Art
Art Basel’s youngest fair is back in the French capital, taking over the imposing Grand Palais and spilling out across the city with hors les murs (that’s French for “off-site”) events. But if you haven’t snagged a ticket for Art Basel Paris 2025 yet, don’t worry—there’s plenty going on outside of the fair. Galleries throughout the city are taking advantage of the crowds of art professionals descending on Paris to host exciting shows featuring big-name artists or up-and-coming stars.
Here are the must-see gallery shows this month alongside Art Basel Paris.
David Zwirner
Through Dec. 20
Gerhard Richter, installation view at David Zwirner, Paris, 2025. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
Gerhard Richter is being doubly celebrated in Paris this fall. A few days after a large retrospective of the German painter opens at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, David Zwirner will host an equally varied—if less comprehensive—overview of his long career. Richter was only added to David Zwirner’s roster in 2023, and this marks his third show with the gallery after exhibitions in New York and London.
On display will be a selection of his blurred paintings: photorealistic oils capturing moments of beauty in daily life, often from unusual angles, such as Blumen (Flowers) (1992) or Torso (1997). The show will also focus on his abstract paintings, which are made up of layers of color thickly applied or removed with a scraper or palette knife, and installations with glass.
“Gluts”
Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais
Through Nov. 22
Robert Rauschenberg, Summer Glut Fence, 1987. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac.
Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais location will open its Robert Rauschenberg show almost 100 years to the day after the artist’s birth on October 22, 1925. The gallery has decided to mark the centenary with a notable first: This is the first time the artist’s “Gluts” series has been exhibited in France.
“Gluts,” Rauschenberg’s last sculpture series, comprises cacophonous assemblages of different bits of scrap metal, creating unique, almost creature-like forms out of exhaust pipes, bicycle frames, and radiator grilles. These sculptures are his response to the 1980s glut in the oil market, which wreaked economic devastation on Rauschenberg’s native Texas. The works are a product of the transformation he noticed in Houston’s urban landscape through scrapyards, closed businesses, and gutted factories.
“On Vanishing”
Templon
Through Oct. 31
A man rowing his flat-bottomed boat through reeds and lily pads. Another man astride a horse with a monkey perched on his shoulder. A girl curled up under a blanket on a sofa, with a dog sleeping on the floor next to her. Hans Op de Beeck’s grayscale, naturalistic sculptures transport the viewer into narrative scenes, sometimes imbued with an otherworldly quality and other times remarkable for their ordinariness.
Op de Beeck has been exhibiting internationally for over two decades and is known for working at scale and creating huge, immersive sculptural landscapes. That is perhaps why Templon has given over both of its spaces on Rue Beaubourg and Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare to the same artist for the first time. “On Vanishing” will also display a film by the artist and some of his watercolors alongside his timeless sculptural works.
Almine Rech/Fondation Le Corbusier
Oct. 21–Dec. 20
Heinz Mack cofounded the Group Zero artistic movement in the 1950s with fellow German artist Otto Piene. The name came from the zero hour, the final point in a countdown to a rocket launch, which stood for the dawn of a new era in the wake of World War II. The group wanted to make works stripped down to what they saw as the fundamental pillars of art: light, vibration, and space.
Mack’s work meets its parallel in Le Corbusier’s architecture in this show at the Maison La Roche in Paris, in collaboration with the gallery Almine Rech. The artist’s shimmering sculptures and colorful paintings play with volume, light, and structure in the same way as Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture around it.
“Jamais les crépuscules ne vaincront les aurores”
Galerie Hamid Khellafi
Through Nov. 8
French Algerian artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar initially studied biology before switching to fine arts. That fascination with the body comes through in her practice, from her performances to her self-portraits and tapestries. Her solo show at Hamid Khellafi focuses on her dreamlike drawings and paintings which often respond to Western art history.
For example, one series is based around Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s famous painting La Grande Baigneuse (1808). Another reinterprets Eugène Delacroix’s 1843 work Women of Algiers in their Apartment: Bouzar mixes abstraction and figurative representations of the naked body to reappropriate Delacroix’s orientalizing gaze. For her, painting is a mechanism of protection, a way of providing an alternative way of imagining the subject and liberating it from Western cultural biases. “Jamais les crépuscules ne vaincront les aurores” is part of the gallery’s 2025 focus on Algerian artists.
