By Ekaterina Vinogradova
The contemporary art market has developed an extraordinary ability to absorb criticism of itself. It can sell anti-capitalist art, market institutional critique, transform political resistance into collectible objects and, increasingly, turn feminism into an attractive commercial proposition. And Art Basel Paris 2026, this contradiction was impossible to ignore.
Across the Grand Palais, works by women artists were presented alongside celebrated male masters whose treatment of women, public statements or representations of female bodies have long invited feminist scrutiny. Outside the fair, meanwhile, the Public Program offered monumental sculptures by Tracey Emin, Alice Diop’s reflections on Black women’s representation and other projects that placed women’s experiences at the centre of contemporary cultural discourse. The message seemed clear: the art world is finally taking women seriously.
But what exactly does that mean? More women on gallery walls? Higher prices for selected female artists? Or genuine changes in the structures that determine artistic value, professional authority and institutional accountability?
Art Basel offered plenty of evidence of the first two. The third remains a much more uncomfortable question.
Rediscovering Women, Again and Again
Few expressions have become as fashionable in contemporary art as rediscovered woman artist. Museums rediscover women. Galleries rediscover women. Collectors rediscover women. Artists who have been studied, exhibited and discussed for decades suddenly reappear as exciting discoveries.
But who forgot them in the first place?
At Art Basel Paris 2026, the rhetoric of rediscovery was not an abstract trend. It appeared in the fair’s own promotional language.
Presenting Sibylle Ruppert through Blue Velvet, Art Basel credited the gallery with playing a decisive role in her “rediscovery”. Elsewhere, Hilla Rebay , a central figure in the history of the Guggenheim Museum , was introduced through her supposedly newly recognised contribution to the twentieth-century avant-garde. These are not invented artistic achievements, but the problem lies in the framing.
Who gets to declare a woman artist forgotten? And who gets to claim the prestige and potentially the financial rewards of discovering her again?
As Gabriella Nugent in her 2023 essay Celebrating Women Artists and Forgetting Feminist Art Histories, has argued, the contemporary celebration of neglected women artists can obscure decades of feminist art-historical scholarship. The market does not simply recover women from oblivion; it can also turn the narrative of recovery into a commercial asset.
The irony is striking. To present itself as the institution that has finally rescued a forgotten woman artist, the art world may first need to erase the women who previously fought for her recognition. This is where the language of historical justice becomes particularly useful to the market.
An overlooked artist is not simply an important cultural figure. She can also become an undervalued asset, a newly desirable name, an opportunity for collectors to enter a market before prices rise.
The language of rediscovery produces scarcity, novelty and moral legitimacy simultaneously. What could be more appealing than purchasing a work of art while participating in the correction of a historical injustice? Except that the correction may have begun fifty years earlier and the profits from its belated recognition do not necessarily benefit those who made it possible.
“Only Two Women. But What Women!”
One of my most revealing conversations at Art Basel took place at Gagosian. Looking around the presentation, I asked a gallery representative why there appeared to be so few women among the major names on display. She pointed to two female artists, including Lee Krasner. When I questioned the imbalance, she replied:
“Yes, two women. But what women!”
She also explained that the presentation changed daily, something I could not independently verify.
To be clear, Gagosian’s broader programme includes considerably more than two women artists, and its Paris exhibition of Krasner’s work was a significant event in its own right. But the exchange revealed something about the language of institutional inclusion. A handful of exceptional women were being offered as an answer to a question about structural representation.
The logic is familiar. Women’s presence does not necessarily challenge the system if it is presented as an exception that confirms the greatness of the existing canon. It is almost as though women must be extraordinarily important to justify occupying space routinely granted to their male counterparts.
Krasner is a particularly revealing figure in this context. For decades, her artistic career was discussed through her relationship with Jackson Pollock. Today she is rightly recognised as an important Abstract Expressionist in her own right. and even this history of overcoming exclusion can become part of an artist’s commercial appeal. The market does not simply recognise feminist victories. It can incorporate the narrative of those victories into the value of the work itself.
