An Art Basel Paris wishlist with something for every collector’s taste

Alighiero Boetti, Card (1983–1984)

About €3 million, Tornabuoni Art

Alighiero Boetti began his celebrated Card series of tapestries (above) in 1971 and continued to make the works until his death in 1994, revealing how the geopolitical landscape changed over those twenty years. For example, this map shows the vast Soviet Union about five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Around the edges of the card is a black and white border with embroidered words that make up some of Boetti’s most famous phrases, such as you are on parole (or “hearing between the words”). The composition is “particularly striking for its color – it depicts a darker blue-green ocean on which the brilliantly colored continents appear to float,” reads a statement from Tornabuoni Art.

Francesca Piccolboni, director of the Paris gallery, emphasizes the intercultural process of creating the work. “The Card series combines the conceptual vision of a Western artist with the skilled craftsmanship of Afghan women embroiderers,” he says. “Boetti had a deep affection for Afghanistan and felt the country’s struggles and losses as if they were his own. Even in times of conflict, he sought out Afghan refugees in neighboring Pakistan to continue creating these remarkable embroideries.” Piccolboni adds that this example from the series is “probably the most iconic of Boetti’s career.”

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Grass on Woman) (1972)

$75,000 – $100,000, Prats Nogueras Blanchard

There is no end to the intrigue surrounding the life and work of pioneering Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Her untimely death at the age of 36 often receives excessive public attention. However, Mendieta’s work in performance, sculpture and land art is now considered crucial to the contemporary canon, and she was recently included in the exhibition Actions for the Earth: art, care and ecology at the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois, about artistic practices that promote a deeper awareness of humanity’s interconnectedness with the planet.

In 1972 Mendieta created Untitled (Grass on Woman) in Iowa and documented the work on 35mm color slides. It was later identified by art historians as her first “earth body” piece, a term the artist used to describe the dialogue she created between nature and the female form. Mendieta then developed this aesthetic in her later work, especially in her highly regarded work Silueta series (1973-80), in which she carved, dug, burned or otherwise integrated her silhouette into various landscapes, simultaneously creating a self-portrait and a stand-in for other female bodies.

Agnes Scherer, Trousseau dérange (2022)

€20,000-€30,000, untitled

Galerie Sans Titre offers a peaceful retreat in the middle of the Art Basel Paris stand: a life-size double bed with four-poster bed. But try to rest on it at your peril; it is made entirely of paper. The two-meter-high statue is attached to the walls and ceiling with transparent cords and is imposing but delicate. The artist Agnes Scherer has decorated the work (inspired by her own antique bed) with images and patterns
with felt-tip pens, liquid ink, gouache and
colored pencils.

The central position of the piece on the stand is inspired by “the inner life of the artist, in which the bed plays a predominant role,” says Marie Madec, the founder and director of the Sans Titre gallery. “The representation of supine bodies is central to the work of Scherer, who is fascinated by the direct link between sleep and death, two temporalities that imply loss of consciousness.” Another version of the work has already been purchased by an American collector.

Juliette Roche, Rue Victor Masse (1912)

€80,000-€100,000, Galerie Pauline Pavec

This oil painting on canvas by French modern artist Juliette Roche depicts two women in a costume shop, dressed in male clothing. It was painted in 1912, when women in France still needed legal permission to wear trousers. (This law was actually only abolished in 2013, although it was not enforced for decades before that.) The work’s documentation of “cross-dressing” was therefore quite provocative for the time. “Far from being a voyeur, Juliette Roche herself is no stranger to the strangeness of her characters, which today we would call queer,” wrote the sociologist Éric Fassin and the art and literature scholar Joana Masó in a new essay that coincided with Art. Basel Paris. They added: “In this store, the reference to homosexuality is underlined by the presence of masks, to which the artist has dedicated several works.”

Galerie Pauline Pavec, which acquired all the works in Roche’s studio from the Albert Gleizes Foundation in 2023, “specializes in the rediscovery of historical artists, especially female artists,” says founder Pauline Pavec. The dealer is showing a selection of Roche’s works at Art Basel Paris, all but one from the estate Rue Victor Massewhich was bought at auction.

Sergei Eisenstein, Sex drawings (1930s and 1940s)

€7,000-€20,000 EACH, Ellen de Bruijne Projects

Sergei Eisenstein, born in 1898 in Riga (then part of the Russian Empire), is best known as a pioneering film director. But he was also an avid draftsman from an early age and often sketched as part of his cinematic and theoretical process. It was during his stay in Mexico on a film project in 1931-32 that he created his most important collection of drawings, including the ‘sex drawings’ – a name coined by the historian Joan Neuberger – which depicted a variety of erotic scenes, both straight and strange. The works were kept hidden for a long time due to censorship.

“When I first saw the drawings, I was touched by their quality, beauty and candor, and overwhelmed by their clarity and freshness,” says Ellen de Bruijne, the founder of Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam. She adds that the sketches “open up a whole new strange perspective on Eisenstein’s entire work.” Although the drawing collection is rarely shown to a wider audience, its representative, art consultant Matthew Stephenson, has shown the works in collaboration with museums and galleries in New York, Mexico City and most recently, through Ellen de Bruijne Projects, in Amsterdam. These are all cities where Eisenstein lectured and, in the case of Mexico City, filmed during the period when he made this group of drawings.