Hyphae 3, 2026
Ines Katamso
Galerie Droste
There’s no best time of year to be in Paris, but late spring is especially magical. The flowers are in full bloom, the museums present their biggest shows, and terraces teem with activity and pichets of rosé thanks to extended hours of sunlight. Paris Gallery Weekend arrives before summer heat hits the city, with three days of programming from May 29th to 31st.
The weekend celebration, organized by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, marks its 14th year as 73 galleries across the Marais, Matignon, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as well as nearby Belleville, Pantin, and Romainville, organize artist talks, performances, vernissages, and exhibition walkthroughs. A selection of galleries have given carte blanche to writers, museum leaders, critics, professors, artists, and curators to organize special shows.
Among the highlights are Waddington Custot’s inaugural exhibition at their new Paris outpost featuring work by Les Nabis artists, and American-born, Australia-based painter Amber Boardman’s stirring show at Brigitte Mulholland.
Below, Artsy selects the 10 can’t-miss shows of Paris Gallery Weekend.
“All That She Holds Inside”
Galerie Droste
Through June 13
Alabaster Dreamin, 2024
Anna Virnich
Galerie Droste
This group exhibition features work by five women artists—Anna Virnich, Nada Elkalaawy, Ines Katamso, Julie Legouez, and Karla Leyva—who explore matrilineal inheritance. Women are invariably marked by the memories, strengths, and deferred dreams of prior generations, and these artists untangle such complex legacies.
In particular, the show explores how grandmothers act as stabilizing, central, and sometimes overlooked forces in a family. Berlin-based artist Anna Virnich presents Alabaster Dreamin (2024), a textile composition layered with silk, velvet, cotton, and satin on screen nettle. It both reveals and conceals a delicate, lace-like figure that peeks from behind transparent swathes of fabric. The piece suggests how materials absorb and transmit charged emotions like anger, fragility, or sadness. Franco Indonesian artist Ines Katamso also uses fabric as a means of storing memory. Hyphae 4 (2026), her work on cotton, features smeared soil the artist collected from Java, Indonesia, Bali, and France to explore the relationship between humans and ecology.
Kishio Suga
Mendes Wood DM
Mar. 26–June 4
Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga is known for his site-specific installations and assemblages made from natural, everyday materials such as stones, wood, metal, wire, and concrete. As a member of the Mono-ha movement, a group of Japanese artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s for prioritizing such humble objects’ natural properties, Suga calls his works “situations” rather than “compositions.”
Now in his eighties, the artist, whose work is seldom shown in France, is the subject of a monumental, career-spanning exhibition at Mendes Wood DM that takes place across both their locations in Paris and New York. In their space on the Place des Vosges, a selection of Suga’s two-dimensional works and three-dimensional situations from the 1970s through the 2010s are on view: The artist arranged a small wall of stones across and beside the limestone steps of the Haussmannian staircase, while a constellation of wooden boards at 90-degree angles extend across the tile floor above. Upstairs, Boundary of Marginal Scenery (1994–2026) features a floor-to-ceiling grid of wooden planks that restrain a spread of painted beams projecting from the gallery’s corner.
Michel Jocaille
“Lily of the Valley”
Galerie Les filles du calvaire
Through June 20
Lily of the Valley, 2026
Michel Jocaille
Galerie Les filles du calvaire
“Lily of the Valley” marks Michel Jocaille’s first solo exhibition in Paris. Jocaille hails from a region in northern France rich with textile tradition, which informs the theatrical sculptures and installations he creates with wax, glass, and printed velvet panne. He employs techniques that he learned growing up, like crochet, weaving, and knitting. They’re also common to the region’s mills, and Jocaille creates a dialogue between industrial and cultural heritage.
The show reframes these traditions, which are too often seen as decorative or too feminine. Jocaille has titled his show after a flower praised for its tender beauty, which also symbolizes the fight for workers’ rights. In France, the lily of the valley, with its delicate cascade of white bells and green fronds, is also handed out on Labor Day as a symbol of good luck, good fortune, and the good of the collective. In Muguet crochet (2026), an assemblage of these crochet lilies of the valley is mounted atop metal stems, which poignantly rise from a tangle of black crochet atop a wooden podium. Jocaille’s work also features in the gallery’s concurrent group show, which marks its 30th anniversary.
Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin
“In Light and in Shadow”
1831 Art Gallery
May 29–June 30
Sous le Soleil Exactement II, 2024
Aude Herledan
1831 Art Gallery
Lidded Vessel #3, 2024
Eleanor Lakelin
1831 Art Gallery
A chance encounter brought artists Aude Herlédan and Eleanor Lakelin together a decade ago. Now, the friends are presenting a two-person show at 1831 Art Gallery’s space in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Herlédan is a French multidisciplinary artist whose gestural, lyrical paintings feature decisive brushstrokes and take inspiration from poetry. British sculptor Lakelin carves sculptures from sequoia and burr, accentuating the wood’s scars and its natural “memory.”
“In Light and in Shadow” is the result of ongoing collaboration. This past fall, the artists immersed themselves in each other’s studios. They each produced new work that directly responded to the other’s practice. These pieces will appear in the show alongside the works that inspired them. The exhibition continues a dialogue between the artists, first explored in a similar show at New York’s Rosenberg & Co. earlier this year.
