Paris Art Fair Marathons: A Season of Too Much Art
- Zoe Chambers
- Oct 27
- 6 min read
Updated: 23 hours ago
The penultimate week of October in Paris has become a marathon for the art-inclined. The city seemed to burst at its seams with fairs, openings, and grand gestures—Paris+ par Art Basel at the Grand Palais, the Biennale, fireworks at the Pompidou, and a couple dozen other events that stretched even the most indefatigable of collectors.There were, by some counts, nearly twenty art fairs running simultaneously across the capital—an impossible feast for anyone with only two eyes and two legs. I managed six, plus a few museum and off-site exhibitions, before surrendering to exhaustion and caffeine.
Let’s start with the whale in the room: Art Basel Paris. Beautifully installed inside the restored Grand Palais, it finally feels like the fair has found its footing. Gone are the dreary days of queuing forty minutes for a coffee or a glass of champagne, as in the first editions at the Grand Palais Éphémère. This year, infrastructure has arrived in triumph: cafés and champagne bars at every corner, proper chairs and tables, and a collectors’ lounge that rivaled the first-class cabin of Japan Airlines—spacious, civilized, with a real menu and actual cutlery.Even the organizers managed a small Parisian miracle by closing part of a main avenue and transforming it into an open-air food court serving fish-and-chips, pizza, and sandwiches. The only hiccup came from the digital invitation system, which proved unreliable enough that paper passes—those relics of the past—worked best of all.
And what of the art? It seems that the heirs of Manzoni, Fontana, and the CoBrA school have finally left the stage. Contemporary art, at least in its most self-referential form, appears to have run its course. The stars of the fair were not the freshly minted art-school prodigies with improbable auction records, nor the venerable masters in wheelchairs, but rather the old familiars: Picasso, Giacometti, Warhol.
The booths of Gagosian and Kamel Mennour gleamed with Rodin bronzes, Matisse drawings, Morandis, and even a Foujita or two. The days of duct-taped bananas are over. Solid sculpture, tangible paint, and the comfort of provenance have returned. Toulouse-Lautrec, Schiele, Dalí, and Lalanne reappeared like trusted old friends.Has the market sobered up? Perhaps the current geopolitical unease has made collectors yearn for something real, something reassuring. Maybe we’ve reached the moment in Andersen’s fable when the king’s tailors cannot sell anymore naked dress to the kings. Whatever the reason, the tone of the market is changing—decidedly for the better.
A short walk from the Grand Palais, another fair—the International Paris Art Fair—opened in a cavernous building at the foot of the Champs-Élysées. It felt like stepping back twenty-five years to a time when European art schools taught that skill, craft, and aesthetics were bourgeois distractions from the artist’s “true expression.” The result was predictably gray and joyless. One wandered through the chilly space hoping for a surprise, finding instead rows of self-consciously “original” works that looked eerily alike.The only memorable moment came courtesy of Stanislava Kovalcikova, whose otherwise weak paintings were redeemed by a corridor carpeted with crisp autumn leaves. Visitors walked through the installation inhaling that unmistakable October scent—a small, sensory triumph amid a sea of conceptual sameness.
Across town, the satellite fair Asia Now offered a different mood entirely. Staged in the magnificent Monnaie de Paris, it remains one of the most elegant art events in the city.
This year’s edition opened with Topographies of Belonging: Homeskin by Muhannad Shono, a haunting installation unfurling along the palace’s grand staircase, its red carpet and 17th-century ceilings lending an operatic air.Another standout was Transience Monuments by Sumakshi Singh, whose intricate, lace-like constructions resonated with me after a recent visit to the Museum of Lace in Alençon. Elsewhere, optical paintings by Korea’s Kim Kang-Young and delicate trompe-l’œil works by Japan’s Daiya Yamamoto (presented by Galerie Tamenaga) demonstrated that craftsmanship and subtlety still have their champions.Yet, compared with previous years, the fair felt shrunken—less crowded, less electric. The gravitational pull of Basel at the Grand Palais may simply have drained its satellites.
