There were sales aplenty during Art Basel’s First Choice preview yesterday (June 17), but little sense of urgency. The mega-fair’s opening day unfolded at a slower, more deliberate pace, especially at the top end of the market, compared to the pre-pandemic and pre-Paris frenzies. After the early breakfast and bottomless Ruinart, no one was stampeding across the ground floor to claim a blue-chip trophy. Instead, the action drifted upstairs, where fresher, more international offerings at lower price points drew a steadier rhythm of discovery and deal-making.
The crowd on opening day skewed unmistakably European—and older—highlighting how Basel’s hometown edition is losing its grip on the next-gen global jet-set, many of whom are now placing their bets on Paris or the much-hyped Qatar edition, a hot topic in the Messe’s circular courtyard.
Seasoned collector Alain Servais confirmed the shift, noting it felt like “the quietest opening day in terms of attendance” in his twenty-eight years of attending the fair. “Looking for works taking me out of my comfort zone, I spent long days at Unlimited and Art Basel,” he told Observer. “With only a handful of exceptions like Martha Rosler at Nagel Drexler, Candice Lin & Miriam Bennani at Ghebaly, Gabrielle Thomas at Rafaela Cortese, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Stephen Friedman, Shino Otake at Take Ninagawa, Vikrant Bhise at Experimenter, Joyce Joumaa at Eli Kerr, it seemed to me too safe.”
What was once the undisputed climax of the art market calendar now reads more like a transitional gathering—a polite farewell before the Mediterranean art circuit takes over, bringing those still making the transatlantic trek to Hydra and Menorca.
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“We’re not in a crash, but a correction,” art market expert Magnus Resch told Observer when we caught him after a few laps around the aisles. “While a handful of top-tier artists still fetch high prices, the broader market has been stagnant for years—the Covid-era hype has simply worn off. At the same time, we’re seeing a generational shift: today’s buyers are younger, more diverse and digital-first, yet the art world hasn’t kept pace. If we fail to convert them into committed collectors, the market’s downturn will continue.”
According to Resch, these new buyers are showing up at events like Art Basel because they value the offline social experience, but in its current form, the fair model isn’t working. “Collectors aren’t buying, and galleries aren’t selling,” he said. “As a result, fairs are becoming costly branding exercises—profitable for a few, break-even at best for the rest.”
Despite mounting geopolitical tensions and looming global conflicts, top dealers arrived in Basel with the expected arsenal of blue-chip names. On the ground floor, Helly Nahmad anchored his booth with a commanding front display: two vibrant Calder sculptures—one mobile, one stabile—flanking a fresh-to-market Dubuffet from 1963. Further inside, the booth leaned into market stability with a familiar anchor: Picasso, including a standout 1964 canvas, Femme nue couchée jouant avec un chat, priced at $28 million after previously selling at Sotheby’s in 2023 for $21.2 million.
An undeniable highlight of this edition of the fair is Sueño de Sirenas (1963) by Leonora Carrington, presented by Di Donna Gallery with a $9.5 million price tag. Structured like an altarpiece, the triptych is encased in an elegantly ornamented frame with intricately sculpted, gilded relief and stands as a rare, symbolically rich example of Carrington’s surreal and mystical portrayals of the feminine. Rooted in a dream or vision the artist experienced, the work depicts iconic Mexican actress and seductress María Félix as a siren in three incarnations. Each panel offers a distinct manifestation: one in ebony (left), one in fire (right) and a luminous mother-of-pearl figure at center, cloaked in a radiant haze of white light.
Another standout was Giuseppe Penone’s Respirare l’ombra – foglie di tè (2008), a monumental wall piece at Marian Goodman’s booth in which bronze lungs emerge from a dense surface of tea leaves, evoking the intimate, symbiotic breath shared between plants and humans. A version of the work is featured in the artist’s current retrospective at the Serpentine, “Thoughts in the Roots.”
