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Three years ago, dealer Thaddaeus Ropac started to question the health of the art market in London. The mixed auction results of 2022 and 2023 reflected what he saw as a stagnant period. And Paris, with the recent premiere of Art Basel, seemed to be emerging as the dominant location. “London lost part of the market because Paris became very attractive,” he told ARTnews in a recent interview. Still, Ropac is bullish on London: his gallery has just renewed its lease there for another 10 years. And he isn’t the only one. Global behemoth Hauser & Wirth, which has had a presence in the city since 2003, has planned a 15,000-square-foot gallery on Mayfair’s South Audley Street that is currently under construction.
In today’s uneven market, dealers and advisers are being especially picky about which fairs to attend. But as Europe braces for a double round of art fairs—Frieze in London from October 14–18, followed by Art Basel Paris from October 21–25—London is having something of a resurgence, even as Paris keeps its appeal. “Paris’s strength is its blockbuster museum exhibitions, which are attracting the Americans and international collectors,” said Ropac, whose gallery is doing both fairs. “Many of the American collectors now plan their trips so that they can combine London and Paris.”
“[Our] artists want to be in London,” said Zoe Sperling, a partner at Hauser & Wirth London, which is also doing both fairs. “We represent 15 artists and estates in the UK, the majority of whom call London home, but so many of our international artists want to exhibit here too. It’s evident that the city’s cultural pull remains very powerful.” To Ropac, London’s appeal is that it’s a city for working artists, and in that respect it has taken over from Berlin, which has “lost a bit of its attractiveness.” At Frieze, Ropac will show work by Denzil Forrester, Jordan Casteel, Oliver Beer, Mandy El-Sayegh, and Antony Gormley in its booth. “Frieze London reflects what’s going on in the studios and in the young scene,” he said. “We’re showing fresh contemporary works versus Paris, where we show important historical works,” including those by Marcel Duchamp, Lucio Fontana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol.
Looking across the pond, American gallerists are looking to strike a particular balance between the two fairs. Kenta Murakami, partner at New York’s Ortuzar gallery, said that while Paris may “seem to be the center at this point,” London continues to pull its weight. Ortuzar is participating in both Frieze and Art Basel Paris, showing historical work at Frieze’s sister fair, Frieze Masters, and showing primary market work at Art Basel Paris. “We think of the two fairs as one extended fair, split between two different cities in two very different contexts. They allow us to show the breadth of [our] program,” he said. “In a way, you can start a conversation in London that you might close in Paris,” he added. “From a sales numbers perspective, we look at [both fairs] holistically.”
At Frieze Masters, Ortuzar’s booth, with prices ranging from $50,000 to over $10 million, will span art from the 1940s to the ’90s by Josef Albers, Claire Falkenstein, Robert Ryman, Lynda Benglis, Joan Snyder, Suzanne Jackson, Jay DeFeo, and Agnes Martin. In Paris, the gallery will show works by living artists such as Takako Yamaguchi, Claudette Johnson, Suzanne Jackson, and Matt Connors, paired with historical works from the 1970s by Yoko Ono, Miyoko Ito, and André Cadere.
Some feel the comparison between London and Paris, ongoing since Art Basel launched in the City of Light, is unfair given that Art Basel’s Paris edition has begun to dominate all of the fairs, even its own flagship. “I think it would be really shortsighted to say that London wasn’t important,” said adviser Meredith Darrow. “[But] Paris has stolen the thunder of really every art fair, including Basel, Switzerland.” Bernard LaGrange, a senior adviser at Gagosian Art Advisory, agrees. “If you’re looking to sell an expensive work of art at a fair, you’re going to choose Art Basel Paris, maybe now above all others,” he told ARTnews. “Maybe Art Basel Switzerland, but it’s [one of] those two.”
Indeed, the highest prices at last year’s Art Basel Paris exceeded those at Frieze. In Paris, Hauser & Wirth sold a Gerhard Richter for $23 million, Pace sold an Amedeo Modigliani for just under $10 million, and David Zwirner sold a Ruth Asawa for $7.5 million. At Frieze, by contrast, the largest reported sales were in the low seven figures.
And yet, there could be a silver lining to the lower price tags in London. LaGrange thinks it could give Frieze an opportunity to rediscover its old identity. “Hopefully that allows Frieze to go back to being a place where you can discover what’s new and what’s exciting, which is what I think people loved going to Frieze to do before,” he said. “Then it just got a bit stale.”
Others see Art Basel Paris as the perfect place to experiment with cutting-edge, lower-price works. Participating for the first time, New York’s Mariposa is showing a large-scale installation of cut-out painted wooden figures by Drake Carr, priced between $10,000 and $15,000. “It’s a kind of daring presentation. What you pay for are the eyeballs on the work,” cofounder Alec Smyth said, noting that gallery views the fair as a marketing expenditure and the goal is to break even. “People from New York will fly to Paris to see Art Basel Paris, but they won’t necessarily go downtown to see your show. The reality is that art fairs still pull a really good crowd of collectors and just general art enthusiasts.”
