APAA’s Top Picks From Art Basel Paris 2025
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987. Presented by Hauser & Wirth.
Art Basel Paris opens this week with 206 galleries from 41 countries and territories, including 29 first-time participants and 65 galleries operating spaces in France. The fair is structured across three exhibition sectors: Galeries, in which exhibitors present the full breadth of their program; Emergence, dedicated to emerging galleries and artists; Premise, presenting highly singular curatorial proposals.
APAA advisors share their standout selections from Art Basel Paris, providing moments of careful looking and reflection during a high-speed time. Thank you to our members for their thoughtful curations and expertise.
Laura Owens, Untitled, 2025
“What I love about this painting is how effortlessly it walks the line between casual and complex. I’ve always admired her work because it seemed so brave – a quality I first recognized at her mid-career exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Owens makes her doodles drift like daydreams, and her sparse gestures hint at figuration. The soft pink ground sets off her brushstrokes and monochrome patches of impasto, while the gentle palette radiates calm – something deeply needed in such chaotic times. The painting’s quiet strength lies in the power of her whisper.”
Oil, pastel, watercolor, graphite, sand, resin and silkscreened Flashe on linen
330 x 229 cm (130 x 90 in.)
Presented by Matthew Marks Gallery
Elizabeth Peyton, Kiss (Love), 2020
“At the heart of Kiss (Love), Peyton captures the intimate poetics of contemporary life, her subjects rendered with luminous tenderness and emotional clarity. A timeless meditation on beauty, longing, and the fleeting nature of connection, the ultimate portrait.”
Oil on board
14 x 17 inches (*35.6 x 43.2 cm)
Presented by Gladstone Gallery
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987
“Our team at Emigrant Bank Fine Art eagerly anticipates seeing this extraordinary 1987 squeegee painting by Gerhard Richter, with its stunningly brilliant colors, at Hauser & Wirth’s booth at Art Basel Paris next week. This is a stellar Richter moment, as the artist’s comprehensive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton opens this week, and is also high on our Paris itinerary.”
Oil on canvas
200 x 140 cm / 78 3/4 x 55 1/8po
Presented by Hauser & Wirth
Robert Rauschenberg, Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba, 1983
“Appropriation is a consistently examined theme across artistic disciplines, making it especially compelling to encounter an early example by a leading figure in the discourse. Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) helped usher in a new era of postwar American art following Abstract Expressionism. “Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba” (1983) is a striking example from his Japanese Recreational Clayworks series, which merges ceramics, painting, and printmaking into a single object. At the center of the composition is a reproduction of Jacques-Louis David’s iconic 1801 portrait “Napoleon Crossing the Alps.” Aligned with the spirit of the artist’s “Combines”, Rauschenberg juxtaposed the art historical image with gestural brushwork and his own 35mm color photography. The work serves both as an homage to canonical art history and an invitation for viewers to reconsider their own relationship to these familiar images—part of the artist’s lifelong exploration into the underlying structures that define what an artwork is.”
Transfer and glaze on high-fired ceramic
106.42" x 90.98"
Presented by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery
Gala Porras-Kim, 202 ivory objects at Carnegie Museum of Art or at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, 2025
“Paris continues to offer an amazing array of art offerings during Art Basel, with incredible museum and gallery shows, and a strong commercial fair of blue-chip and emerging talent presented in the beautiful Grand-Palais.
Of the many early previews, Commonwealth and Council’s solo booth of new drawings by Gala Porras-Kim looks fascinating. Large in scale and executed by hand in colored pencil, these detailed index drawings of groups of artifacts question how institutional cataloging can affect our understanding of objects as works of art.”
Colored pencil, flashe on paper
Diptych: 48 x 96 in (122 x 244 cm) each; framed: 49.5 x 97.5 in (126 x 248 cm) each; overall dimensions variable
Presented by Commonwealth and Council
Jennifer Guidi, A Never-Ending Whirl of Evanescence, 2025
“Last spring I saw a solo show of Guidi’s at the Massimo de Carlo Gallery in Milan. There were mostly landscape paintings in her signature technique of sand mixed with paint, with a thick, light-reflecting dense surface, which she covers with thousands of rigorously applied scratch marks. It sounds like a lot is going on, but there is a stillness and permanent quality about the images, as if removing one mark would disrupt the composition. Guidi manages to create a glowing, meditative landscape, where ‘the sun’s concentric pulses animate sea and land.’ I could enjoy gazing at her work forever and never tire of it. For those interested in following her work more closely, Kordansky will have a solo exhibition of her work at their Los Angeles Gallery.”
Oil and sand on linen
21 1/4 x 30 x 1 3/4 inches, (54 x 76.2 x 4.4 cm)
Presented by David Kordansky Gallery
Rinus Van de Velde, Maybe the Rope hangs just a few Centimeters above the Ground, 2025
“Rinus Van de Velde is a Belgian artist best known for his monumental charcoal drawings, recognizable for their cinematic aesthetic. His works are raw, contemplative and emotionally charged, almost always accompanied by a line of text beneath that rarely refers directly to the image, but instead evokes suggestion, as if one were looking at a film still without having seen the entire film.
In his more recent work, Van de Velde has significantly expanded his color palette. In this piece at Max Hetzler, for instance, color takes on a dominant role. As throughout his oeuvre, this work balances between fiction and reality: the flower field is an imaginary landscape, born from his inner world.
Van de Velde recently made a film about an artist who ventures into nature to paint, a romantic image he himself can only experience in imagination, since he always works in his studio. He travels in thought, constructing a fictional world that he seeks to capture on canvas. The play of light and shadow, combined with his painterly approach, creates a dramatic, cinematic atmosphere that feels like a daydream where reality and imagination intertwine.”
Oil pastel on paper
172 x 112 cm (67 3/4 x 44 1/9 inches)ax h
Presented by Galerie Max Hetzler
