Limited Editions: Two Realities for Prints Dealers in Basel

Courtesy Mixografia

Mixografia of Los Angeles sold a suite of five crochet prints by Louise Bourgeois, from an edition of 50, for €85,000. Pictured here is "Crochet I" (1998).

Courtesy Two Palms

Carroll Dunham's "Untitled (Mar–April 2008) 4" (2008) is part of a seven-monotype series that sold out at Two Palm's booth for $16–23,000 each.

Damien Hirst Edward Ruscha Cy Twombly Antoni Tapies Tom Wesselmann Louise Bourgeois John Baldessari Jean Arp

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Meanwhile, at Art Basel’s Art Editions, prints, books, and other multiples were selling like hotcakes.

“I’m crazy busy,” said Brussels publisher Michèle Didier, who hadn’t really thought about heading over to PrintBasel. “Just this morning I tried for the first time to do a small tour of my neighbors [at Art Basel].” Her booth is presenting a limited-edition series of books by On Kawara and Robert Barry that are testimonies to both artists’ obsessive-compulsiveness. Kawara presents ten years worth of daily entries about where he went during the day and what time he got out of bed, while Barry fills 25 volumes with pages that each contain 40,000 tiny dots, for 1 billion dots in total. Didier reported selling numerous editions of each set of books, but said he would not have exact totals until the end of the fair.

Evelyn Day Lasry of New York’s Two Palms was also having a successful fair, having sold out a seven-monotype series by Carroll Dunham priced at $16–23,000 each, a Richard Prince sculpture of 11 nurse books, edition of 2, for $425,000, and various prints by Prince, Chris Ofili, Mel Bochner, and Elizabeth Peyton.

Though Day Lasry noted that Art Editions is something of a ghetto within Art Basel, since many high-end collectors do not consider purchasing multiples and therefore avoid the section altogether, the fate of dealers there is certainly better than that of their colleagues at the print fair. During my two-hour stay, PrintBasel probably drew no more visitors in total than were found in many Art Edition booths at any given moment.