Swiss powerhouse Hauser & Wirth, playing on its home turf, is showcasing a sweeping range from its global roster. “In a moment of instantaneous PDF sharing and digital everything, this is the fair where you’re guaranteed to see masterworks you otherwise wouldn’t—to be reminded of the best art’s ability to ambush ennui and shock the senses back to life,” gallery president Iwan Wirth said. A standout at the booth was Mark Rothko’s No. 6/Sienna, Orange on Wine (1962), described as a “homecoming” for the moody canvas, which was first exhibited in the legendary 1964 show at Kunsthalle Basel that introduced Swiss audiences to the international avant-garde. The gallery declined to share the asking price, but recent auction results suggest a range between $30 million and $50 million.
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Confirmed seven-figure sales included two large-scale Mark Bradford paintings, each at $3.5 million, a George Condo for $2.45 million sold to a European collection, a Jack Whitten for $2 million timed with his MoMA show and works by Rashid Johnson and Louise Bourgeois, each at $1 million.
By evening, the orange Rothko that Pace brought to mark its 65th anniversary was already on reserve, along with works by Pablo Picasso and Joan Mitchell. In a statement to the press, Marc Glimcher noted that many had misread the May auctions, which, in his view, signaled a return of market confidence. “When it came to Basel, they said ‘the Americans aren’t coming’ and ‘the hotels aren’t full’… well, we can barely move in our booth, and the sales velocity has been as vigorous as any year in the past. The energy to collect is back.”
By the end of the first day, the gallery had secured multiple institutional placements, including a gestural abstraction by Pam Evelyn ($85,000), a sculpture by Arlene Shechet ($150,000) and paintings by Loie Hollowell ($275,000), Nigel Cooke ($250,000) and Adam Pendleton ($165,000), whose entire thirty-five-work exhibition was recently acquired by MoMA. The gallery also placed early works by younger artists from its program, including Kylie Manning ($115,000), Li Hei Di ($28,000) and newly represented Friedrich Kunath ($135,000), who will have his first solo show with the gallery in New York this fall. Pace also debuted a sculpture by Chiffon Thomas, suggesting a possible new collaboration, though a gallery representative told Observer that no show is yet confirmed. Other notable sales on day one included an Emily Kam Kngwarray painting for $450,000 ahead of the artist’s major survey opening in a few weeks and a solo at Pace London. The gallery also sold Elmgreen & Dragset’s marble sculpture to G2 Kunsthalle, a Leipzig for $300,000 ahead of their upcoming L.A. exhibition in September and three editions of Alicja Kwade’s SunderState V (2025) for $125,000 each, as the artist prepares for her first major New York presentation since joining the roster in 2023. However, the top-priced acquisition from the booth was Agnes Martin’s Untitled #5 (2002), which sold for over $4 million.
Notably successful was a series of solo presentations curated by Perrotin, which sold out all the works by Japanese artist Mr., including shaped canvas paintings in the $85,000-250,000 range, drawings priced at $30,000 and a sculpture for $120,000. As Emmanuel Perrotin noted in his statement to the press, the gallery’s large three-level booth this year allowed them to showcase eight solo shows and works by more than thirty artists. Izumi Kato’s solo presentation, which included paintings in the $70,000-120,000 range and sculptures priced between $50,000-100,000, sold out. Surrealist sculptural pieces by Genesis Belanger also sold out in the $30,000-50,000 range, and works by Lee Bae sold out for $30,000-200,000. Also on view were new works by Julian Charrière, currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Musée Tinguely, alongside a group of sculptures by Lynn Chadwick—part of an ongoing international spotlight on the British sculptor’s legacy, with a global tour of major shows following “Hypercircle – Chapter 1: Scalene” during Art Basel Paris last October.
David Zwirner sold sixty-eight works, including major six- and seven-figure placements such as a $9.5 million sculpture by Ruth Asawa, a $6.8 million painting by Gerhard Richter, a $1.3 million diptych by On Kawara and two new paintings by Dana Schutz for $1,200,000 and $850,000. The gallery also reported placing two paintings by Marlene Dumas, along with works by Yayoi Kusama, Raymond Pettibon, Lucas Arruda, Michaël Borremans (two paintings at $850,000 each), Chris Ofili ($700,000), Koan Mitchell, Paul Klee, Wolfgang Tillmans, William Eggleston, abstractionist Emma McIntyre ($120,000) and Victor Man, among others.
