Art Basel Paris 2025: The New Parameters of Collecting

by Alexandra I. Mas

In an era of economic uncertainty and shifting cultural tides, the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 arrives as a signal. Commissioned by two pillars of the art world, the survey draws on 3,100 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) from ten key markets — from the US and UK to Mainland China, France, Japan, Brazil, and beyond — to map emerging trends in collecting up to mid-2025.

The Fair and the City

From October 24 to 26, Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais, reaffirming the French capital as the world’s beating artistic heart. 206 galleries from 41 countries will converge beneath the glass nave into this breathtaking intersection of commerce and culture. Among them, 25 newcomers (including Crèvecœur, Jan Kaps, David Nolan Gallery, and Stevenson) mark the fair’s growing plurality of voices. Over a third of exhibitors have spaces in Paris, and hundreds of participating artists maintain close ties to the city. Paris remains what it has always been: a meeting ground for the avant-garde and the refined, a crossroads of ideas where the dialogue between past and present never ceases.

The Rebirth of Painting and the Rise of the New Vanguard

While the market diversifies into digital and cross-collectible territories, painting, the most ancient of mediums, continues to reinvent itself. Two major institutions — Ghent’s S.M.A.K. and MCA Chicago — have recently dedicated exhibitions to this paradox. Both “Painting after Painting” and “The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970–2020” began from the provocation that painting might be exhausted, only to reveal its endless adaptability.

Indeed, at Art Basel Paris, the vitality of the brushstroke is undeniable. Younger artists are reclaiming the gesture, not as nostalgia but as rebellion, an act of resistance against the dematerialized image economy. Francesca Mollett (b. 1991, UK), whose fluid abstractions echo the pulse of consciousness itself, has seen her work soar from modest estimates to auction heights, her lyrical surfaces acquired by ICA Miami and the K11 Art Foundation.

From Roméo Mivekannin (b. 1986, Ivory Coast), who re-inscribes Black identity into European canonical works, to Blerta Hashani (b. 1997, Kosovo), whose pastoral miniatures hum with serenity, to Oliver Bak (b. 1992, Denmark), whose spectral flowers bloom between beauty and decay, each asserts painting as living thought, as existential inquiry.

Equally magnetic is Samuel Hindolo (b. 1990, US), whose figures and grids hover between cinema and dream. His refusal of digital presence turns absence into allure. Stanislava Kovalčíková (b. 1988, Slovakia) approaches figuration as invocation: her mythic, erotic tableaus exude both humor and menace, establishing her as one of Europe’s most compelling provocateurs.

Evelyn Plaschg (b. 1988, Austria) transforms the banal into the uncanny — zippers, seats, and folds become meditations on fragmentation — while Libasse Ka (b. 1998, Senegal), still in his twenties, conjures atmosphere through abstraction, his compositions floating between geometry and shadow. His recent sell-out presentation at Art Basel Paris confirms that young painters are defining new aesthetic grammars.

Liza Lacroix (b. 1988, Canada) burrows into darkness: her smudged black expanses evoke a post-romantic confession. Her inclusion in Unlimited at Art Basel Basel, followed by solo exhibitions at Chantal Crousel and Gisela Capitain, marks her as a voice of this psychological era. Reina Sugihara (b. 1988, Japan) dives inward, her earthy canvases resemble anatomical or geological cross-sections, organs of pigment and patience.

Their presence across galleries such as Sprüth Magers, Emalin, and LambdaLambdaLambda signals a wider movement: painting as conversation, painting as resistance, painting as renewal. As one observes these canvases within the grand architecture of the Grand Palais, it becomes evident that while technologies evolve, the human need to make a mark, to leave a trace of consciousness on surface, persists undiminished.

Material Faith in a Digital Age

In the language of markets, one could say that painting’s resilience defies prediction. Yet its endurance is more than economic, it is metaphysical. According to the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, Millennial and Gen Z collectors now account for 74 percent of active buyers, and they are investing not only in the digital realm but in the tactile, the trace of the hand, the aura of material presence. Many of them are women, shaping new standards of taste and risk.

“Contrary to the stereotype of caution,” notes Dr. Clare McAndrew, “female collectors are expanding into less traditional media and embracing emerging artists.” This shift mirrors what is seen on the ground at Art Basel Paris: young collectors gathering around canvases that hum with life, color, and defiance. Their acquisitions are not about ownership but participation, gestures of empathy in a fractured world.

As Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, observed, “The rising influence of women collectors and the championing of female artists are markedly impacting the trade.” In the glass nave of the Grand Palais, this statement feels prophetic. Here, where generations and aesthetics converge, the act of collecting itself becomes a form of authorship, a dialogue between intellect and emotion, between permanence and flux.

Art Basel Paris 2025 thus stands as a marketplace but as well as a mirror of our cultural consciousness: a city, a survey, a fair, and a reaffirmation that, despite every technological acceleration, art remains our most human form of continuity.