News from Art Basel and beyond

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The 56th edition of Art Basel, Basel, closes its doors today after yet another whirlwind fair.

For those that don’t know, Art Basel is a global art fair franchise with outposts in Miami Beach, Hong Kong, Paris and Qatar, but before the global expansion the fair started in Basel and it’s still the OG location that everyone talks about like it has slightly better manners than the others.

This year, in a bid to combat claims that the art fair model had become outdated and stale, Basel tried to bring back a little suspense with an initiative they called Basel Exclusive that asked galleries to hold back at least one work from all the usual pre-fair PDFs and reveal it on the ground only once the fair opened.

Almost 200 galleries reportedly took part, which means that for the first time in a while there was a genuine sense of old-school dealer drama that encouraged murmurs of “what are they showing?” and many of the pieces were worth waiting for.

One of the standout surprises included Keith Haring’s Untitled (Two Figures and Clock) (1981-83) at Vienna’s Layr Gallery. The Haring last sold at Sotheby’s in 2024, when it was offered from the collection of renowned art dealer and publisher Larry Warsh, for just over $200,000.

The work belongs to Haring’s subway drawings of the early 1980s. Sketched in chalk on the black paper the Metropolitan Transit Authority pasted over unpaid or empty advertising panels on New York subways, the drawings were technically illegal, and Haring was eventually arrested for making them. On one occasion, though, the story goes that