The Numbers Behind the Celebration
The latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, prepared by Clare McAndrew’s Arts Economics, offers a less flattering picture than the promotional rhetoric suggests.
In 2025, women accounted for 45% of artists represented by surveyed galleries, reaching 50% among primary-market galleries. But works by women generated only 37% of dealer sales by value. The contrast becomes sharper at the highest commercial levels.
Among galleries with annual turnover below $250,000, women represented 55% of artists. Among those earning more than $10 million, the figure fell to 35%. And at those largest galleries, works by women generated just 27% of sales by value. The figures do not prove that every individual gallery discriminates against women. They do, however, expose the distance between symbolic inclusion and economic power. Women may be increasingly visible, but they remain less represented at the most lucrative end of the market. The art market has become better at including women in its narrative than at distributing commercial success equally.
Fifty Years of Feminist Critique, and the Female Body Is Still Available
Perhaps the most frustrating contradiction of Art Basel Paris was visual. For more than half a century, feminist artists have been challenging the transformation of women’s bodies into passive objects of consumption.
VALIE EXPORT disrupted the relationship between spectatorship and sexual access. Carolee Schneemann reclaimed the female body as an active artistic subject. Martha Rosler exposed the ideological structures embedded in domesticity and consumer culture. Later, Sarah Lucas turned fragmentation, sexual symbolism and grotesque bodily forms into weapons against conventional femininity.
Their approaches were never identical, and their works should not be reduced to a single feminist programme. and together they fundamentally altered the terms on which women’s bodies could be represented.
At the fair, a sculpture associated with the artistic language of Sarah Lucas offered an especially confrontational image: a brightly coloured, headless female figure folded over a chair, its body twisted into an almost absurd anatomical configuration.
The figure is simultaneously comic, disturbing and difficult to consume as a conventional erotic image. Its exaggeration makes the mechanisms of objectification visible. But only a short distance away, the female body continued to appear in a strikingly familiar visual economy.
At Galerie Karsten Greve, paintings by Gideon Rubin presented women without faces. Works titled Black Bra, White Stockings and White Knickers focused attention on underwear, exposed skin and bodily posture.
Rubin’s established practice uses faceless figures to explore memory, anonymity and the viewer’s imagination. His subjects are not exclusively women. Nevertheless, the particular selection I encountered invited another reading. The women had lost their faces but retained the attributes through which their bodies could be sexually identified. Identity disappeared. Lingerie remained.
This is not to claim that the artist intended to demean women. It is to ask what happens when anonymity intersects with established visual conventions of erotic consumption. Several works were marked with red dots, although I could not independently establish whether these indicated completed sales or reservations.
A different version of the problem appeared in paintings by Nolan Simon, presented by 47 Canal. In works including Mary Maria (Amanda) (2024), Soft Reins, Man Kind (2023) and Anatomical Venus (Amanda) (2024), photographic imagery and painterly transformation produce intimate, fragmented representations of bodies. The works resist easy classification. Their faces, surfaces and cropped compositions complicate the viewer’s relationship with their subjects. So the same question returns: when fragmentation becomes a fashionable contemporary aesthetic, does it interrogate the objectification of women, reproduce it, or deliberately occupy the unstable territory between the two?
The answer cannot be determined from the artist’s gender alone, and depicting a body without a face automatically constitute misogyny. But after decades of feminist intervention, the commercial circulation of anonymous female bodies deserves more critical attention than the simple celebration of painterly sophistication.
The Women Who Complicate the Picture
It would be equally misleading to suggest that feminist art is defined solely by resisting the nude or refusing sexual imagery.
A photograph by Diane Arbus presented by David Zwirner offered a very different relationship between image and subject. Seated female impersonator glancing sideways into framed mirror, N.Y.C. (1959) belongs to a photographic practice that challenged conventional distinctions between normative and marginal identities.
Arbus’s work is itself ethically complicated. Its relationship to vulnerability, difference and the power of the photographer has been extensively debated. and it makes an important point: looking at the body does not necessarily mean reducing that body to an object.
The distinction lies in the construction of the image, the relationship between photographer and subject, and the position offered to the viewer. Elsewhere, contemporary women artists continued to produce visual languages that refused comfortable categorisation.