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard
Through June 20
Untitled, 2003
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard
Untitled, n.d
Richard Nonas
Galerie Christophe Gaillard
American Postminimalist artist Richard Nonas made modular sculptures from raw wood, stone, and steel, which he believed to carry deep philosophical meaning. The artist initially trained as an anthropologist and carried out field research on American Indian tribes across Canada and the American Southwest. He turned to sculpture in his mid-thirties and became a part of the early 1970s downtown New York art scene alongside Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Keith Sonnier, and other artists. His anthropological background informed his sculptures, which used negative space as a material and highlighted how objects and sculpture itself can activate an environment. In the Marais, Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents a selection of Nonas’s small-scale sculptures and works on paper, all made between 1983 and 2016 (the artist passed away in 2021). An untitled, floor-based sculpture anchors the show.
Paula Rego
“Drawing from Life”
Galerie Lelong
Through July 11
Life Room III, 2005
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong
Scarecrow III, 2006
Paula Rego
Galerie Lelong
Galerie Lelong presents drawings and lithographs by Portuguese visual artist Paula Rego, which the artist made in her London studio during an intense period between 2005 and 2007. Shortly after her 70th birthday, Rego turned to prints, which she could execute faster than her layered paintings. The dark, complex works on view draw on fairytales and folk legends to explore hierarchies, oppression, and interpersonal dynamics. Some take inspiration from The King of Pigs, a 16th-century Italian fairytale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola about an anthropomorphic pig, while others use the work of playwright and director Martin McDonagh as a catalyst. Upon seeing McDonagh’s 2003 play The Pillowman. Rego asked him for more dark, twisted stories, and he shared a series of unpublished manuscripts. Rego united his narratives with memories of her childhood in Portugal under fascist rule. The resulting works are extraordinarily imaginative attempts to grapple with the complexities of human nature.
Arcangelo Sassolino
“Aux abord du séisme”
GALLERIA CONTINUA
Through May 30
La consistance du vide, 2026
Arcangelo Sassolino
GALLERIA CONTINUA
The title of Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino’s latest solo show at GALLERIA CONTINUA translates to “on the verge of the earthquake.” It’s an apt title for a presentation that investigates the physical limitations of matter and its precarity when subject to significant force. New and existing works are on view, and many will transform over the course of the show. In Damnatio memoriae (2016), for instance, a marble bust of a Roman torso sits on a metal plinth while an industrial apparatus with a spinning round saw slowly shaves down the sculpture. A new work, La consistance du vide (2026), features a large slab of black marble placed atop a floating sheet of glass. Its gargantuan weight bends the pane, which threatens to shatter.
Lee Mingwei
“Lorsque la beauté paraît”
Perrotin
Through May 30
In his first exhibition with Perrotin in Paris, Taiwanese-born American artist Lee Mingwei presents seven works, created between 1995 and 2005, which question our relationship to beauty. Curator Thierry Raspail has organized the show, which includes the participatory work The Mending Project (2009–2026): The artist sits at the end of a long table and invites visitors to bring him their damaged garments, which he patches and repairs with colorful threads. Throughout the exhibition, the mended items remain laid out with fragments of threads still attached. Mingwei demonstrates that damage should not be hidden, but celebrated for its capacity to transform. Also on view is a selection of the artist’s “breath drawings,” for which he places droplets of sumi calligraphy ink on thin alabaster tablets. He meditates, then breathes on the droplets, invoking the internal and external to make the compositions.
Khalif Tahir Thompson
“Beautiful Land”
Zidoun-Bossuyt
May 29–July 18
Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Khalif Tahir Thompson is on the rise. For his second solo show with Zidoun-Bossuyt, he presents “Beautiful Land,” a suite of new compositions made with oil and acrylic paints, handmade paper, papyrus, and oil pastels. The artist’s layered portraits of Black figures (family, friends, and imagined characters) give art historical styles a contemporary update. His layered canvases take inspiration from Fauvist masters Henri Matisse and André Derain, German Expressionists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the luminous canvases of Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney. In addition to his representation with Zidoun-Bossuyt, Thompson joined Victoria Miro’s roster last month. He’ll present his first solo show in London with the gallery this fall. Thompson was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in North Carolina, and his work belongs to collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Szabolcs Bozó
“Antidote”
Semiose
May 23–June 20
Jupiter, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose
A Dog's Dream, 2026
Szabolcs Bozó
Semiose
Hungarian-born, London-based painter Szabolcs Bozó returns to Semiose for his second solo show with the gallery. He presents new works that feature his technicolor cartoon characters in states of motion. While past works have depicted an ensemble of these googly-eyed creatures against punchy, static backgrounds, the new paintings appear more frenetic, relying on Bozó’s spontaneous, brazen brushstrokes. A year after the artist began making art between shifts at a London restaurant, a Spanish gallery discovered the artist on Instagram in 2018 and offered him a residency in Mallorca, Spain. He presented his first show with Semiose in the summer of 2020, featuring raw, playful paintings that perhaps call to mind Hungarian folklore; now, thanks to the recent onset of war and unrest, the work has become more sinister. In Cold Landing (2026), an acrylic and sand depiction of a dancing elephant, the subject remains largely in focus while its chaotic environment betrays its hopeful gaze. And in Jupiter (2026), a grinning mouse takes a fighter’s stance.
