During Paris Art Week and beyond, you can catch a sweeping survey of polymath Simone Fattal, a 20th-anniversary celebration of Sofia Coppola’s Versailles confection Marie Antoinette, and the Parisian debut of the enigmatic painter Franne Davids in the span of a day. Designating these shows as purely “solo” endeavors is misleading, as collaboration is a recurring theme among them: Ibrahim Mahama shows alongside nine longtime partners, while filmmaker Alice Diop brings together dancers, poets, and musicians for her Miu Miu installation at the Palais d’Iéna. Against the backdrop of France’s biggest wave of student protests in decades over rising costs of living, poor educational infrastructure, and police violence, it’s a salient reminder of the demands of living and working alongside one another.
Below, see our editors’ picks for the 15 most exciting shows on view in Paris this season.
“High and Dry” by Katinka Bock
Where: Maison La Roche – Fondation Le Corbusier
When: Through Oct. 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: Katinka Bock’s photo and sculpture exhibition is both an ode to and an exploration of renowned architect Le Corbusier’s 1925 book Urbanisme. Bock deconstructs and enlarges mundane objects like spoons, combs, and even a radiator, freeing them from their everyday function. Both Le Corbusier and Bock wield simplicity, color, and negative space, all united by a clean formal discipline.
Know Before You Go: The show also has a deeply personal side. Alongside her sculptures, the Franco-German artist includes images from her photo series “Some of Any Fleeting,” which captures fleeting moments from her own life: a hornet resting on someone’s fist or glimpses of her children.
“The History of Tears” by Barbara Kruger
Where: Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection
When: Through January 25, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Barbara Kruger’s instantly recognizable graphic style has leapt from two dimensional collages to an immersive exhibition wrapped around the curved walls of the Bourse de Commerce’s rotunda, designed by Tadao Ando. Alongside Kruger’s signature black-and-white photomontages, visitors will find the video work Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust, exhibited for the first time since 1996.
Know Before You Go: Kruger, now 81 years old, is concurrently showing her first solo exhibition in Greece at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The show features 13 new works, including a monumental 90-meter-long wall mural on the building of the National Library of Greece.
“Cities at the Bottom of a Lake” by Simone Fattal
Where: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
When: Through Jan. 24, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Spanning more than 50 years and roughly 100 works, “Cities at the Bottom of a Lake” pays tribute to the sheer breadth and scope of the Lebanese-American artist’s career. Alongside her early landscape paintings and later ceramics, the exhibition also features nearly 30 books published by Fattal’s independent publishing house, the Post-Apollo Press.
Know Before You Go: Fattal is a true polymath. She first studied literature and archaeology at the École des Lettres in Beirut and later at the Sorbonne. She began painting landscapes in Beirut in the 1960s, but when the civil war broke out, she moved to California and founded The Post-Apollo Press. In 1988, after taking classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and the College of Marin, she started making ceramics. This is her first major museum show in Paris.
“Marie Antoinette” by Sofia Coppola
Where: Petit Trianon, Château de Versailles
When: Through Jan. 24, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Sofia Coppola’s cheekily anachronistic take on Marie Antoinette’s French coming-of-age turns 20 this year. To mark the occasion, the Château de Versailles, with the support of Cartier, has opened an exhibition that takes visitors behind the scenes of the film, with original costumes, annotated scripts, props, and on-set photographs.
Know Before You Go: The film, starring Kirsten Dunst as the queen, was filmed inside the palace and on its grounds. Coppola’s late mother, the filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, chronicled the production of Marie Antoinette in a documentary, in theaters Oct. 23 and on Mubi Nov. 6.
“Yu Nishimura: Towards a Sea”
Where: Lafayette Anticipations
When: Oct. 21, 2026 – Jan. 3, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Japanese painter Yu Nishimura takes viewers on an ethereal journey among human and animal figures, the sea, and plant life with a body of work he’s been making for the last decade. His paintings take on a dreamlike quality, leaving the viewer to wonder which scenes reflect reality and which are figments of the artist’s imagination.