London still has scale on its side. The city has a higher concentration of galleries than Paris, Frieze has more exhibitors than Art Basel, and the auction houses achieve higher totals. Last year, Frieze London and Frieze Masters together brought more than 280 galleries to Regent’s Park, compared with 203 exhibitors at Art Basel Paris. The difference was also apparent at Christie’s London, where the 20th- and 21st-century evening sale around Frieze totaled $142.9 million. The total for all four of the sales Christie’s held during Art Basel Paris came to only $107.4 million.
Paris, though, is gaining ground quickly. Last year, Christie’s total there was up 16 percent from the previous year, while Sotheby’s marquee modern and Surrealist sales totaled €89.7 million, more than 50 percent up from the previous year. Those sales included a €27 million Modigliani that became the most expensive work ever sold by Sotheby’s Paris.
Whether a gallery chooses London or Paris—or both—ultimately comes down to the numbers. Ryan Stern, a director at the nomadic British gallery Sixty Six, said that taxes have become one of the biggest challenges to selling in London. The final invoice for a work staying in the UK includes a 20 percent VAT. “Sometimes that amount is enough to be an entire work in itself,” he told ARTnews. “That can deter someone from going through with it, and that’s a shame for younger collectors.”
London-based adviser Arianne Piper said Brexit’s end to temporary import fee exemptions and the added burden of customs red tape have undeniably forced Frieze London to pivot from a high-volume transactional hub to a more curated, talent-focused platform. “A decade on, top-tier international galleries that previously brought their highest-value primary and secondary inventory now split their offerings between London and Paris,” she said.
Taking up space at Frieze London is costly, and in an uncertain economy, even the big galleries are wary. At Regents Park, a small booth (between 30–50 square meters) costs of £597 per square meter; a medium one (50–70 square meters) is £618 per square meter; a large stand (70–90 square meters) is £640 per square meter; an XL booth (90–110 square meters) is £653 per square meter; and the biggest, an XXL, (110–130 square meters) is £671 per square meter. In total, the smallest fee a gallery can be charged just for the space without the additional furnishing and lighting, is £17,910 ($23,657), while an XXL gallery of 130 square meters costs £87,230 ($115,219).
Meanwhile, across the Channel, booths on the ground floor range from €880–€1,098.50 per square meter, while upstairs, prices range from €724.5–€849 per square meter. Art Basel Paris also offers a 25 percent discount for first-time exhibitors in the main Galleries section, and 15 percent off for a gallery’s sophomore outing there. The fair’s two smaller sectors, Emergence and Premise, are also 50 percent and 25 percent cheaper, respectively, than a Galleries booth. (At both fairs, the larger booths pay more per square meter as a way to help offset the cost of the smaller booths.)
In a sign of a collaborative trend among dealers and perhaps cost-cutting measures, this year’s Art Basel Paris will have a record 12 shared booths. Giving that a positive spin, Karim Crippa, the fair director, characterized it as “an edition of renewal and evolution, and we’re quite excited about that.”
By way of example, French dealer Edouard Montassut said his Paris booth cost about €35,000 with tax (about $39,200). That is just one reason he limits the number of fairs he does; the other is that too many of them demanded too much production from his artists, who work at a slower pace. “My artists don’t produce en masse, and that’s what I like. They’re not machines,” he said.
Zurich-based gallerist Eva Presenhuber estimated that the cost of participating in fairs has risen by about 50 percent, when factoring in all expenditures, over the last decade. She said this year the gallery will likely spend, all in, between $250,000 and $350,000 on its Art Basel Paris participation. “You have to sell at least $1 million just to cover that,” she said, which is “usually possible.” While that might seem high, she noted that fairs make up about 30 percent of their annual sales, though Art Basel in Switzerland remains its most important fair.
Presenhuber added that economic crises and global politics seem continue to dampen her clients’ moods overall—and their spending. “There’s a lot of panic in the world right now, which also reaches our clients, who are getting more and more quiet, and less excited,” she said. “There’s more hesitation, maybe due to overpriced works by younger artists over the last 10 years.”
But she insists that despite costs, fairs are essential for meeting new collectors. “More than ever, and if you’re not based in New York, then you need to do fairs—even if you’re in New York you need to do fairs,” she said.
One thing is for certain: collectors and art lovers will not be at a loss for delight at either London or Paris. Murakami, the Ortuzar partner, said the gallery was pulling out all the stops. “In this market, as soon as you have something that’s an A- or B+ work, it’s hard to place.”