Notable sales in the six-digit range were also reported at Gladstone, where senior partner Max Falkenstein described the day one results as one of their strongest showings at Art Basel to date. The gallery placed a Keith Haring sumi ink on wood painting from 1983 for $3,500,000, a Sigmar Polke painting for $1,750,000, an Alex Katz for $1,200,000 and a Robert Rauschenberg collage for $1,200,000, along with works by Amy Sillman ($575,000), Ugo Rondinone’s stone figure sculpture ($550,000), Rosemarie Trockel ($325,000) and multiple Keith Haring drawings ranging from $275,000 to $550,000 each. Several drawings by Joan Jonas also sold at approximately $10,000 each, among other first-day transactions.
In the $1+ million range, Thaddaeus Ropac reported the sale of a €1.8 million Georg Baselitz, a $1.5 million Robert Rauschenberg and a four-part James Rosenquist painting, Playmate (1966), which sold to a European institution for $1.8 million. The Austrian dealer described the opening as dynamic, declaring in a statement that “Basel is delivering, with a strong and busy start to the opening day. The quality you see here is incredibly high, and this is what people come for.” Additional sales included works by Alex Katz, Antony Gormley, Sean Scully and two paintings by Martha Jungwirth for $320,000 and $350,000.
White Cube successfully placed a 2023 work by Georg Baselitz for €2.2 million, three works by Danh Vo at €250,000 each and Cai Guo-Qiang’s Red Birds (2022), acquired by a European institution for $1.2 million, along with other works from its roster. Also reporting strong results was Korean-American dealer Tina Kim, who sold two paintings by Ha Chong-Hyun for $550,000 and $250,000; three mixed media works by Suki Seokyeong Kang priced at $100,000, $70,000 and between $40,000-50,000; a textile work by Lee ShinJa in the $40,000-50,000 range; a mixed media sculpture by Mire Lee for $40,000 and a mixed media work by Pacita Abad priced between $30,000-40,000. Notably, the large-scale installation by Suki Seokyeong Kang, Mat Black Mat 170 x 380, which the gallery is presenting at Art Basel Unlimited, is currently on hold with a major U.S. institution.
However, once we take blue-chip and mega-brand booths out of the equation, the pace of deal-making feels noticeably different from Art Basel at its peak. As Kelly Woods, a partner at Marianne Boesky Gallery, put it, curiosity was the order of the day. Collectors were interested but also much more cautious when it came to buying. “Collectors are buying with their eyes and not their ears,” she said, “and really spending time looking and not chasing.” The gallery spotlighted works by top names from its roster, including Ghada Amer, Sanford Biggers and Celeste Rapone, among others, and was showing a colorful, intricately layered large-scale painting by Michaela Yearwood-Dan.
Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, acknowledged that while the art market is far from immune to today’s precarious geopolitical climate, it continues to show resilience. “We’ve had an active first day at the fair, despite the challenging circumstances around the world,” she told Observer. “A high caliber of serious collectors and curators showed up—mainly from Europe, but also from the Middle East and China.” The gallery reported several six-figure sales by artists with institutional shows in Europe, including a new painting by Cecilia Vicuña, whose solo exhibition opens later this year at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and two works by Do Ho Suh, whose survey is currently on view at Tate Modern. Additional placements included works by Kader Attia, Billy Childish, Liza Lou and Calida Rawles, as well as a new piece by Anna Park—recently added to the gallery’s roster—sold to a collector based in Seoul in the $80,000-100,000 range. Park is currently preparing for a solo show in London in 2026.
MASSIMODECARLO expressed satisfaction, confirming several sales by the end of day one, including works by Maurizio Cattelan, Jenna Gribbon, France-Lise McGurn, Jennifer Guidi, Ludovic Nkoth and Xiyao Wang. For the first time this year, the gallery is also staging a pop-up exhibition by Lenz Geerk at Domushaus—a must-see off-site highlight.
