Top Sales from Art Basel Paris 2024
The 2024 edition of Art Basel Paris attracted more than 65,000 (well above last year’s figure of 38,000) throughout its VIP and public days. Galleries placed work by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, 20th century masters, and emerging voices, including Louise Bourgeois, Julie Mehretu, Willem de Kooning, Lee Ufan, Olga de Amaral, Paulina Olowska, Camille Henrot, Lungiswa Gqunta, Juliette Roche, and Mimosa Echard, in esteemed public and private collections.
The fair’s leading sale was reported on its second day: Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture “Spider I” (1995) sold for a staggering $20 million by Hauser & Wirth. That price represents more than three times the leading sale from last year’s fair, and was perhaps the most telling sign of all that Art Basel has made Paris a very comfortable home indeed.
At White Cube, Julie Mehretu’s “Insile” (2013), a monochromatic work that melds architectural drawing and abstract gestures, sold for USD 9.5 million. Often based on real locations – in this case Iraq, addressing the aftermath of the Arab Spring – her paintings nonetheless dissolve into what the artist describes as ‘story maps of no location.’
Sales exceeding the one-million mark were achieved by the following works:● Mark Bradford’s “Not Quite in a Hurry (2024)” sold for $3.5 million;
● Pierre Soulagese’s “Peinture (1994)” sold for €2.6 million ($2.81 million);
● Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “Numero Noir #2 (2021)” sold for $2.2 million;
● Bourgeois’s “La Forêt Enchantée (Up and Up!)” (2006) sold for $2 million;
● Howardena Pindell’s “Untitled (1975)”, sold for $1.75 million;
● Lucio Fontana’s “Concetto spaziale”, Attese (1964–65) sold for €1.3 million ($1.44 million);
● Lee Ufan’s “Response (2022)” was reported by the gallery to be sold for a price in the range of $900,000–$1.8 million;
● Victor Man’s “K (2014)”, sold for €1.2 million ($1.3 million);
● Alice Neel’s “Irma Seitz (1963)” sold for $1.2 million;
● Lee Ufan’s “Dialogue (2015)” sold for €1.05 million ($1.13 million).
Dealers saved a lot of formidable material for the fair. Surrealism, which is the subject of at least two major exhibitions in Paris right now, took the front seat in a number of booths, with too many paintings by Joan Miró and René Magritte to count.
The priciest work for sale at the fair was Suprematism, 18th construction, a 1915 painting by Kazimir Malevich. The painting fetched $33 million at Sotheby’s in 2015. And while the gallery declined to reveal its asking price, Carlo Knoell, the senior director who procured the consignment, said, “It’s not very different today.”
This overview has been composed with information sourced from the following publications: ArtBasel press release, Artsy та Artnet.
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