“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there is arguably no other city worldwide that captures the minds and imagination of artists and lovers of art more than Paris,” Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz told Art & Object. “This dynamism, however, is also materially reflected in France’s growing significance in the international art market. France today is the fourth largest market in the world and represents full half of the trade in the European Union. This is reflected in the remarkable continued growth of the local gallery scene and the strong demand globally for artists living and practicing in France.”
Perrotin, exhibiting a fantastic new figurative flower sculpture by Takashi Murakami at the front of its booth, and Gagosian, displaying a new, ironic screen-printed painting by Urs Fischer on its outer wall, are among the blue-chip exhibitors in the Galleries section, where visitors got their first look at the art the bustling fair.
Perrotin is presenting Murakami’s iconic Together with the Flower Parent and Child, a platinum-leaf-covered sculpture of a tall, smiling flower figure with an equally happy child-like character at its side, with mirrors behind the sculpture to highlight its dazzling surface and seductive forms. Urs Fischer’s masterful work, Eternity, located a couple of aisles away, offers an enlarged vintage black-and-white image of a couple embracing, flipped on its side and overlaid with an uncooked strip of bacon, which seems to be ironically colorizing the lower half of the picture from the heated action being portrayed.