Karim Crippa's First Art Basel Paris: Fifth Edition, New Direction
Karim Crippa took over as director on 1 November 2025, and this fifth edition is his first. New directors tend to be judged on the numbers, and the numbers are fine. A more useful way to read the fair is to sort the stands by what drives them. Reading through the booth information, two kinds appear. Some stands are tied to something happening elsewhere in Paris or the art world this month: a museum opening, a new estate, a recent solo show. Others make a self-contained argument that would work in any hall in any year. The first kind shows how well the fair is connected. The second kind is what people will remember.
The frame
The fair is no longer a newcomer. It began in 2022 as Paris+ par Art Basel and took its current name in 2024, when it moved into the Grand Palais. Last year it drew more than 73,000 visitors, so proving it can attract a crowd is behind it. This year's edition has 211 exhibitors from 41 countries and territories, across Galeries, Emergence and Premise. Nearly 30 galleries are new and more than 60 have a space in France, in a market that grew about 9% in 2025 to roughly USD 4.5 billion. Avant-Première for galleries and top clients was held on 20 October, Preview Days are 21 and 22 October, and the public comes from 23 to 25 October.
Stands that follow the calendar
Look at who is on the walls and the pattern is hard to miss. Hauser & Wirth (Booth B23) builds its presentation around Louise Bourgeois, who has a solo show at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until February 2027, and around a Jenny Holzer Redaction Painting, shown while Holzer fills the Musée d'Orsay. Sprüth Magers carries Holzer as well, plus Barbara Kruger, whose installation anchors the Pinault Collection's photography exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, and Sylvie Fleury, whose rockets have been on show in Leipzig since September. Gladstone has recently taken on the Colescott estate and is putting him at the front of the hall. Standard (Oslo) gives its entire stand to Suleman Aqeel Khilji, an artist who has had a busy year of residencies and new representation.
None of this is accidental. For a gallery, a museum show is the best advertisement available, because it confers a kind of authority that a booth cannot. By lining up with the institutions, the stands borrow it. The fair benefits too, since it can present itself as part of a wider cultural moment instead of a closed marketplace. The honest reading is that the market and the museum are feeding each other here, and the stands are where the exchange becomes visible.
It also creates a dependency. A fair that leans on the calendar needs the city's institutions to keep delivering, and a quieter year in the museums would leave these stands without their hook.
The first row: two ways to open
Gladstone and Sprüth Magers both sit in the first row after the entrance, and they use the position differently. A fair this size is read in the first minutes, so whoever stands near the door shapes what follows.
Gladstone builds contrast inside a generation. Colescott (born 1925), Merz (1926) and Katz (1927) are almost exact contemporaries, yet they could hardly be further apart: Colescott rewrote American history as satire, Merz made small, fragile things from modest materials, and Katz honed a cool, flat way of painting people. Next to them, Jafa, Mutu, Parreno and Wekua bring in film, sculpture and installation. The thread through the whole stand is the image of the person: who is shown, by whom, and on whose terms. It is a strong first statement, and showing the Colescott estate's new representative at the door is also a quiet piece of news.
Sprüth Magers works in the other direction and shows how one long programme stretches across decades, from Baldessari and Trockel to Kruger, Holzer, Walker, Fleury and Condo. Where Gladstone sets up a sharp comparison, Sprüth Magers offers breadth. Side by side, the two stands give a visitor a quick lesson in two ways of building a booth.
What happens to an artist between museum and booth
Holzer is the clearest test case, since she appears at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth while her exhibition runs at the Orsay. That show opened on 20 October and uses texts found in the museum's own collections. Projections ran across the building's façade from 18 to 22 October. At the museum, the language takes over a building and speaks to people who came for other reasons. At the fair, a painting from the Redaction series, where the text is partly blacked out, is a single framed object that a collector can consider buying.
The same artist, then, means two things in two places. At scale and in public, Holzer is about how language occupies a space. On a booth wall, a Redaction Painting is about what has been withheld, which is a more private, concentrated reading. The fair makes that difference easy to see. It works because visitors can step from one to the other within a day, and few fairs offer that kind of comparison.
Kruger offers a variation. Her work also has a museum presence this month, in a Rotunda built for large-scale installation, so her stand appearance reads as a preview or a postscript to something bigger.
Courtesy at Art Basel
A generation of women, scattered across stands
One pattern across the stands is easy to overlook because it never appears in any one booth description. Several of the older artists on view are women who worked with the body and with unglamorous materials: Bourgeois (1911–2010) and Carol Rama (1918–2015) at Hauser & Wirth, Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973) there as well, and Marisa Merz (1926–2019) at Gladstone. Add Kruger, Holzer and Walker among the living, and a good share of the fair's most serious work is by women who were at various points sidelined or slow to be recognised.
