Art Basel’s Little Brazil

Within 24 hours of Art Basel opening, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel reported selling a raft of works by Brazilian artists. Among them was  Marina Rheingantz’s painting Pé do Ouvido (2026) for US$80,000 (£60,000), Antonio Társis’s wall-based sculpture Untitled (The colour side of the flames) for US$32,000 (£24,000), and Márcia Falcão’s painting Malandra não Para XXXVII (2026) for US$27,000 (£20,000). The São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro-based gallery turns 25 this year and has brought a presentation of 25 works to Basel to mark the occasion. All three of the works sold had been held back from advance PDFs and private presentations under the fair's new Basel Exclusive initiative and were revealed only once doors opened. 

It is a record year for Brazil in Basel. Six Brazil-based galleries are showing in the Galleries sector (Almeida & Dale, A Gentil Carioca, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Gomide&Co, Luisa Strina, and Mendes Wood DM), with Nara Roesler offering a joint presentation in Unlimited, the fair’s platform for large-scale works. Brazil is comfortably the best represented non-European country excluding the US.

The galleries arrive to the fanfare of optimistic domestic figures in the most recent Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report, where Brazilian dealers reported sales up 21 percent year-on-year, with 83 percent saying they expected to sell more in 2026. The same report put global sales up just 4 percent after a two-year dip, with 43 percent of dealers worldwide confident in an uptick in sales this year. Is it boom time for the Brazilian market? 

Not quite. Those figures are self-reported; no receipts required. The record number of galleries is up by exactly one from previous years – hardly a surge. Dealers on the floor in Basel are positive, but slightly less ecstatic than the March report. “I cannot speak for all of my colleagues, but for us the market looks good and stable,” says Márcio Botner, the owner of A Gentil Carioca, which he founded in Rio in 2003. 

Miguel Afa, Varal de vagalumes, 2026, acrylic and oil stick on canvas,,100 x 150 x 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and A Gentil Carioca

The crowd at Art Basel is thinner this year. “Perhaps a few less people,” Botner says. “But, in the end, good people. Sometimes it's not the quantity, but the quality.” At Luisa Strina, director Katia Gondo also reported fewer visitors, but a better edition than last year sales-wise. Maria Ana Pimenta, a partner at Fortes, says its gallery is on an upward trend, but she remains “very cautious of the current moment”. She adds: “I’d say that we’re growing, yes, stable, yes, but very aware of the moment we are living in – not just of the art market, but geopolitically, too.” The general sentiment reflects the careful optimism of the report’s author, cultural economist Dr. Clare McAndrew, who saw a shift from contraction to ‘modest growth’ in a ‘volatile geopolitical environment’. 

Making its debut in the Galleries sector is Almeida & Dale. Freshly merged with Galeria Millan, it is now, by its own description, Latin America’s largest gallery. Partner director Hena Lee explains what’s at the heart of the buoyant Art Basel & UBS figures: “Brazil has a robust collector community with a long history of supporting artists across generations.” Gondo has noticed a shift since the pandemic that may also be driving dealer confidence internally. She says the domestic market has become “more local” because selling international artists into Brazil has become harder, “mainly because of the taxes – we have high import taxes.”

“The Brazilian market is in a really, really good moment, very stable,” says Botner, citing a new generation of collectors and museum acquisitions. He notes that the scene isn’t immune to the politics of the moment, hoping October's election returns “a government that thinks about democracy and believes and trusts in art and culture”. Pimenta echoes a feeling of precarity and emphasises the importance of Fortes’ global outlook. “We are living through a moment of enormous political shift, of fragilities that are very sensitive within institutions and galleries,” she says. “We don't act solely in Brazil. We act internationally, with artists who live abroad, and international galleries that we work with. I don’t think we can just live within ourselves.”

The confidence expressed in the report and underlying tension on the ground seem to rub alongside one another in Brazil, but one thing every gallery can agree on is that harnessing international sales is key – and all the galleries report progress on the international stage. Lee thinks this growth isn’t just trend-led: “Latin American art is becoming more structurally integrated into international discourse, with deeper institutional engagement and a broader collector base.”