Institutional presentations and discoveries in the curated sections
In Statements, Jakarta-based RHO Projects presented an intricate installation by Bagus Pandega titled Fabric of the Earth, composed of mechanical circuits and toolboxes. The work serves as a site for shared knowledge and critical reflection on the 2006 Sidoarjo mudflow disaster in East Java, where a gas drilling operation triggered a man-made eruption that buried villages and devastated the environment. Known for his modular electronic practice, Pandega disrupts mechanical and industrial systems, transforming technology into a decentralized, adaptive tool for sociopolitical engagement and resilience in the face of institutional failure. The presentation anticipates a string of major institutional solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Basel (opening August 29), the Swiss Institute in New York later this year and the Singapore Art Museum in 2026.
Addressing political and societal paradoxes—and the failures of political infrastructure—is the work of Arturo Kameya, presented in a solo booth by GRIMM in the same section. The artist told Observer that the works draw from Peruvian political history, specifically state-led education reforms that promoted physical conditioning in the aftermath of military defeat—a campaign fueled by the perception of Peruvians as lazy and self-indulgent. Through a mix of paintings, installations and sculptures, the booth layers symbols of control and contradiction: wheels reference objects one might carry into the afterlife, while a table strewn with drinks is repeatedly trampled, underscoring the absurdity of performative normalcy amid enduring instability.
Kameya has recently attracted significant institutional recognition, with exhibitions across major museums and biennials worldwide. Highlights include a solo show at Marres House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, as well as presentations at Prospect.6 in New Orleans, the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo (2023), the Busan Biennale (2022) and the 5th New Museum Triennial in New York (2021). Upcoming engagements include a solo presentation at CAP Lyon in fall 2025 and participation in the Carnegie International. His presentation in Basel was met with immediate enthusiasm: one painting was acquired by a museum in Hangzhou, China, and his sculpture Tú tranquilo, yo nervioso is currently on hold for a Dutch museum. The large installation anchoring the back wall is also on hold, and most of the works from his recent solo show in Amsterdam are reportedly close to selling out.
GRIMM is also presenting in Unlimited an ambitious, large painted mural installation by the artist’s partner, Claudia Martínez Garay, which sold on opening day to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami for $90,000.
Nearby in the same section, Gunia Nowik Gallery is showcasing a monumental frieze by young Ukrainian artist Sana Shahmuradova (b. 1996) titled The Rupture—a procession of souls suspended in limbo, drifting between life and death, embracing the flux and possibility of transformation. Genderless bodies unravel across the surface, tracing the contours of transgenerational trauma and collective memory. Each work is priced at $10,000, forming a circular choreography that evokes the perpetual existential cycle of birth, death, apocalypse and, insistently, regeneration and hope.
Worth seeing in Statements is the presentation by Proyectos Ultravioleta of British-Iranian artist Abbas Zahedi, who debuts his collaboration with the gallery at Basel while simultaneously presenting a site-specific installation at Tate Modern in London as part of the celebrated Hyundai Commission, In the absence of ruins, which gives voice to the architecture of the Turbine Hall through January 2026. As at Tate, the sculptures on view at the fair are crafted from repurposed pipes, gas cylinders and other materials typically used to channel utilities, reimagined by the artist as instruments and vessels that carry sound. Half-instruments, half-speakers, these resonant forms challenge rigid formal boundaries while probing the ecological and social systems we inhabit.
As part of the Kabinett sector—a curated “booth within a booth” format where galleries present highly focused thematic installations within their main booth space—Mexican gallery Kurimanzutto is spotlighting the work of Wang Shui, whose latest pieces explore the intersection of desire, technology and consciousness through abstract painterly gestures on aluminum. Embracing a more tactile and intuitive process grounded in both body and mind, the artist moves away from earlier engagements with artificial intelligence, signaling a shift toward material sensitivity and embodied experimentation.