That is partly a matter of market timing: estates are being reassessed, institutions are reorganising their histories, and galleries respond with stands that reflect it. It is also a matter of fit. The body, the domestic, the fragile and the fragmentary are exactly the subjects that this fair's quieter stands are drawn to. These artists give the Paris edition much of its seriousness, and none of them needed a theme to be put there.
Stands that argue on their own
Two stands do not rely on the calendar at all, and they are the strongest in the hall.
Gagosian takes Jeff Koons's "Corks (Couple)" (2011–18), a hand-finished polychrome bronze, and hangs it beside two Duchamp readymades, "Roue de bicyclette" and "Fountain", both dated 1964 and both made after originals from 1913 and 1917 that are lost. The easy reading is lineage. The better one is about copies. The founding works of the readymade now survive only as later versions, and they hang next to a bronze that imitates everyday objects with great care. In other words, the stand shows three kinds of copy at once, and asks which of them is the work. That question normally has a price attached in a place like this, and Gagosian has put it on the wall.
Larkin Erdmann Gallery, new to the fair, brings Duchamp's moustached Mona Lisa, "L.H.O.O.Q." (1964), so the same artist turns up on a second stand with no connection to the first. It is a coincidence that says something about how much of contemporary art still runs through him.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber takes the opposite route with "silence", a booth curated by Ugo Rondinone. The gallery's artists are packed salon-style around the walls, and a single red and black nun stands in the middle. The walls compete for attention; she does not. The idea is that silence and voices need each other, and the booth makes the argument by contrast: a loud hang with a still figure at its centre.
Esther Schipper makes the same point from the other side by adding rather than withdrawing. Seventeen artists share its stand, among them Huyghe, Parreno, Henrot and Sala, and the effect is of a group show more than a sales counter. Rondinone appears among them too, so he is at the fair both as an artist on one stand and as the arranger of another. Between Schipper's crowd and Presenhuber's silence, the hall has two complete answers to the same problem: how to be noticed when everything else is shouting.
The shared-artist map
Taking the stands together shows something booth boundaries hide. Parreno is at Gladstone and Schipper. Henrot is at Schipper and Hauser & Wirth. Condo and Holzer are at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth. Rondinone is at Schipper and behind Presenhuber.
So the fair is less a set of separate programmes than an overlapping network. A collector can meet the same artist in two settings within a few aisles, and the settings change the reading. Henrot reads differently among Schipper's mix of generations than beside Picabia and Kentridge at Hauser & Wirth. That makes context a central part of what the fair sells, and no single gallery can supply it alone.
The fair's own structure
The layout supports the same instincts. Emergence has 16 solo booths along the balconies of the Nave, 12 of them from first-time participants, which keeps newer artists in a calmer setting away from the main floor. Premise has moved to the larger Salon Seine and grown to 12 presentations. Its projects deal with history and with material that does not suit a market stand. Examples include Derek Jarman's tar paintings and a group of Robert Michel's Dada works.
The most telling structural change is the shared booth. A record 12 are split between two galleries this year, and pairings include Michael Rosenfeld with Jeffrey Deitch, and Tina Kim with Take Ninagawa. That is the shared-artist map turned into floor plan. It also suggests that galleries are looking for partners who can broaden a stand's story, not only split the cost.
The rehang Oh La La! follows the same instinct on 23 and 24 October. It is directed this year by actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu under the theme "Myths and Legends". Giving it to someone outside the art world forces galleries to look at their own stands again, and gives visitors a reason to return.
Beyond the Grand Palais, the public programme extends the idea. Miu Miu again partners the programme, and filmmaker Alice Diop has her first exhibition at the Palais d'Iéna. A project like hers cannot sit on a booth wall, which is why it matters: it shows the fair is willing to host work that has no market form.
Where this leaves the fair
Art Basel Paris used to have to show that it could exist. Now the stands show a fair that is confident enough to be selective. The connected stands tell visitors that the fair belongs to the city's cultural life. The self-contained ones, with a replica next to a lost original, a nun among a loud wall, a single painter, tell them the fair can think for itself.
There are two risks. The first is dependence on the calendar: a fair that leans on museum shows needs those shows to keep coming. The second is sameness. If the same artists keep appearing on several stands and every stand has a hook, the hall can start to feel like one long conversation without an author. Crippa's job in this first edition, and the ones after it, is to keep the stands that make a clear point and to make sure the whole still adds up to a fair people can describe. This year's stands are ready for that. The question is whether the structure around them is.
