An afternoon at Art Basel Paris 2026

Photography Valentina Bisco & Tyra Galieva
Introduction Veronica Tlapanco Szabó

Art fairs have always been exercises in compression. Entire practices reduced to booths and artistic universes collapsed into wall texts. Art Basel Paris makes this compression feel especially acute. So much to see, so much to feel, there is no shortage of art beneath the Grand Palais’s vast verrière, its pale-green iron framework cinching in 211 galleries. Some works make themselves impossible to ignore by stretching beyond their allotted white cube, others require a more personal encounter to reveal themselves.

For instance, Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘Post’ works are part of a greater experience than first meets the eye, requiring a degree of human interaction to acquire. Each piece could be purchased for 500 euros through a tombola system, hence the title of the exhibition in which they were featured, EX-VOTO-TOMBOLA. Bringing together around 300 works made from cardboard and drawn on with felt-tip or ballpoint pens, some incorporating images and others pieces of tape, the works embraced a certain simplicity. Found in the excitement of not knowing which work one would receive. Purchasers were asked to blindly select a numbered piece of paper, with each number corresponding to a work, leaving the final choice entirely to chance.

Condensing the vast spectacle of reality television was Solomon Garçon’s Cache (cow), a giant, make-up-splattered faux-fur white coat, framed in an art shipping crate, accompanied by retroreflective powder and a prison burner phone. The work was conceived around The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, in particular one of the show's leads, Jen Shah, who was sentenced to federal prison in 2023 to serve 6.5 years for conspiracy to commit wire fraud as part of a telemarketing scheme. Hence the inclusion of the actual real burner phone! The retroreflective powder sprinkled around made the work all the more compelling, as it only becomes visible when illuminated by a source of light. Evoking the flashes of paparazzi cameras. It brings the scandalous, seemingly lowbrow world of reality television into one of the highest-brow settings of all, Art Basel Paris.

To navigate all of the fair’s abundance, Valentina Bisco and Tyra Galieva took us under their wing. Offering a guiding hand through the fair’s seemingly endless discoveries.