 2018.)

“Almost everything was sold in-person today,” said Pace’s Rubell, calling the gallery’s first day at Basel “fantastic.”

She continued, “In years prior, there has been a good amount of pre-sales from previews, but this time we’re really trying to capture new interest, and this moment of suddenly engaging, and having that feedback and response—it’s really worked. The energy is very good.”

A sprawling Jean Dubuffet bench sculpture titled Banc-Salon, overhung with suspended kites, was a welcoming attraction for visitors who stopped at Pace’s booth. By early afternoon, the gallery had sold three editions of a total of six of them, priced at €800,000 ($860,000) each, in collaboration with Galerie Lelong & Co. 

Pace also sold its star Agnes Martin painting, Untitled #20 (1974), which last sold at auction in 2012 for $2.43 million. Though Pace would not share the price, a source told ARTnews that it was $14 million. In 2021, a similar work sold for $17 million at auction. Pieces by First Nation artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, whom the gallery recently took on, also sold: one for $250,000 and the other for $220,000. Kngwarray had a retrospective at Australia’s National Gallery, and next summer will be featured at Tate Modern in London.

Thaddaeus Ropac, which historically does not presell its offers, was humming early in the fair, with fast-paced sales from the get-go. “Like the old days,” one spokesperson told ARTnews. The gallery sold a major Robert Rauschenberg work from 1985 for $3.85 million, several editions of a Georg Baselitz bronze sculpture for €2 million each, along with other works by the artist, priced between €1.2 million and €1.8 million.

At White Cube, a Julie Mehretu painting from 1999 went for $6.75 million; it was last seen at auction six years ago, when it sold for $2.5 million. A “monumental” Mark Bradford, titled Clowns Travel Through Wires (2013), also sold for $4.5 million. Jeff Wall’s The Storyteller (1986) sold for $2.85 million, along with works by David Hammons, Tracey Emin, Gabriel Orozco, Antony Gormley, Howardena Pindell, and others. At the time of writing, the $1.75 million Richard Hunt sculpture and the $1.35 million Frank Bowling were not listed as sold.

“It’s neither the end of the world nor is it speculation,” Belgian collector Alain Servais told ARTnews. But that can make for a lack of newsy buzz. In fact, Servais says presales and a broader commercialization of the fair have helped sap the fair of its urgency so that, “the froth (or the buzz) is down, so the excesses are down, but you’re still selling.” Now, “80 percent of the reason I go to Basel is for the networking,” he added.

Others felt differently. Wishing away the preselling model is “nostalgia,” Madrid-based art adviser and curator Eva Ruiz, a friend of Servais, told ARTnews. She said she sees excitement in the way people share what they’ve seen and talk about in the early moments of the fair. “I still see collectors excited to be there the first day,” despite having seen a PDF in advance. “They still want to rush to see the work, and to be the first to buy,” she said.

As to whether Art Basel Paris might soon eclipse the Swiss fair, Ruiz said other regional fairs remain limited to their geographic locations. Basel is the exception. “Art Basel, Basel is seen as the prized, first art fair to visit,” she said, before adding that there is “room” for two European fairs. Americans, in particular, she said, are happy to come back to Europe for the Paris fair.

On the fair’s upper floor, where midsize and smaller galleries have their booths, New York’s Canada gallery featured color- and material-rich abstractions by Joan Snyder, which have attracted a lot of attention. They sold and reserved her pieces for $180,000 and $190,000. The artist is enjoying some overdue attention in her 80s, selling above estimates at auction and set for her first solo exhibition with Thaddaeus Ropac in November. Canada gallery also placed a 2013 painting by Joe Bradley for an undisclosed sum. Cofounder Phil Grauer agreed collectors were calculating and taking their time.

“They’ve got time, it’s not a rush,” he said. “But there’s still desire and interest and enthusiasm.”

But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

The 172,000-square-foot hall reserved for Unlimited is currently home to 76 projects and live performances by Seba Calfuqueo, Resto Pulfer, and Anna Uddenberg and others. Giovanni Carmine, director of the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland, has curated this edition of Unlimited, which, for the first time ever, will also feature a People’s Pick award, selected by visitors themselves. A winner will be announced by the end of the week after the votes are tallied.

There is no shortage of old works that have returned to view here: Wu Tien-Chang’s Farewell, Spring and Autumn, which appeared in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Christo’s 2014 recreation of his 1963 wrapped Volkswagen; a 153-foot-long Keith Haring frieze from 1984; a reactivation of Carl Andre’s 1988 Körners Repose, consisting 50 floor units. But fear not, there are new works here, too.

Below, a look at some of the best and most impressive works on view in Art Basel’s Unlimited section.