The Best of Paris+ par Art Basel 2023

It's around an imposing yellow car, more precisely a Triumph TR6, that there were the most number of brandished phones. And for good reason: this work by Sarah Lucas, a “Young British Artist” exhibited on the stand of the Sadie Coles HQ gallery during Paris+ par Art Basel, addressed very current themes. While earlier versions exuded sensuality, objection, and fragility, more recent ones emphasized individuality and vitality. The duo of “models” embodied the lascivious glory of the middle-aged woman.

But this type of work, often there to "put on a show," which sooner or later ends up on Instagram, now seems to be exhausted over the course of the fairs. Indeed, we returned to the essential, to discreet painting on canvas. This is the case of a work by Ed Clark, at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery, which has just—finally—been exported to Paris, and with which we find ourselves face to face as soon as we entered the fair.

Further on, at the Lisson Gallery, we found a noble cabinet and its skeleton, signed by Hugh Hayden, while a sculpture by Takashi Murakami and Pale Blue by Paul McCarthy caught the eye at Perrotin. Throughout the fair were also found neon lights by Claire Fontaine at Mennour, a small series by Gideon Rubin at the Karsten Greve Gallery, a knot by Jean Michel Othoniel at the Kukje Gallery, a Jeppe Hein balloon, a forest by Eva Jospin and a superb Buren at the Galeriacontinua.

Once out of the Grand Palais Éphémère, towards the Jardin des Tuileries, which hosted La Cinquième Saison, was an exhibition designed by Annabelle Ténèze, director of the Louvre-Lens museum, with works by artists such as Gaetano Pesce, Alicja Kwade, John Giorno, and Zanele Muholi.

There sat a demountable house designed in 1941 by the visionary designers Jean Prouvé and Pierre Jeanneret, then produced in a few rare examples until 1943. A little further away, on Place Vendôme, Urs Fischer unveils the work "Wave" (2018), an aluminum sculpture five meters high, while Jessica Warboys takes over the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the exhibition This Tail Grows Among Ruins (2023), which combines a video and canvas collages. At the Palais d'Iena, a joint project by Daniel Buren and Michelangelo Pistoletto awaited you, curated by Matthieu Poirier. Finally, on the Parvis de l’Institut de France proudly sat "Vers Des Horizons Nouveaux" (2023), a monumental sculpture by Sheila Hicks.

One of the favorite exhibitions was the Waall .2 exhibition that was held at the Au Roi gallery, where the Together Agency invited six multidisciplinary artists to take over the walls of the gallery through abstract explorations of reality, colors, matter, and its transitory states: Côme Clérino, currently in the windows of the Hermès boutique in Aix-en-Provence, Marion Flament, Arthur Hoffmann, Guillaume Linard Osorio, Mathieu Merlet-Briand, and Clara Rivault, whose HEDERA project was just selected to come to life on the facade of the new head of the Institut Français.