Ida Ekblad’s provocatively titled WHAT THE FUCK, MARRY (2026), presented by Karma International, was one reminder that women do not need to be positioned exclusively as victims of representation or representatives of a supposedly unified feminine sensibility. They can be aggressive, excessive, contradictory, humorous, formally experimental and resistant to the interpretive expectations imposed upon them. This matters because one of the art market’s most subtle strategies is to turn women artists into a coherent commercial category. But women are not a movement, a medium or an aesthetic. And of course their work should not to be required to communicate an acceptable version of feminism to justify its inclusion in the canon.
The Male Genius Still Comes Without a Warning Label
While women artists are repeatedly introduced through narratives of historical exclusion, vulnerability and rediscovery, the biographies of celebrated male artists often remain conveniently optional.
Picasso, Gauguin, Balthus and Egon Schiele continue to occupy prestigious positions in the history and market of art. Their cases are not interchangeable.
Picasso’s relationships with women have been critically reassessed through biographies, testimonies and the experiences of his partners. Gauguin’s colonial life in the Pacific raises serious questions about sexual exploitation and unequal power relations. Balthus’s representations of young girls have provoked longstanding debates about the eroticisation of childhood. Schiele’s biography and erotic imagery raise their own distinct questions about sexuality, power and the regulation of artistic representation.
These histories should not be collapsed into the same accusation. but their continued celebration reveals an extraordinary asymmetry.
Women artists are frequently interpreted through their gender and personal experiences. Male artists can still be presented as universal geniuses whose artistic achievements supposedly transcend biography.
At Acquavella, for example, Gauguin’s Fruits sur une table (Nature morte au petit chien) (1889) appeared as a desirable nineteenth-century painting.
The work itself is a still life, not an image of an exploited woman. Its presence is not evidence that the gallery endorses the artist’s conduct. and it raises a question about the selectivity of historical contextualisation. Why is a woman’s biography so often essential to explaining her work, while a man’s troubling biography can be considered irrelevant to the presentation of his artistic achievement?
The same asymmetry is visible in the continuing commercial prestige of Georg Baselitz.
In 2013, Baselitz publicly asserted that women were inferior painters. He later defended his position by invoking market success as evidence. The argument is almost circular: women supposedly lack artistic greatness because their works command lower prices, while those lower prices reflect a market historically shaped by unequal access to recognition. At Art Basel Paris 2026, Hauser & Wirth reported selling Baselitz’s Der Hirte (1965) for approximately $10 million. The market, it seems, can still reward a man whose own rhetoric used that market to justify women’s exclusion.
The question is not whether his paintings should be destroyed, banned or removed from public view. It is why the myth of the autonomous male genius remains so resistant to the critical scrutiny routinely applied to women.
From Representation to Accountability: The Vallois Affair
Perhaps the most serious contradiction goes beyond artworks altogether.
In February 2025, French investigative newspaper Mediapart published Dans l’art contemporain, des violences sexuelles mises sous le tapis, an investigation by Sarah Brethes and Magali Lesauvage into allegations of sexual misconduct and the response of the French gallery sector.
The investigation examined an internal report prepared by Egaé, an organisation specialising in gender-based discrimination and sexual violence, at the request of the Comité professionnel des galeries d’art (CPGA).
According to Mediapart, the report concerned allegations involving Georges-Philippe Vallois, a prominent Parisian dealer and honorary president of the professional association. The newspaper reported that the findings had been left without adequate follow-up.
The allegations were disputed. An internal investigation is not a criminal conviction, and no judicial finding of guilt should be inferred from the reporting. But the institutional questions raised by the case are serious in their own right.
At Art Basel Paris 2026, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois participated at booth D26, presenting, among other artists, Niki de Saint Phalle, Eulàlia Grau and Pilar Albarracín.
These artists have distinct artistic practices, several of which directly address questions of gender, social structures and power. The contradiction is than institutional.
What does it mean to celebrate women artists publicly while questions remain about how the professional art world responds to allegations of misconduct within its own structures?