Know Before You Go: This is the Japanese painter’s first institutional solo exhibition in France. Nishimura uses blurring and layering to achieve the contemplative and phantasmagoric quality that defines his work. His simple figures in urban and rural settings, evoke street photography, anime, and other pop cultural forms.
“Cœur sauvage” by Sonia Gomes
Where: Palais de Tokyo
When: Oct. 21, 2026 – Feb. 14, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: Acclaimed Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes weaves, braids, and assembles unlikely materials—such as textiles, rope, wood, and other recycled objects—into evocative forms rooted in her region’s cultural traditions. She suspends and arranges them throughout the space to tell stories that span generations.
Know Before You Go: The 77-year-old artist abandoned a long and successful career as a lawyer in middle age to pursue art. Since then, she has participated in the Venice Biennale twice, first in 2015 as part of the main international exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and later in 2024, representing the Vatican at the Holy See pavilion in 2024.
“The Harvest Season” by Ibrahim Mahama
Where: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
When: Oct. 22, 2026 – Feb. 28, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: For his first major exhibition in Paris, the renowned Ghanaian artist, alongside nine longtime collaborators, presents a constellation of new works and a few of his best-known installations, inspired by three cultural spaces founded by the artist in northern Ghana in 2019. A highlight of the show is Things Fall Apart, a monumental installation designed for the Fondation Cartier that reconstructs a former glass bottle factory that Mahama acquired from the Southwest region of Ghana and relocated to his hometown of Tamale.
Know Before You Go: Red Clay, Mahama’s sprawling red-brick studio complex in Ghana, houses hundreds of discarded objects from chipped pots to broken planes to school desks to shoeshine boxes. These form the foundation of Mahama’s installations, which respond to the uneven process of industrialization in Ghana and the destructive reverberations of mass production.
“Geste de consolation” by Alice Diop
Where: Palais d’Iéna
When: Oct. 21 – 25
Why It’s Worth a Look: Miu Miu gave acclaimed filmmaker Alice Diop carte blanche for “Geste de consolation,” an exhibition combining photography, sculpture, film, poetry, dance, and music to examine how Black women have been depicted throughout art history. At the Palais d’Iéna, you’ll work by South African artist Zanele Muholi, video installations by Diop, a living room and library furnished by artist Mary Lee Bendolph, sculpture by Simone Leigh, and dance performances by Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré’s Prophétique.
Know Before You Go: Diop’s collaborations with Miu Miu stretch back to 2025, when she directed Fragments for Venus, the 30th entry into the brand’s series of women-directed short films, Women’s Tales. From the cavernous halls of an art museum to the streets of Brooklyn, the film charts representations of Black women and beauty across art history.
“Winter Sun” by Jordan Casteel
Where: Thaddaeus Ropac
When: Through Dec. 23, 2026
Why It’s Worth a Look: True to its title, Jordan Casteel’s exhibition takes its inspiration from the warmth and light that persists through the dark frost of winter. The paintings, which make up the artist’s first exhibition in France, are a mix of portraits (strangers she meets on the street, her son), landscape (garden boxes, kitchens), and botanical works.
Know Before You Go: A 2017 CULTURED Young Artist alumna, Casteel received a prestigious artist-in-residency award from the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015-2016. Her early work drew upon the rhythms and textures of Harlem, where she lived before relocating to Hudson.
“Calder: François Premier” by Alexander Calder
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: Through Dec. 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: This exhibition is a homecoming of sorts—Alexander Calder lived and worked in Paris from 1926-1933, then Aix-en-Provence and the Loire Valley for nearly two decades, beginning in 1953. This show is the first major project dedicated to that latter, Postwar period for Calder. It features two of his most monumental and gravity-defying works: Les Granettes, 1953, on view for the first time in 72 years, and The Putney Mobile, 1954. Both works were made when Calder returned to France after living in America for 20 years.
Know Before You Go: This show follows a rapid expansion of major Calder-related projects worldwide. The Calder Gardens, an expansive cultural institution without exhibitions or even wall displays, opened in September 2025 in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, beginning April 2027, a new show focused on Calder’s relationship to performance will open at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.
