Art Basel Paris closed on Sunday, October 26, 2025, ending six days of dealmaking at the Grand Palais. The edition gathered 206 galleries from 41 countries and drew more than 73,000 visitors.
The top sale arrived before the fair had properly opened. Hauser & Wirth placed Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild (1987) for $23 million during Avant-Première, a new preview tier introduced for the 2025 edition.
The mechanism worth paying attention to
Art fairs have always had previews. What Paris introduced was a preview inside the preview: a tier ahead of the tier, for a smaller group, before the VIP day that was already invitation-only.
Read the sales sheet in that light and the design becomes obvious. The largest single transaction of the fair happened in the narrowest window of access it offered. That is not a coincidence, it is the product specification.
Art Basel has since taken the logic everywhere. Basel Exclusive in June 2026 had more than 190 main-sector galleries reserving significant works for the preview opening. Hong Kong in March closed nine of its twelve seven-figure sales during previews. Paris 2025 is where the template was proven.
The rest of the sheet
Behind the Richter, the reported sales were dense and expensive:
- White Cube led with Julie Mehretu's Charioteer (2007) at $11.5 million.
- Pace sold Modigliani's Jeune fille aux macarons (1918) for just under $10 million.
- Thaddaeus Ropac placed an Alberto Burri sculpture (1953) at €4.2 million and a 2024 Baselitz painting at €3.5 million.
The Ropac pair is the interesting one. A 1953 Burri and a 2024 Baselitz in the same reported sheet, at €4.2 million and €3.5 million, is a dealer demonstrating that a living artist's new work can still clear a price within range of historical material. In a year when most of the money was moving toward the safest available names, that was not a given.
Paris week, beyond the fair
The auction houses treated the week as a main event rather than a satellite. Sotheby's Surrealism and Its Legacy and Modernités sales took a combined €89.7 million ($104 million), a roughly 50% increase on the same double-header the previous year.
That is the clearest measure of what has happened to the Paris calendar since Art Basel took over the Grand Palais slot. The fair did not just import buyers for six days, it moved the center of gravity of the European October, and The Art Newspaper's reporting through the VIP days found top dealers rewarded accordingly while smaller galleries competed harder for the same attention.
That last point is the one to carry forward. A fair that concentrates its buying into ever-narrower preview windows is a fair that works extremely well for galleries with the inventory to fill those windows, and progressively less well for everyone standing in the same building on the public days.
Sales as reported by the galleries and collected by Artsy, Artlyst and The Art Newspaper. Auction totals per ARTnews.