Brazilian powerhouse Almeida & Dale is presenting a solo booth spotlighting the work of José Antonio da Silva, a widely recognized artist whose legacy has slipped into partial obscurity in recent years. The son of coffee plantation workers in rural São Paulo, da Silva worked various manual jobs before settling in São José do Rio Preto, where he painted his first works on flannel due to a lack of resources. His paintings from the 1940s captured the shifting social fabric of Brazil’s interior, portraying settlers, ranchers and laborers amid the expanding collision of rural life and industrialization. Known for transforming popular and folkloric imagery into a distinctly contemporary practice, his work is currently being reexamined in a solo exhibition at the Musée de Grenoble. Despite being represented in all major Brazilian institutional collections, his works remain relatively accessible, priced here between $40,000 and $100,000.
Another highlight comes from Raquel Arnaud, who is presenting a solo booth dedicated to Sérgio Camargo—an institutionally recognized yet still underknown figure in Europe, and one of the most important sculptors in Brazilian art history. A student of Lucio Fontana and in dialogue with figures like Brancusi and Vantongerloo, Camargo developed a rigorous visual language rooted in essential geometric forms, resonating with the aesthetics of movements such as Group Zero and N. With prices ranging from €45,000 to €100,000, his work explores the relationship between form, space and light, creating surfaces animated by the shifting play of shadow. His sculptures are held in significant institutional collections, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Tate, MAM-SP and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
Lisbon-based gallery Madragoa has works by Basel-born Arnette Barceló created in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Her haunting portrayals of female figures confined to bathtubs offer a poignant commentary on the condition of women, who are suspended in a liminal space between objectification, voyeurism and the fertile ground of gestation. Over the years, Barceló developed a personal mythology and symbolic lexicon that feels strikingly current. Gallery owner Matteo Consonni told Observer that he first encountered her work in the exhibition “Live Your Transformation” at Der Tank in Basel, curated by Chus Martínez, which he later brought to Lisbon. A selection of Barceló’s drawings was also featured in Manifesta in Barcelona, marking a growing resurgence of interest in her practice. At Basel, the gallery reported strong attention from both private and institutional collectors, but her prices remain accessible, ranging from €5,000 to €28,000.
Similarly psychologically intense are Judith Bernstein’s vehement, turbulent gestural canvases at Kasmin. The presentation is anchored by a monumental, long-unseen work priced at $400,000 that is a searing example of the raw immediacy and physical force of the artist’s provocative, politically charged drawings and paintings. Merging feminist critique with visceral, gestural abstraction, Bernstein channels her frustration with the chaos of contemporary society into embodied mark-making, unleashing anger across the canvas through bold, visceral gestures. Though long overlooked by the institutional mainstream, Bernstein has seen a major resurgence in interest in the last two decades, with solo exhibitions at the New Museum, Kunsthall Stavanger and The Drawing Center. Her work is also in prominent collections, including the Whitney Museum, MoMA and Centre Pompidou.
Other notable sales on the upper floor, on the more contemporary end of the spectrum, included a large painting by rising Japanese star Yu Nishimura—sold by Galerie Crèvecœur at a price point well into six figures—alongside a smaller work priced at €25,000. The gallery also placed pieces by Tomasz Kowalski, Emma Reyes and Ernst Yohji Jaeger. David Kordansky moved two Jonas Wood paintings with ease, along with a Broken Soul painting by Rashid Johnson and works by highly watched names such as Lucy Bull, Jennifer Guidi, Maia Cruz Palileo and Shara Hughes. Adding fresh voices to the fair, Société introduced works by Salim Green and Wynnie Mynerva—both recent additions to the gallery roster—which were met with enthusiastic response and rapid placements.
While Art Basel’s flagship Swiss edition has reaffirmed its reputation for quality, the true pulse of the market—beyond the blue-chip facade—will come into sharper focus as additional sales are finalized in this quieter “new normal” over the coming days.
Art Basel runs through Sunday, June 21, 2025.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