It was impossible to see everything. The smaller fairs—THEMA, Offscreen, Design Miami/Paris, Outsider Art Fair, MENART, and others—were scattered across the city, too far from the Grand Palais to benefit from Basel’s crowds. The hope that collectors, after a day amid the booths of Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth, would venture to lesser fairs remains largely wishful thinking.Once you’ve secured the golden Basel pass, your off-hours are consumed by dinners, parties, studio visits, and perhaps a quick pilgrimage to Hermès or Chanel. No one has a twenty-fifth hour to spare.
Still, I managed one more stop: AKAA—Also Known As Africa—at Le Carreau du Temple in the Marais. Smaller than in previous years but warm and lively, it offered welcome contrast to the corporate chill of other fairs. The entrance installation, The Third Aesthetics by Serge Mouangue, a Cameroonian-born designer long based in Paris and Japan, was a triumph of cultural synthesis.Among the highlights were works by Stéphane Edith Conradio, who transforms humble household objects into poetic assemblages, and by Emmanuel Aggrey Tieku, whose textile panels made from discarded clothing bore the telling title How to Heal a Broken World. There was freshness here—hand, heart, and humor in equal measure.
Another stop on the circuit was Moderne Art Fair, which this year moved from its usual perch along the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde—arguably the most central address in Paris and a surprisingly fitting setting for a fair that celebrates the contradictions of modern taste.Inside its two tents unfolded an eclectic mix: genuine 20th-century masterpieces hung side by side with glossy, mass-produced decor fit for the lobbies of Las Vegas or the galleries of Palm Springs. It was, in a sense, a fair of two souls—one devoted to quality and history, the other to commerce and glitter.
Yet when one ignored the over-varnished distractions, treasures emerged. There were luminous works on paper and canvas from the greats of the École de Paris—Yula Chapoval, Foujita, and Chagall among them—alongside strong showings of Bernard Buffet and Serge Poliakoff. César was present, too, in a small army of compressed metal and thumb-sized bronzes.Among contemporary offerings, several galleries presented intimate works by Bernard Venet and the late Sam Szafran, both elegant in their restraint. My personal highlight was a delicate drawing by Nicolas de Staël and a spirited Calder from Kalisto Fine Art.
There was even a welcome surprise—a rare painting by the Italian artist Valerio Adami. Out of all these impressions, one discovery proved especially memorable. I was beautifully surprised to find an entire stand devoted to Gouji, one of today’s leading silversmiths. Born in Georgia and based for most of his life in Paris, Gouji has forged a singular aesthetic language—part medieval craftsmanship, part Art Deco geometry, part contemporary edge. His objects possess that rare quality of feeling at once ancient and freshly minted.
His reputation, long established among the initiated, extends from the Vatican to the newly restored Notre-Dame de Paris, both of which have commissioned his work. The gallery presenting him at Moderne has represented him for nearly half a century—his first French gallery, and still his most faithful. In a fair full of noise and novelty, Gouji’s quiet, meticulous brilliance felt like a revelation.
Finally, at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, a Ceramic Art Fair unfolded under the gilded ceilings of the 18th-century Hôtel de Varengeville. The setting was magnificent; the fair itself, less so. The standout was Galerie Vauclaire, whose sumptuous display of Vallauris ceramics spanned 130 years—from Art Nouveau masters like Clément Massier to Roger Capron and Eugène Fidler. The rest tended toward the decorative rather than the artistic: many Madouras, but, alas, no Picassos. Still, the grandeur of the venue didn’t quite serve the ceramics. Such delicate objects need room, light, and a bit of breathing space—not the constant anxiety of being nudged by a visitor’s bag or umbrella.
And so ends the Paris art-fair marathon. Too much of a good thing, as the old Polish proverb says, can be unhealthy. Perhaps it’s time for fewer fairs, better spaced, and better paced. May be thematically: a week of different ceramic fairs, a week of different Asian fairs, a week of young or prehistorical art fairs etc.
The week’s real revelation? The emperor’s new clothes no longer sell. The market has rediscovered substance—Picasso, Giacometti, Warhol—and perhaps, after years of noise, art itself.
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