Despite only being a year old, the Parisian edition of Art Basel is already making changes. The upcoming art fair and its city-wide programming, scheduled to take place this October in Paris, will include new venues and collaborations with institutions like the Louvre and Centre Pompidou.
Launched in 2022, Paris+ par Art Basel will once again host its fair in Paris’ Grand Palais Ephemere. But its concurrent programming, which is free to the public and will take place in six venues, is expanding across the city to new locations like the Centre Pompidou, the parvis de L’Institut de France and the Palais d’Iena.
The Centre Pompidou will host the fair’s “Conversations” program, which consists of nine talks on topics like art collecting, avant-garde figures and purveyors of contemporary myths. Meanwhile, the parvis de L’institut de France will present a six-meter-high sculpture by American artist Sheila Hicks, while an exhibition showcasing works by Italian painter Michelangelo Pistoletto and French artist Daniel Buren will be on view in the museum spaces of the Palais d’Iena.
Paris+ par Art Basel will also repeat its 2022 collaboration with the Louvre through an exhibition of public artworks at the Tuileries Garden. The show, titled ‘The fifth season,” will be curated for the second time by Annabelle Teneze, who later this year will leave her position as director of Les Abattoirs, Musee-Frac Occitanie Toulouse to head the Louvre-Lens Museum.
Locals entering the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins des Beaux-Arts de Paris in October will hear the soundtrack of bat noises accompanying an exhibition from British multimedia artist Jessica Warboys, whose show will explore the intersection of man-made culture and nature. And a project presented by Gagosian Gallery will be on view at the Place Vendome, which is showcasing Wave, a five-meter-high sculpture by Swiss artist Urs Fischer.
How is Paris+ par Art Basel director Clement Delepine shaping the fair?
“With Paris+ par Art Basel’s 2023 public program, Parisians and visitors from out of town will be able to explore thought-provoking art and engaging discourse in the context of historical, if not legendary, locations,” said Clement Delepine, the fair’s director, in a statement. Delepine, who has led Paris+ par Art Basel since its creation in 2022, previously emphasized his aim to diversify the fair’s locations outside of the center of Paris. “In the long term, I would like Paris+ par Art Basel to be different in the sense that I’d like to broaden its scope across the city; a fair where collectors can discover places they normally wouldn’t go,” he said in an Art Basel Q&A last year. The director reiterated his mission in another Art Basel interview published earlier this week, stating that “it’s vital that the fair extends beyond the walls of the Grand Palais Ephemere.”
The addition of venues like the Centre Pompidou for the fair’s city-wide programming will help bring in first-time visitors, according to Delepine. “The idea is to create new encounters and chance collisions,” he said. “My hope is that someone will overhear a snippet of conversation as they pass through, and that this phrase will percolate, making them think—or react. That’s what art is all about.”
Delepine also emphasized that the upcoming edition of the fair contained a lot of “fine-tuning,” as last year’s Paris+ par Art Basel was launched in the short span of nine months as opposed to a year. “That said, it also remains a year of transition and experimentation. We’ll continue to send out a few trial balloons.”