Representing women is not the same thing as ensuring that women working in the industry are protected. A gallery’s programme cannot, by itself, demonstrate the existence of effective procedures for addressing harassment, discrimination or abuses of power. And a progressive exhibition cannot substitute for institutional accountability. This is where the concept of femwashing becomes more than an accusation of fashionable hypocrisy. It concerns the distance between an institution’s symbolic commitments and its actual distribution of protection, authority and credibility. The real test is not simply how many women appear on the walls. It is also how women are treated behind those walls.
Feminism as Public Spectacle
None of this diminishes the importance of the feminist artistic projects presented alongside Art Basel.
Three monumental bronze sculptures by Tracey Emin appeared on the Parvis des Droits de l’Homme at the Trocadéro, overlooking one of Paris’s most symbolically charged public spaces.
Presented by White Cube, the works brought an artistic language shaped by vulnerability, intimacy, illness and bodily experience into a monumental civic setting.
The gesture was powerful. What has historically been dismissed as excessively personal or feminine occupied the scale traditionally reserved for public commemoration.
At the Palais d’Iéna, Alice Diop’s Geste de Consolation, presented by Miu Miu, pursued a different form of feminist intervention.
Exploring the representation of Black women and the historical structures through which their images have been constructed, Diop’s project confronted the relationship between looking, racialisation, gender and the possibility of reclaiming one’s own narrative.
Its importance should not be reduced to the fact that a luxury fashion house supported it, or that the presence of commercial sponsors automatically invalidate feminist artistic work. Two realities can coexist: an artist may produce a genuinely critical intervention, while the institution financing or presenting it benefits from association with that intervention. Indeed, this coexistence is central to contemporary cultural capitalism.The market no longer needs to silence every form of critique. It can support critique, circulate it, exhibit it , and enhance its own prestige in the process.
Who Profits from Feminist Progress?
The commercial success of women artists at Art Basel Paris also complicates any straightforward narrative of exclusion.
White Cube reported selling two paintings by Julie Mehretu for $7.85 million each. David Zwirner reported a Joan Mitchell sale at $3.8 million and a Marlene Dumas painting at $3 million. Tracey Emin’s You Were Part of Me (2022) was reported sold by White Cube for £990,000. These figures are substantial. They demonstrate that work by women artists can command extraordinary sums.
But exceptional prices should not be confused with structural equality. The market for blue-chip art concentrates enormous value around a relatively small number of established names, and the entrance of more women into that group does not necessarily transform the working conditions, opportunities or economic prospects of women artists more broadly.
The art world is increasingly able to celebrate feminist progress through individual success stories. What remains much less visible is the distribution of power behind those success stories. Who owns the works before prices rise? Who controls the estates? Who determines which artists deserve rediscovery? Who has access to influential collectors, museums and international fairs?
And who profits when feminist history becomes a desirable category of luxury consumption?
The Art Market Has Learned to Sell Its Own Critique
The contradiction of Art Basel Paris 2026 is not that feminist art exists within a commercial fair.
Feminist artists have always negotiated institutions, markets, public funding, private patronage and the contradictions of cultural production. Women artists are finally receiving recognition and achieving high prices. Their success is important. The deeper problem lies in the tendency to equate visibility with justice.
A fair can celebrate women while leaving the structures of its most profitable sector largely intact. A gallery can champion feminist artists while declining to contextualise the troubling legacies of established male masters. An institution can embrace the language of empowerment without demonstrating that it has transformed the conditions under which women work. And the market can transform decades of feminist resistance into a profitable narrative of rediscovery. None of these contradictions automatically invalidates the artworks concerned. But neither should the artworks be used to resolve them rhetorically.
The question is no longer simply whether the art market has room for women. It clearly does , particularly for women whose works have acquired sufficient cultural and financial value. The more urgent question is whether it is willing to redistribute the power that determines whose work becomes valuable in the first place. Until then, the celebration of feminism may remain one of the art world’s most successful contemporary marketing strategies.
The art market has learned how to sell feminism. Whether it is prepared to confront the inequalities feminism exposes is another matter entirely.
