In six short years, Ketabi Bourdet has grown from a nomadic gallery into one of Paris’s most ambitious young spaces.
It has outgrown its home in upscale Saint-Germain-des-Près, is expanding into a second space in a new cultural hub in Pantin, France, shows at major art fairs globally, and was the instigator of Maze Design Basel, which has immediately become Basel’s most prestigious design fair.
The gallery began in 2020 as Ketabi Projects, run by Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard, who had just left her post as sales director at French stalwart Galerie Nathalie Obadia. Her first move was an exhibition for painter Inès Longevial at the Grands Serres de Pantin—a former factory being converted into a multiuse space—which drew 10,000 people over two weeks.
After her second show, for French artist Idir Davaine in mid-2021, Ketabi-Lebard gave birth to her second child. Unable to work from home with a newborn and a toddler, she took up a desk at the recently opened gallery of her friend Paul Bourdet, who had left his job as a sales director at Laffanour | Galerie Downtown at the start of COVID to go solo and deal in 1980s French design.
“When you work next to somebody,” Ketabi-Lebard said, “you start talking about who your clients are, the way you work, the art you sell.” We clicked in some way, and we were bringing a new perspective to what the other was doing. She found her own space—22 Passage Dauphine, located in the courtyard tucked away in a passageway in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près—in the summer of 2021, and Bourdet was with her “every step of the way,” she said: attending meetings, overseeing the conversion of what had been medical school classrooms. When the gallery opened four months later, they had already decided to merge.
The original pitch was simple: “championing young artists on one side and defending historic 1980s designers on the other,” Ketabi-Lebard said.
La vie dans les plis, 2024
Audrey Guttman
Ketabi Bourdet
Cakewalk, 2024
Jo Fish
Ketabi Bourdet
At launch, this included Longevial and Davaine, alongside artists Audrey Guttman and Julien Saudubray, and primarily works by Philippe Starck on the design side. The roster has since expanded to include emerging artists Jo Fish and Arthur Lemonier, as well as mid-career artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard, and the estates of Guy de Rougemont and Robert Wilson, whose first show since his death in 2025 is currently on view at the gallery.
“We ended up realizing that we had found this kind of line where we really liked to champion these artists who weren’t really appreciated the way they should have been.”
A gallery showing both art and design was unheard of in Paris at the time. “Everybody told us we were insane,” Ketabi-Lebard said of the French art establishment.
But the model has shaped which artists they take on: de Rougemont, for example, was celebrated in France as a designer, but was also an académicien, meaning he was recognized both by the state and his peers as a painter of renown. Yet only a relatively small public audience realized he was also a serious painter. “I think the world is evolving and you can’t really put artists in boxes anymore like you used to,” Ketabi-Lebard said.
This work has paid off, opening doors that stay shut for a lot of young galleries. In 2024, Ketabi Bourdet began showing at TEFAF Maastricht, where most other dealers are older and more established. The gallery will also debut at Frieze Masters this year in London, in similarly rarefied air to TEFAF. “I think the difference between us and all these young galleries that started at the same time as we did is that, now, because we sell this historic work, we have access to these incredible fairs,” Ketabi-Lebard said.
That access, combined with characteristic opportunism, led to the idea that has become Maze Design Basel. Last year, the design fair Design Miami decided to cancel its Basel edition, which typically takes place during Art Basel week.
Seeing as it was too late to apply to another fair, Ketabi-Lebard decided to show in Basel anyway. She dreamed, literally, of the church where Perrotin gallery held its annual party, woke up, and called to ask the price. She booked it without consulting another gallery. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just make it work,’” Ketabi-Lebard said. She then rang the major Parisian design dealers—several of whom had stopped showing at Design Miami Basel over cost—and assembled a fair.
After a successful first edition, Maze Design Basel is expanding with a tent in front of the church this year, adding almost 10 galleries to a lineup that includes Jousse Enterprise, Galerie kreo, and Salon 94.
The sky caves in, 2025
Mie Olise Kjærgaard
Ketabi Bourdet
Untitled, 2024
Arthur Lemonier
Ketabi Bourdet
This entrepreneurial instinct is also behind the expansion in Pantin, a suburb just northeast of the Paris boundary. The Grands Serres de Pantin, near where it mounted its first show, is becoming a new development that will include office space, restaurants, and a concert hall, opens in October and has invited the gallery to curate and show in its dedicated art space.
For the gallery, this has come at an opportune time. Rising running costs make it harder to sell works at entry-level prices, and the new space, with a show every two to three months, gives Ketabi Bourdet room to platform its emerging artists to a different audience. “By doing a show in Pantin, we know for sure that the collectors who will come are the young collectors,” Ketabi-Lebard said. Many of them, she noted, already live nearby, having been drawn to the neighborhood over the past decade. “Now we have a second space that will be like a young Ketabi Bourdet,” Ketabi-Lebard said. “It’ll be fun.” Such is how a small gallery grows up.
