PARIS.- Gagosian announced its participation in Art Basel Paris at the Grand Palais with a presentation of exceptional paintings, sculpture, and photographs that define many of the key artistic movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, evidenced by the inclusion of these artists in major museum exhibitions currently in Paris and internationally.
The booth centers around Corks (Couple) (2011–18), a rarely seen polychrome bronze sculpture by Jeff Koons. Standing over three meters (10 feet) tall, it depicts a cluster of oversize corks with illusionistically detailed textures, wine stains, and imprints of origin and vintage. Loosely suggesting the form of an embracing couple, the sculpture belongs to Koons’s Antiquity series (2008–), here evoking themes of beauty, eros, and the Dionysian.
Corks (Couple) is accompanied by Marcel Duchamp’s Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle Wheel) (1964, after lost 1913 original) and Fountain (1964, after lost 1917 original). These works introduced the radical concept of the readymade and have had a profound effect on artists through the present, as reinforced by the retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art that will travel to the Grand Palais in the spring of 2027.
Peter Doig’s painting Bathers (Sings Calypso) (2019) pictures a standing bather, a motif that engages with the legacy of Paul Cezanne likewise explored in Doig’s related work in the group exhibition Cezanne et nous that is also on view at the Grand Palais during the fair. Works by other artists featured in Cezanne et nous include Roy Lichtenstein’s Painting with Silver Wood Grain Frame (1984), which takes as its primary subject the stylized elements of painting itself, a prominent theme of the artist’s retrospective Like New, now at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Tom Wesselmann’s Interior #2 (1964) extends strategies of appropriation into the Pop era by incorporating a working fan, clock, and fluorescent light into a painted and collaged scene. Georg Baselitz’s towering Mein Bein, ein Bein V (My Leg, a Leg V) (2020) asserts the primacy of the human figure amid colorful abstraction, and Simon Hanta’s canvas from the Blancs series (1974) uses white to intensify the prismatic range of hues in jagged shapes produced with his pliage process.
Lee Krasner’s painting Offbeat (c. 1953–56) features arcing forms that are alternately interrupted and carried across the composition to create complex visual rhythms. Krasner’s career is the subject of renewed international consideration in Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Gagosian’s exhibition Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s at the rue de Ponthieu gallery in Paris. The sinuous lines and primary colors of a 1987 painting by Willem de Kooning distill the artist’s nuanced approach to space and gesture into an active, harmonious composition. A selection of works by leading Californian artists Richard Diebenkorn who charts his development between abstraction and figuration, while Ed Ruscha’s painting Talk Radio (1988) invokes the transmission of voices over a nocturnal cityscape, Helen Frankenthaler is represented by Thanksgiving (1972), in which vibrantly colored biomorphic shapes are held in dynamic balance. Cy Twombly’s Seguso (1976) employs fervid gestures of formation and negation across painting, drawing, and writing.
The selection of photographs includes Irving Penn’s Lily: Imperial Pink, New York (1971), a floral close-up that complements an expansive presentation of Penn’s work within the exhibition Penn & Fashion at the Maison Europenne de la Photographie, Paris. Penn’s work is also featured alongside other Gagosian artists—Richard Avedon, Maurizio Cattelan, Nan Goldin, Tyler Mitchell, and Francesca Woodman—in Remember Me at the Bourse de Commerce, an exhibition celebrating the bicentennial of the invention of photography.
Gagosian’s presentation at Art Basel Paris continues with a display on the first and second floors of the gallery’s nearby rue de Ponthieu location. Participating artists include Derrick Adams, Richard Avedon, Balthus, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Louise Bonnet, Carol Bove, Glenn Brown, Alexander Calder, Maurizio Cattelan, John Chamberlain, Christo, Willem de Kooning, Edmund de Waal, Richard Diebenkorn, Peter Doig, Marcel Duchamp, Urs Fischer, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Gavin, Nan Goldin, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Andreas Gursky, Lauren Halsey, Simon Hanta, Hao Liang, Romuald Hazoum, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Titus Kaphar, Jeff Koons, Lee Krasner, Deana Lawson, Roy Lichtenstein, Rick Lowe, Ren Magritte, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Tyler Mitchell, Henry Moore, Sabine Moritz, Takashi Murakami, Marc Newson, Cady Noland, Albert Oehlen, Nam June Paik, Irving Penn, Giuseppe Penone, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Auguste Rodin, Mark Rothko, Sterling Ruby, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, Richard Serra, Setsuko, Jim Shaw, Pierre Soulages, Rudolf Stingel, Tatiana Trouv, Cy Twombly, Mary Weatherford, Tom Wesselmann, Anna Weyant, Rachel Whiteread, Stanley Whitney, Jordan Wolfson, Francesca Woodman, and Christopher Wool.
In addition to Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s at 4 rue de Ponthieu (October 19–December 18, 2026), two further exhibitions are on view at Gagosian galleries in the Paris area during Art Basel Paris: Rudolf Stingel at 9 rue de Castiglione (October 22, 2026–January 9, 2027) and Dan Flavin: European Couples at 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget (October 18, 2026–April 3, 2027).
