BASEL— ARTINFO’s early-afternoon visit to Volta coincided with the first few hours of the VIP preview of Art Basel, and the four-year-old satellite fair, housed in an old train station, looked like a ghost town. But the slack attendance did little to dampen the mood of the exhibitors we queried, who mostly seemed upbeat and had impressive sales to report.

“All the collectors were here yesterday,” said Andrea Smith of New York’s ZieherSmith, referring to Volta’s own VIP preview on Monday. “We expected today to be the slowest day.”

Smith reported selling a Rachel Owens installation of broken glass and chain-link fence, priced at $15,000; an Eddie Martinez painting for $16,000; and five Javier Piñón prints priced at $5–7,000 each. Smith also said that she had spoken to collectors about some bigger projects that she hadn’t brought to the fair, but wouldn’t elaborate on details.

Augusto Arbizo of New York’s Eleven Rivington didn’t quite share Smith’s enthusiasm. “There was some traffic yesterday,” he said, “but I’m told — this is my first year here — that things were slower than usual.” But he still reported sales: he sold out an edition of 5 of a Matt Ducklo photograph, priced at $4,400 apiece. The image, which depicts someone groping an Ancient Egyptian statue at New York's Museum of Modern Art, was taken during a touching tour for the blind. Arbizo also reported selling two Cameron Martins.

Federica Angelucci of Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson Gallery reported sales of Deborah Poynton’s giant canvas depicting a nude reclining elderly couple, priced in the €40–50,000 range, as well as three of Youssef Nabil’s prints of notable artists including Gilbert and George (a diptych) and Zaha Hadid, at prices ranging from €2,600 to €6,800.

Wohnmaschine of Berlin dedicated most of their booth to figurative works by Michael Kalmbach. Though his large-scale watercolors lacked red stickers, the gallery did sell a few smaller-format pieces by the artist, as well as two of his sculptures, priced at €2,800 and €8,000. The gallery also reported selling a set of drawings by Japanese-based artist Takehito Koganezawa for €7,000 total.

Despite these successes, the fair did have a bit of Basel envy. Nowhere was this more in evidence than at the booth of Grace Li Gallery of Zurich, which featured photo-derived large-scale paintings by Zheng Guogu depicting scenes from recent editions of Art Basel: a close-up of former director (and now Beyeler Foundation head) Sam Keller; people milling about an outdoor sculpture; a heated talk as part of the Basel Conversations program. Zheng, according to the gallery, became the first Chinese artist to show at Art Basel in 1998, when he came with the Vancouver-based Features Gallery. Ten years later, two of his newest “Basel” works had been placed on reserve.

On the second of the fair’s two levels, spirits seemed a little heavier, perhaps an indication that those big collectors who did show up had only breezed through. Dublin’s Green on Red Gallery, for example, had no sales to report, though they did have a suite of five drawings by Alice Maher, priced at €10,500, on reserve.

Jerome O Drisceoil, the gallery’s proprietor, supported Arbizo’s claim that this year is much slower than last: “We had a lot of business early on in past years. This year seems to be a bit of a damper.” But the dealer attributed this not to the economy but to the schedule of the fair, whose first day coincided with the opening of Art Basel’s Art Unlimited and Art Statements sections and second day with the opening of the main fair. He expected things to pick up later in the week.

Joe Amrhein, the owner/director of Brooklyn/Leipzig gallery Pierogi, exuded a much deeper pessimism and was the only dealer we spoke to whose testimony suggests real concern about the current state of the art world.  

The gallerist had given his booth over to photographs and other objects documenting an ambitious conceptual project and installation by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, priced at a rather Basel-like sum of $250,000. Although a few light-box images had drawn collector interest, Amrhein had yet to draw much interest for the giant glass-enclosed block of ice that constitutes the piece’s core. “It’s always great to present ideas,” Amrhein said of the work, which he believes to be a difficult conceptual piece. “I’m not sure a fair’s the place to do it.”

“These fairs drive a certain aesthetic, and it gets kind of cloying,” he continued, before adding that that he would be re-hanging his booth with more salable work, likely tomorrow.

But the dealer’s frustrations seemed to go well beyond the difficulty of selling six-figure conceptual installations. Amrhein, who said he has already done six fairs this year, told us that he plans to cut that number in half going forward, limiting himself to New York, Berlin, and Miami, where he does a three-gallery mini-show with Hales Gallery of London and Feldman Gallery of New York.

“I’m tired,” Amrhein said. “I’ve been doing these for a while.”