As Art Basel Paris returns to the Grand Palais for its fifth edition, two of the fair’s sectors invite visitors to slow down and look more closely.

Presented on the Grand Palais’s upper walkways, Emergence brings together 16 solo booths dedicated to emerging artists, exemplified by Cudelice Brazelton IV, whose assemblages of iron, rust, faux leather, and denim give form to narratives around labor, the body, and family.

Launched in 2024, Premise has become a distinctly Parisian feature of the fair: among Art Basel’s shows, it is one of the few sectors to officially allow the inclusion of works produced before 1900. According to Art Basel Paris director Karim Crippa, it reflects ‘a desire to expand the margins of what constitutes the canon of art history.’ For the 2026 edition, the sector is expanding and will feature 12 booths, up from nine last year. It will also move to a new space within the Grand Palais, resulting in an additional entrance to the fair via Square Jean Perrin. There, visitors will encounter works by Derek Jarman, a Queer figure of the British punk scene, as well as the feverish visions of Sibylle Ruppert, an artist long found at the fringes of Postwar Surrealism. Between new voices and rediscovered figures, here is our suggested route through the fair.

Emergence

Solomon Garçon
243 Luz (London)

According to Solomon Garçon, the art world is the set of a reality TV show, where everyone is performing their own role. Drawing on close observation, the artist, who was born in London in 1991, has developed a practice defined by a striking economy of means. His installations isolate gestures, attitudes, and social codes observed in the places he frequents – including the microcosm of the art fair. 243 Luz presents a group of the artist’s wall-based works: abstract monochromes stamped with the logo of the American reality television channel E!, alongside a plexiglass cube containing a man’s shoe that reveals a hidden microphone.

Cudelice Brazelton IV
Wschód (Warsaw)

Cudelice Brazelton IV’s practice is marked by a sensual and poignant materiality. Iron, rust, faux leather, pomade, denim, and acrylic paint convey deeply personal stories. Deindustrialization, working-class history, and cultures of care run through his work, shaped by his experience as an African American artist who grew up with a steelworker father and a mother who ran a beauty salon. For his presentation in Émergence, Brazelton has covered the walls with panels stained a deep petroleum black. These elements come from Soft Corrosion (The Pomade House), an installation first shown at the Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania in 2025: a hut he has since dismantled and is now reassembling in Paris.

Clémentine Adou
Lo Brutto Stahl (Paris)

One can imagine Clémentine Adou walking the streets of Paris, gathering abandoned materials from the sidewalks. The artist creates tragicomic panoramas from the city’s debris, using the things others overlook such as large sheets of cardboard packaging, or the spidery ribs of broken umbrellas. Lo Brutto Stahl presents a group of suspended and wall-based works by the Parisian artist.  The works invite us to slow down and look differently at the ordinary objects that make up the urban landscape.

Lorenza Longhi
Galerie Oskar Weiss (Zurich)

Born in 1991, Lorenza Longhi belongs to a generation that has only ever known a world already saturated with objects, signs, and slogans. The Italian artist reclaims craft techniques as a way of regaining control over an environment invaded by the traces of consumer society. For her installation with Zurich-based Galerie Oskar Weiss, she has reproduced the floor of her studio using a screen printing process. Shopping bags are scattered here and there – casually abandoned, they conceal spy cameras, encapsulating the ambiguity of an age torn between the desire for simplicity and the growing omnipresence of technological surveillance.

Asma Belhamar
Green Art Gallery (Dubai)

How do we orient ourselves in a hypermodern space where the scale of the landscape exceeds human perception? How can we preserve the memory of a familiar place when everything around us is accelerating? Emirati artist Asma Belhamar knows the paradoxes of the rich and complex Gulf region well. With Green Art Gallery, she presents a group of sculptures and drawings around the utopian notion of the ‘megastructure’, a concept that resonates directly with the urban environments of the region. She brings together 3D-printing, ceramics, and wood to examine the memory of places at a time when the speed of their transformation only keeps increasing.

Premise

Sibylle Ruppert
Blue Velvet (Zurich)

Sibylle Ruppert’s visions open doors onto feverish realms where limbs endlessly intertwine and kingdoms give way to unnatural hybridizations. Born in 1942, as bombs rained down on her native Frankfurt, Ruppert navigated the century from the margins. In Paris, she found her chosen family: masters of transgression, from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille. One of the women of Postwar Surrealism long kept in the shadows, Ruppert’s work is at last being increasingly celebrated, with the Zurich-based Blue Velvet instrumental in this rediscovery. The gallery presents paintings and drawings around the monumental Curval (1976), a large charcoal on paper that has never before been shown, in which bodies, fantasies, and violence merge.

Tarsila do Amaral
Almeida & Dale (São Paulo)

Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was one of the founding figures of Brazilian Modernism. She developed her own pictorial language at the intersection of the European avant-garde and the heritage of her own country. Trained in Paris, notably with the Cubist Albert Gleizes, she drew on the landscapes and folklore of Brazil to create a deeply personal aesthetic. Almeida & Dale entrusted the selection of her works to curator Cristiano Raimondi, who has conceived a presentation in which dreamlike images of tropical nature offer a counterpoint to more mineral European views.

Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, and El Anatsui
kó (Lagos)

In the wake of African independence movements in the 1960s, Nigeria experienced a remarkable creative flowering. The Nsukka School became one of the major centers for reinterpreting Modernist abstraction through Igbo traditions, including wall and body painting. Lagos-based gallery kó brings together three of the school’s key figures: Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, and El Anatsui. In tones of muted intensity, the presentation sets landscapes, spiritual memories, and political visions in dialogue. Okeke’s depictions of virgin forests find a counterpoint in El Anatsui’s tropical wood murals, while Udechukwu portrays a procession of refugees moving through tall grasses beneath blazing skies.

Derek Jarman
Amanda Wilkinson Gallery (London)

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was one of the most influential figures of British counterculture, and the author of a poignant and uncompromising body of work that spanned painting, writing, film, activism, and gardening. Queer, punk, and darkly romantic at heart, he pursued his obsessions across different media, never separating creation from his private life and political commitment. After learning he was HIV-positive, he retreated to Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, an isolated fisherman’s hut where he made some of his most iconic works. Among them are his ‘tar paintings’, created between 1984 and 1991. London’s Amanda Wilkinson Gallery presents a selection of these works, celebrating last year’s French translation of his diary, Modern Nature (1991).

Futura
Danysz Gallery (Paris)

Since the early 1980s, Futura (aka Lenny Mc Gurr) has turned the wall into a field of abstraction, especially in New York. There, he became part of the vibrant artistic scene that helped expand the boundaries of art, alongside his peers such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. Born Lenny McGurr, he has often been described as one of the founding fathers of graffiti, a form he pushed toward abstraction and brought onto canvas. Danysz Gallery, which has championed urban art and graffiti for more than 30 years, revisits his career with a presentation of historic works spanning four decades, accompanied by an in-situ intervention by the artist.