Art Basel Paris is launching a new initiative that will have galleries save a selection of remarkable works to display exclusively during the fair’s public days, allowing a wider audience to view fresh art and, hopefully, luring VIPs back to the aisles.
Dubbed Oh La La!—yes, the exclamation point is an official part of the title—the campaign will see at least 35 exhibitors in the fair’s main section hold “unusual, thought-provoking or rarely exhibited artworks” to show on 18-19 October, the first two of Art Basel Paris’s three public days, after the conclusion of its invitation-only previews on 16-17 October.
The buzz around this year’s iteration of Art Basel Paris has been building steadily, particularly among Americans. The fair’s 2024 edition will be the first staged at the Grand Palais, now that its three-year, €466m renovation is complete. However, as the fair’s head of communications, Karim Crippa, says, “Paris is a city filled with temptations beyond Art Basel.” Oh La La! was mainly conceived as a kind of counter-seduction.
“The idea is really to create something that is perhaps a bit irreverent and brings attention to the fair on days that are not so visited by VIPs, simply because there are so many other things to do in Paris,” Crippa tells The Art Newspaper of the motivation behind Oh La La! “It offers general visitors something exclusive, something that others won’t have seen before them, which is exciting. On the other hand, it motivates VIPs to come back and discover this initiative.”
Ceci n’est pas un objet d’art, This is not..., Dieses ist nicht eine Kunstwerk (1972) by Marcel Broodthaers, at Galerie Konrad Fischer © The Estate of Marcel Broodthaers
Since exhibitors often refresh their stands with new work throughout the run of the fair with little fanfare, Art Basel Paris officials hope that launching a campaign to build anticipation for some particularly notable additions will give visitors more incentives to stay engaged in the aisles throughout the week, including a healthy dash of playfulness.
“Oh La La! reflects the spirit of Art Basel Paris. It’s the youngest of all Art Basel fairs, and therefore it has a bit more liberty to experiment, to try things out and be a bit more irreverent–very simply, because it is a French fair,” Crippa says. “And as you know, the French love a bit of irreverence.”
Although the fair’s leadership did not ask participating exhibitors to curate their Oh La La! works around a particular theme, many of them selected pieces that happen to deal with love, eroticism and other topics that are “a bit cheeky”, Crippa says, adding that the phenomenon may be a side effect of the initiative’s name. “Oh La La!” has no direct English translation, but foreigners know the French phrase as an expression of pleasant surprise, often of a saucy nature.
Along with a collection of erotic sketches by the Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein presented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects (see page 4), other highlights of the programme will include a piece on the stand of Düsseldorf’s Galerie Konrad Fischer by the late Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers, known for his playful use of language; a major work by the late American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), along with new pieces by the young US-based artist Gerald Lovell, brought by the New York gallery PPOW; and the Tbilisi, Georgia-based LC Queisser gallery’s selection of works by the late self-taught artist Vati Davitashvili (1946-2000), whose practice is rarely exhibited outside his Georgian home region of Kakheti—and who has never before been shown in France.
A more whimsical and accessible contribution to the initiative will be distributed at Anton Kern Gallery’s stand: a series of pins emblazoned with the phrase Oh La La!, made by the British artist David Shrigley, who is “known for his propensity to be cheeky”, Crippa says.
Oh La La! “will offer audiences an opportunity to discover or rediscover the fair from a different perspective,” Clément Delépine, director of Art Basel Paris, said in a statement. “They may suddenly find themselves in front of a ceramic sculpture studded with fragrant olives, walk onto a booth floor entirely covered with golden reproductions of Byzantine icons, grab a free artist-made pin or gaze at complex patterns created in the Amazon forest.
“Visitors will be able to experience art they may not expect or associate with the typical art fair environment,” his statement continues. “Art Basel Paris tells a story, and this will be one of its stimulating chapters.”