Returning to the Palexpo for its 13th iteration, Art Genève is carving out its own niche in a crowded European art fair circuit. This year was the second edition of the fair under director Charlotte Diwan, and her first with a full year to plan—her predecessor, Thomas Hug, was ousted three months before last year’s edition over allegations of fraud and theft.
Diwan has put the fair through a makeover: There is a new logo, a more modern graphic design, and the fair’s name is a more sensible two words (it used to be called artgenève).
Last year, Diwan slashed the number of galleries down to around 80 from 100 or so. “It is very important to have a more restrained selection so that the quality level is more regular,” Diwan told Artsy. “We had a large turnover of international galleries, so we felt like the program lacked stability in terms of quality.” That’s what attracted Anne-Sarah Bénichou, founder and director of her eponymous Paris gallery, to come for the first time this year. “The new direction has reoriented the quality of booths and gallery selection,” Bénichou said.
Diwan has also instigated the introduction of Swiss institutions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Fondation Opale. The point of bringing institutions from all over the country to show at the fair is to raise it from a “regionally important one,” as Diwan characterized it, to one of national (and even international) significance—more galleries with a Parisian presence participated this year than last. “We had a large turnover of international galleries,” Diwan said, “so we felt like the program lacked stability in terms of quality.”
Her goal is to create loyalty with the galleries who come to Art Genève; the fair will continue with its cap of around 80 galleries to maintain quality levels. Although a number of larger galleries didn’t return this year—including Opera Gallery, which has a Geneva location—Diwan said they’d be welcomed back if they wanted to return. Should Art Genève continue to grow in significance, this could yield hard decisions if the fair is to keep its tightened scale.
As the second-largest fair in Switzerland, it’s only natural that Art Genève is compared to its larger compatriot, Art Basel. Many collectors and gallerists point to the more conversational aspect of smaller fairs. “I think that today, compared to 10 years ago, we see the grand global fairs—the Art Basels, the Friezes—are becoming more vulnerable,” noted Galerie Nathalie Obadia founder Nathalie Obadia. “The small fairs are more intimate, more like salons. I think there is a place for very serious fairs like Art Genève.”
“There is no comparison,” Hauser & Wirth senior director Séverine Waelchi noted of Art Basel and Art Genève, instead calling them “complementary.” She has noticed that the vast majority of those coming into Art Genève speak French: Not only does this mean that the Swiss collectors attending are from the francophone part (unlike Basel or Zürich), but also from France and Belgium as well. Many gallerists noted that there’s a large split between the Swiss collectors who speak German to those who speak French—many of those who attend Art Basel don’t come to Art Genève, and vice versa. Diwan agreed that “in Switzerland, people struggle to mix.”
Art Basel itself, as multiple gallerists said, faces an issue in that its Swiss fair is partly supported by an older generation of (germanophone) Swiss collectors who aren’t being replaced. In Geneva, Ketabi Bourdet director Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard said that she saw quite a few francophone Swiss collectors in their thirties who grew up in families that view “collecting as a lifestyle,” as she put it. With a newer generation of Swiss collectors coming from the francophone part, it makes Geneva an important—and growing—center.
This momentum is bolstered by Geneva’s considerable infrastructure. The city is used to hosting foreigners, as it’s where the European headquarters of the United Nations is, as well as its banking institutions that bring in the wealthy from all over the world. It is also easily accessible by train—Parisian collectors can get there in just over three hours.
The cosmopolitan nature of Geneva is reflected in the kinds of artworks shown at Art Genève. Ketabi Bourdet mounted a solo presentation of American artist Jo Fish, who only started exhibiting in 2023, and sold six works—one for €20,000 ($20,489), and three for prices ranging from €8,000–€12,000 ($8,195–$12,293) each. “You have to level up when you bring works to Geneva,” Ketabi-Lebard said. “You can’t just bring eye-candy works,” as collectors are knowledgeable.
Hong Kong gallery Tang Contemporary Art, which has regularly participated in Art Genève, brought Western artists, like Studio Lenca and Von Wolfe, but also Chinese artists, like Cai Lei and Yue Minjun, and Chinese artists living in Europe, like Jade Ching-yuk Ng and Xiyao Wang. Works were sold by the gallery for prices between €12,500 ($12,811) and €73,000 ($74,818). “The fair is very good for us, this year we are happy about it,” director Willa Yip said. The only other non-Asian fair it does regularly is The Armory Show in New York; Art Genève is chosen as its usual European presence because of advantageous timing—it is always held in January.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia sold works across a wide range of styles too, from artists Shirley Jaffe, Laure Prouvost, Wang Keping, Joris Van de Moortel, Fiona Ra, and Antoine Renard. It had just done the BRAFA art fair in Brussels a few days earlier, but for Obadia, Art Genève’s been worth doing for well over a decade: As the gallery has a location in Brussels, BRAFA participation is practically obligatory, but Art Genève is very much a choice.
For her gallery, Obadia sees the germanophone-francophone split in these fairs and Geneva’s place as an international hub as important within the Swiss art world: In addition to francophones, she’s personally met Italian collectors and other foreigners who live in Geneva. She told Artsy: “I think that Geneva is a very international city, much more than Zürich,” the other major Swiss financial hub. “Geneva is a pole of stability that’s very international,” Obadia added, “and I think that’s reflected in the fair.”