“Lee Krasner: Works from the 1960s” by Lee Krasner
Where: Gagosian
When: Through Dec. 18, 2026
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lee Krasner’s name has been on the lips of nearly everyone in the art world this year thanks to the Met’s vast retrospective, “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous.” This show at Gagosian brings together paintings and works on paper for the artist’s first solo show in France. (Krasner’s husband, Jackson Pollock, meanwhile, has been the subject of countless, including a landmark 1982 retrospective the Centre Pompidou.)
Know Before You Go: This show focuses on Krasner’s work in the 1960s, a time of intense experimentation and production for the artist after Pollock’s death in 1956. Her works became more saturated and rhythmic, culminating in some of her most celebrated works including her “Umber” paintings, 1959–62, and “Primary” series.
“Franne Davids in Paris”
Where: Sebastian Gladstone
When: Through Oct. 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: What makes an outsider artist? Franne Davids remains an enigmatic figure to the public. During her lifetime her work was rejected by several major American museums and she died in 2022, virtually unknown. However, just two years later, there was a surge of interest in her colorful paintings after they were unveiled at The Art Show in New York.
Know Before You Go: Born in Connecticut, Davids attended Skidmore College for a year, but after she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in her late-’20s, she moved back in with her parents, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. In the ensuing 40 years, she would iterate on the same subject matter and themes—women, often in isolation, even when in groups.
“What the water kept: Ce que l’eau a gardé” by Deborah Roberts
Where: Salon 94
When: Through Nov. 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: In Deborah Roberts’s new exhibition, the Atlantic Ocean is a site of theft and agony, recalling the Black figures carried across it on the Middle Passage, as well as a place of continuation, where generations survived and thrived despite the horrors they endured. Five mixed-media paintings and two collages depicting young girls standing next to vast expanses of blue water conjure the duality of the ocean.
Know Before You Go: The exhibition inaugurates Salon 94’s new gallery across the way from the Jardin du Palais-Royal. The permanent spaces comes after several years of pop ups that the gallery has mounted across Paris, including two solo exhibitions, staged in collaboration with Devals gallery, for Kennedy Yanko in 2023 and Marina Adams in 2024. Last year, Salon 94 mounted a group show at 30 Galerie de Montpensier.
“Philippe Parreno“
Where: Esther Schipper
When: Oct. 20 – Nov. 21
Why It’s Worth a Look: Light takes center stage in Philippe Parreno’s latest solo exhibition. The multi-hyphenate artist and filmmaker transforms the gallery into a domestic interior where two motorized blinds slide across the windows, and the shifting light activates Chronochromes, 2026, a wallpaper that glows and dims as light conditions change. Flickering lamps and a bas-relief pulsing with light complete the scene’s strange choreography.
Know Before You Go: Parreno’s filmmaking is wide-ranging in tone, style, and subject. It includes everything from Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, 2006, a feature-length study of the French football star he co-directed with Douglas Gordon, to June 8, 1968, 2009, a somber short that follows Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train.
“Waiting as Time Shifts” by Daisuke Fukunaga
Where: Crèvecœur
When: Through Nov. 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: Daisuke Fukunaga is preoccupied with the rhythms of everyday life. His paintings center on labor, and especially on the moments of rest that interrupt it: workers asleep with their helmet lamps still switched on, for instance. His first solo exhibition with Crèvecoeur recalls the sense of respite and peace that can be found in these quiet pauses.
Know Before You Go: The Japanese painter works primarily from memory and sketches, favoring large-scale canvases and using their size to evoke depth and a sense of theatricality.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
In London for Frieze? Here Are 12 Must-See Museum Shows Outside the Fair
How Many Men Does It Take to Get a Man to Pick Up a Book?
Four Art Critics Walk Into a Bar… and Debate the Met’s Pollock-Krasner Retrospective
The Best New York Restaurants for Every Conceivable Scenario
How Jonathan Van Meter Convinced Kim Kardashian to Participate in Her First Authorized Biography
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