What does the Basel set want from a Brazilian gallery? Pimenta pushes back on the question itself. “I'm always a little resistant about putting Brazil in a kind of pigeonhole,” wary of the “Brazilian bracket” and what European buyers expect to find inside it. Lee spells out the market mechanics. Some things travel more easily: “Works connected to modernism, geometric abstraction, [and] tropical imagery provide familiar entry points.” Harder to place is “work that operates through highly local references, complex cosmologies, or forms of knowledge that do not fit established market narratives”. But the boundaries are shifting. “International audiences are becoming more informed,” she says. “Increasingly, what resonates is not whether a work conforms to expectations about Brazil, but whether it presents a compelling artistic proposition on its own terms.”

And the booths bear that out. A Gentil Carioca, the only artist-founded gallery of the six, based in Rio’s historic Saara market district, brings its own unique approach. “We do social and education projects connecting with art in Rio, and we try to bring this difference to our presentation.”

Luisa Strina sets out its stall as, “contemporary practices in dialogue with historical legacies”. It’s a fitting framing for the first gallery from Latin America to have been invited to attend Art Basel in 1992. For this edition, the fifty-two-year-old gallery hangs the canon of Brazilian artists alongside up-and-comers like Ilê Sartuzi and Juliana dos Santos. Gondo says the pairing isn't a commercial strategy, but instead, “positions the legacy of Luisa [Strina, founder of the eponymous gallery, who] worked closely with Mira Schendel, Cildo Meireles and all of these artists. So, it’s organic for us to have historic artists and young artists. We have a continuity”.

Galeria Luisa Strina, Art Basel 2026. Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina

The work on show at Basel has grown more charged, and the galleries reject the idea that this is something to be managed. A Gentil Carioca’s stand includes Renata Lucas’s reconstruction of a border-control booth, clad in Brazilian wood, holding a deconstructed national passport, and a Marcela Cantuária painting that challenges the mechanisms of the legitimisation of art itself. Was there a tension, then, in selling institutional critique at the largest commercial fair in the world? Botner says there was not. Lucas’s passport was “a very poetic way to think about territories, about immigration nowadays”; Cantuária’s canvas is an homage to Nise da Silveira, the Brazilian psychiatrist who pioneered art therapy. “Art needs to take risks,” he says, a phrase he returns to again and again. 

The buyers are a mixed bag. When political work sells, Botner says, “sometimes it goes to a collection, or to a museum, and sometimes not – sometimes the work is [there for] visibility”. This year, Gondo notes, “There are fewer Brazilian collectors in Basel. I’ve heard they are prioritising Art Basel Paris. We’ve also already had two local fairs at the beginning of the year, and there's also Venice. So, I think there was too much competition for Art Basel.” Lee agrees there are “fewer Brazilian collectors in Basel than in previous editions”, and says, instead, interest was coming from European, American and Asian collectors and institutions. 

The deeper change is in what they arrive knowing. “A decade ago, conversations often began with introducing an artist or explaining an historical context,” Lee says. “Today, many collectors arrive already informed” – people who may never have set foot in Brazil now know an artist from a museum show, a catalogue or a private collection abroad. It’s a tribute to the staying power of galleries like Luisa Strina, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and A Gentil Carioca at the top end of the market.

What does it take for a Brazilian gallery to last and matter abroad? Luisa Strina once said, “If you’re not tough, you don’t achieve quality or excellence.” Thirty-four years on from her gallery’s first appearance in Basel, her thoughts from the floor of this edition have only hardened. “Nowadays we need to be even tougher than before. It’s much more competitive right now.” Botner, a member of Art Basel Miami Beach’s selection committee for the past 15 years, is also well placed to comment on what endures. “Take risks, do what you believe,” he says “After that, the market will come.” Eighteen years into A Gentil Carioca’s run at Basel, his own gallery is evidence of that wisdom.