Observer’s Guide to the Must-See Paris Art Week Shows
Observer ·
As Art Basel Paris brings the international art world to the French capital, the city's expanding cultural ecosystem has mounted an impressive lineup of exhibitions. From Barbara Kruger's intervention at the Bourse de Commerce and Ibrahim Mahama's takeover of Fondation Cartier to new presentations of work by Kennedy Yanko, Lee Krasner and Kerry James Marshall, these are the shows worth making time for.
Following London’s busy art week , the French capital reclaims the spotlight, showcasing an ever-expanding ecosystem of galleries, institutions, fairs and private foundations . The latest arrival is Large, an art center backed by Groupe Emerige —with mega-collector Laurent Dumas as president—that turns a former Renault industrial site on Île Seguin into a cultural destination. Art Basel Paris , which draws international collectors and art world insiders to the city each fall, has also become deeply embedded in the local scene, extending its public program into the surrounding streets and gardens and partnering with institutions across the capital to turn fair week into a genuinely citywide event.
Buoyed by the post-Brexit effect and the arrival of Art Basel , the French art market has grown increasingly confident. Sales reached $4.5 billion last year, up 9 percent from 2024, making France the largest art market in the European Union and the fourth largest globally. With a packed Paris Art Week ahead, we’ve selected 10 must-see exhibitions you should make time for in between the dinners, the fairs and the flânerie.
Large Through March 7, 2027 Large opened to the public last week, anchoring a new cultural district on Île Seguin in Greater Paris and becoming a point of reference for French contemporary artists. For its inaugural show, the center devotes its entire 2,500-square-meter exhibition space to “Imaginary Engine: From Masterpieces of the Collection Renault to Artists of Today.” Curated by Cecilia Alemani and organized in collaboration with the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture, the exhibition explores the relationship between humans and machines, particularly cars, a theme rooted in the history of a site once occupied by the automaker’s factories. Structured in five chapters—“The Factory of My Thoughts,” “Social Bodies,” “Motor Forces,” “Objects of Desire” and “The Human Machine”—the show examines both the industrial utopias of the 20th Century and the technological and social transformations that have revolutionized and continue to reshape contemporary life.
Pinault Collection – Bourse De Commerce Through January 18, 2027 To celebrate the bicentenary of the invention of photography, the Pinault Collection presents a major group exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, bringing together some 700 works by more than 70 artists. Spanning historical photography and contemporary image-making—from Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman , Dorothea Lange to Wolfgang Tillmans , along with Man Ray and Louise Lawler —the exhibition embraces the full breadth of the medium. Rejecting strict chronology in favor of a more fluid, asynchronous structure, the exhibition traces the evolution of aesthetics and techniques across two centuries. It borrows its title from a work by Barbara Kruger , who also takes over the Rotunda in her largest presentation in France to date. Folding image, text and architecture into one of her characteristically confrontational environments, she turns the building itself into a field of address, probing how language shapes memory and the construction of the self.
Reiffers Initiatives Foundation Through December 12, 2026 Thomas Houseago and Théo Mercier each explore the expressive possibilities of the non-finito: form left in process, transitional and suspended in a liminal state, able to inhabit several temporal and spatial dimensions at once—hovering between a relic of the past and a new, alien entity emerging from a speculative future. Born of Reiffers Initiatives’ 2026 Mentorship Program, the exhibition unites the two artists in a shared exercise of world-building that grapples with ruin, transformation, globalization and obsolescence. In the weeks leading up to the opening, Houseago turned the upper floor into a studio, creating new sculptures now shown alongside recent works, including a monumental bronze owl and one of his celebrated masks. Mercier, a French sculptor and stage director, turns the ground floor into a hauntingly seductive, shape-shifting world, with an accumulation of sculptural presences and narratives that mirrors the way he reimagines forms in his own mind.
Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine Through January 3, 2027 Kennedy Yanko ’s practice has always been deeply concerned with transformation. In her work, found scrap metal—mechanical relics from heavy vehicles—fuses with skins of paint molded into veil-like forms. Through rupture, manipulation, layering, mending and reconfiguration, she plays with the particulate structure of matter to tease out the latent expressive and alchemical potential of these salvaged materials. Curated by Matthieu Poirier, the exhibition puts her work in dialogue with France’s architectural history. A new series of salvaged-metal and paint-skin sculptures appears among casts from churches and cathedrals across France, staging the timeless tension between earthly bonds and the desire for transcendence. Drawing on her religious upbringing and explorations of mysticism, sacred sexuality, Mary Magdalene and female spiritual authority, Yanko considers how desire, devotion and intuition inform the act of making.