“Plateau XXI”
Galerie Christophe Gaillard
Through Nov. 8
Step into the looking glass: Julien des Monstiers’s intricate oil paintings bring to life fairytale narratives in the style of board games, with numbered squares and winding paths creating a journey. These richly ornate works are peopled with characters familiar from fairytales, from kings, queens, and servants with bulbous noses to lost children, anthropomorphized teapots, woodcutters, and wizards.
Des Monstiers has made a name for himself as an artist who is constantly reinventing himself within the medium of painting, with each exhibition wildly different from the next. If there is a common thread running through his work, it’s his bold use of rich, vibrant color. Here, ruby reds brush up against veins of cobalt blue, and a peacock-turquoise punctuates a fantastical landscape washed with a dusty parchment yellow.
“The Singular Experience”
Gagosian, Le Bourget
Through Apr. 18, 2026
Walter De Maria, installation view of Truck Trilogy, 2011–17, at Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York, 2017–19. © 2025 Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian.
On the other side of the pond from Paris, the Dia Art Foundation maintains and manages some of Walter De Maria’s most well-known land artworks. Their curator Donna De Salvo has stepped in to work on “The Singular Experience” at Gagosian’s Le Bourget site. The exhibition displays the artist’s last ever work, Truck Trilogy (2011–17), which was incomplete when De Maria died in 2013. Gagosian worked with the artist’s estate to finish it posthumously according to his instructions.
The work comprises three Chevrolet pickup trucks that have been stripped of some of their elements and instead fitted with upright stainless-steel rods—a nod to his previous land art work The Lightning Field (1977). The work has only been exhibited once before, in New York, from 2017 to 2019. Fans of De Maria can also see some of his work featured in the group exhibition “Minimal,” on view at the Bourse de Commerce at the same time.
“Un jour”
Semiose
Through Nov. 15
Semiose is one of the most exciting galleries in the Marais neighborhood today, just a street away from the Centre Pompidou. During Art Basel Paris, the 5,000 square meter space will be taken over by two artists: French artist My-Lan Hoang-Thuy and German painter Helene Appel. Appel specializes in painstakingly detailed facsimiles of mundane scraps of everyday life. A swash of sudsy water over a surface, a slightly crinkled envelope lying on a table or an empty plastic wrapper are not just depicted but recreated in 1:1 scale with astonishing realism.
Appel works on untreated linen canvas, giving her trompe l’oeil works an earthy quality, rooting us in the here and now. This year, she has shown her work across Europe, with exhibitions in Germany and Italy, though this is her first exhibition in France.
“Nuances en terre et en couleur”
Dumas Limbach
Through Dec. 1
The small town of Vallauris in the south of France has Pablo Picasso to thank for cementing its reputation as the French capital of ceramics. The Spanish painter settled there in 1948, but it was during the 1950s that Vallauris experienced its golden age of pottery with artists coming from all over France to open ceramics studios.
One of them was Gilbert Portanier, an artist who worked with clay but refused the title of ceramist, saying, “I am profoundly a painter….Why should painting have to be on canvas or cardboard?” His painted ceramics in this show at Dumas Limbach toggle between abstraction and figuration, with his choice of palette showing why he was given the nickname “Magician of Colors.” His unpolished, sketched designs belie his mastery of the medium.
“Good Old Raisins and Peanuts (GORP)”
Ruttkowski;68
Through Nov. 1
The women that Monica Kim Garza paints don’t—to put it frankly—give a fuck. They’re voluptuous, Renaissance-inspired women of color who smoke, drink, and lift weights wearing high heels. For her third solo show at Ruttkowski;68, Kim Garza has situated them outdoors, painting them wearing backpacks, with hiking poles, picnicking, or rock climbing.
Catherine Bennett
Catherine Bennett is a writer based in Paris. She writes regularly about art and culture for publications like Apollo Magazine, the BBC, Artsy, The Guardian, and Art Basel.
