Seven artists not to miss at Art Basel Paris 2025

Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais for its second edition from 24–26 October 2025, bringing together 206 leading galleries from 41 countries and territories. The fair is divided into three main sections: Galleries, featuring established international galleries; Emergence, dedicated to promising new and younger artists; and Premise, showcasing curated, experimental projects. Over just a few days, visitors can experience a concentrated view of the most innovative contemporary art from around the world.

Below is our guide to seven artists not to miss at this year’s edition, each presenting distinctive work through their galleries.

Nefeli Papadimouli

The Pill    

Nefeli Papadimouli, The Pill. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image courtesy of Art Basel.

#FLODown: At The Pill, Nefeli Papadimouli presents Idiopolis (2024), a large textile installation made up of robe-like forms suspended within a wall structure, accompanied by drawings, modular sculptures, and photographs documenting her past performances. The installation reflects her ongoing interest in how garments, materials, and human movement shape the spaces they inhabit. Across the booth, each work feels connected through a sense of physicality and rhythm, revealing how the artist’s background in architecture informs her understanding of structure and the body.

Website: thepill.co Instagram: Artist: @nefeliepd; Gallery: @thepillofficial

Tanoa Sasraku

Vardaxoglou Gallery

Tanoa Sasraku, Vardaxoglou Gallery. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image credit MTotoe.

#FLODown: Tanoa Sasraku’s presentation with Vardaxoglou Gallery includes Mascot (2025), a monumental sculpture built from layered newsprint, stitched seams, and natural pigments sourced from Ghana and Cornwall. Part of her ongoing Terratypes series, the work transforms fragile paper into dense, textured strata that reflect landscape, memory, and cultural identity. Sasraku’s practice balances scale and delicacy, exploring how simple materials can convey history and personal narrative.

Sasraku currently has a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, titled Morale Patch (7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026), which expands on these concerns through works on paper, sculpture, and found materials that examine oil, extraction, and national identity. The ICA show and her Terratypes series together highlight the artist’s ongoing engagement with material, memory, and the political and cultural dimensions embedded in everyday substances.

Website: vardaxoglou.com Instagram: Artist: @tanoasasraku; Gallery: @vardaxoglou

Étienne Chambaud

LABOR

Étienne Chambaud, LABOR. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image credit MTotoe.

#FLODown: French artist Étienne Chambaud presents works from his Untamed! series (2025) with LABOR, the Mexico City–based gallery. In this series, sacred icons are largely obscured under layers of gold leaf, leaving only select details such as eyes, ears, or mouths visible. The pieces become enigmatic relics, with gold creating a surface of silence and opacity that highlights the latent presence of the images. Each work carefully combines this physical layering with the conceptual exploration of presence, absence, and perception, showing how images and surfaces can be transformed to convey complex ideas.

Website: labor.org.mx Instagram: Artist: @etienne_chambaud; Gallery: @l_a_b_o_r

Michel Blazy

Galerie Art Concept

Michel Blazy, Galerie Art Concept. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image credit MTotoe.

#FLODown: Michel Blazy, represented by Galerie Art Concept (Paris), is known for working with temporary and organic materials. His pieces often resist permanence, featuring decomposing materials or living systems that shift over time. At Art Basel Paris 2025, his work Mission 1, 2000‑2025, an avocado tree planted in soil and placed inside a suitcase, is on display. The presentation highlights Blazy’s focus on fragility and transformation, and, more importantly, serves as a reminder that art can be alive, impermanent, and constantly evolving.

Website: galerieartconcept.com. Instagram: Artist: @michelblazy;  Gallery: @galerieartconcept  

Arash Nassiri

Ginny on Frederick

Arash Nassiri, Ginny on Frederick. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image courtesy of Art Basel.

#FLODown: Arash Nassiri’s installation at Ginny on Frederick transforms the signage and architecture of Tehran’s streets into a miniature cityscape. Toy sized buildings form shop front façades, illuminated with flickering Farsi letters, creating a compact but vivid reconstruction of urban life. Born in Tehran and now working in Berlin, Nassiri uses these small scale constructions to explore how urban environments carry memory and identity. The installation reflects on migration, cultural displacement, and the passage of time, showing how cities and the signs, shops, and streets that define them preserve stories of personal and collective history. By condensing these experiences into a delicate, playful model, Nassiri highlights the fragility and resilience of cultural memory in the face of change.

Website: ginnyonfrederick.com Instagram: Artist: @arash.nassiri; Gallery: @ginnyonfrederick

Meriem Bennani

Lodovico Corsini

Meriem Bennani, Lodovico Corsini. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image credit MTotoe.

#FLODown: Moroccan-born artist Meriem Bennani (b. 1988, Rabat) combines video, sculpture, animation, and installation to create work that is both playful and incisive. At Lodovico Corsini, she presented pieces from her Cursed Objects series, including Salad Shake (2022) and Cravate Monster, which reimagine everyday items with humour and playful movement, showing how ordinary objects can carry inventive ideas. She is also the subject of a solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations (22 Oct 2025 – 8 Feb 2026), which turns the gallery space into an amphitheatre for a tap‑dance orchestra, using flip‑flops as percussive instruments to reflect on communal experience and collective gesture.

Website: lodovicocorsini.com Instagram: Artist: @meriembennani; Gallery: @lodovicocorsini

Kandis Williams

Heidi Gallery

Kandis Williams, Heidi Gallery. Art Basel Paris 2025. Image courtesy of Art Basel.

#FLODown:  In her booth presented by Heidi Gallery, Kandis Williams shows layered installations that investigate the lasting impact of militarisation, racial injustice, and historical memory. Combining video essays, collages, and drawings, her work explores landscapes marked by political and social histories. Williams presented pieces including Ricochet: Post‑event stars light the darkness over a sea of sacrificial bodies (2025) and Medusa (2025), which intertwine archival research with poetic and visual interventions. Her multi-layered approach transforms materials and imagery into dense, resonant narratives that confront histories often overlooked or suppressed.

Website: heidigallery.com Instagram: Artist: @kandis_williams; Gallery: @heidi_heidi_heidi

Click here for our top picks from Art Basel Paris’ 2025 public programme.

Art Basel Paris is open until 26 October 2025 at the Grand Palais. For more information, visit artbasel.com