Lafayette Anticipations Through January 3, 2027 After a stellar year in which he joined David Zwirner’s roster and set new auction records, most recently $998,400 for Leaves carpet (2017) at Sotheby’s New York in May 2026 , Japanese painter Yu Nishimura receives his long-deserved first institutional show in Paris. The exhibition focuses on his contemplative, poetic explorations of landscape as a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. His hazy, dreamlike, lyrical canvases are animated by a singular ability to reveal the beauty of the ordinary, dwelling with imagination on the mysterious, complex nature of beings and things. Transcending direct physical experience, his paintings are spaces of quiet psychological depth, marked by a universality that taps into the unconscious, archetypal essence of life.
Fondation Cartier Through February 28, 2027 In his most ambitious presentation in France to date and his first institutional solo exhibition in Paris, Ibrahim Mahama takes over the entirety of Fondation Cartier’s new building, transforming it into a living ecosystem of relations and exchanges between individuals and between humans and nature. Extending the model of the art centers he founded in northern Ghana , the exhibition embraces collaboration, featuring nine artists and collectives connected to the Ghanaian art scene with whom Mahama has longstanding relationships: Dorothy Akpene Amenuke , Gideon Appah , James Barnor , the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), Courage Dzidula Kpodo , Postbox Ghana, Zohra Opoku , Tjaša Rener and Feda Wardak . Among the installations is his acclaimed Parliament of Ghosts , which serves as the stage for an extensive program of events that turns Fondation Cartier into a civic laboratory. Mahama also unveils his latest monumental work, Things Fall Apart , which reconstructs a former glass factory—a major industrial project of the postcolonial era, later abandoned and now symbolically revived.
Galerie Crévencoeur Through November 28, 2026 Having brought Yu Nishimura to wider international attention, Crèvecœur now debuts fellow Japanese painter Daisuke Fukunaga with a solo show timed to Art Basel. Fukunaga’s paintings emerge from an exercise in attuning to a different rhythm of the world: one of attention and contemplation rather than the accelerated pace of contemporary life. Working primarily from memory and sketches, he is drawn to the quiet theatricality of everyday experience and the extraordinary hidden within the mundane. His figures are often absorbed in forms of labor, yet it is less the gestures of production than the intervals between them that hold his interest: a pause, a walk, a moment of contemplation, a period of waiting. In these suspended moments, as the world’s cadence loosens, objects, landscapes and ordinary presences regain a heightened visibility.
Perrotin Through December 19, 2026 Building on the steady demand for Lee Bae’s work , Perrotin devotes one of its most prominent slots of the year to an extensive exhibition of the South Korean artist. Applying the aesthetic and philosophical approach of Dansaekhwa (“monochrome painting”) to his contemporary practice, Lee treats charcoal as both material and metaphor for the continuous processes of transformation that shape our lives. Beyond abstraction, his practice centers on charcoal’s alchemical nature: wood turned to carbon by fire, matter reduced to an elemental state yet still capable of reflecting light. Lee has described charcoal as the “final form” of matter, and his process reinforces that sense of metamorphosis—the wood is slowly carbonized in a kiln for roughly two weeks, then cooled for another two. The result is a material that reads as black but holds a surprising range of tones, from warm and soft to dense, reflective blacks.
Gagosian Through December 18, 2026 Timed to the much-anticipated Lee Krasner / Jackson Pollock show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Gagosian stages a focused presentation in Paris of Krasner beyond her role as wife of the Abstract Expressionist hero whose reputation long overshadowed hers. The first solo exhibition of Krasner’s work in France, the show was organized with Olney Gleason and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Centered on her work from the 1960s, it illuminates Krasner’s standing as one of the most versatile and daring painters of the New York School. Dividing her time between Springs, in East Hampton, and her Manhattan apartment and studio, she entered an intense period of reinvention during this period, tackling canvases of unprecedented scale, increasingly lyrical compositions and more restricted palettes. Her experimentation gave rise to the Umber paintings (1959-62) and the Primary Series of the 1960s, now considered among her best work.
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris Through January 24, 2027 On the strength of its programming, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris has in recent years become an anchor of the city’s art scene. Currently, it’s showing a sweeping survey of work by Kerry James Marshall , organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich. Featuring 70 pieces, including eight new paintings, the exhibition traces the evolution of Marshall’s storytelling as he chronicles Black communities in the U.S., filling historical gaps with monumental canvases that raise ordinary experience to the level of the epic. Drawing on both the Western art-historical canon and popular culture, Marshall addresses the Middle Passage and the legacies of the civil rights and Black Power movements without directly depicting violence or alienation. Running concurrently is a major exhibition dedicated to Lebanese American artist Simone Fattal . Bringing together around 100 works, the show spans more than 50 years of her practice, from early landscape paintings to ceramics and collages. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, it invites visitors to trace the recurring concerns in a remarkably diverse body of work.