Paris, in the most colloquial terms, has really been that girl lately, having spent the past year in the international spotlight. In addition to hosting the Summer Olympics, the city reprised its starring role in one of the most popular Netflix series of all time, all while Paris’s post-Brexit ascent as a major European commercial hub has injected a renewed energy into the city’s creative classes. Across the worlds of fashion, gastronomy, commerce, and not least of all, contemporary art, according to Art Basel’s Clément Delépine, “There is a sense that creativity and engagement with culture are thriving like never before.”
This week, Delépine takes his own place in the international spotlight as the director of the inaugural Art Basel Paris, the highly anticipated French edition of the venerated art fair. From October 18 through 20, the fair’s debut presents 195 exhibitors under the iconic Grand Palais’s newly renovated glass dome. There is genuine cause for excitement: “The energy in Paris is quite invigorating,” Delépine adds, describing what some have called the city’s contemporary renaissance. With all eyes in the art world on the French capital, below is a (too-brief) list of what W is looking forward to this week as we head to Art Basel Paris.
Art Basel Paris Public Programming
Extending beyond the Grand Palais’s walls, Art Basel Paris engages the city’s urban fabric, activating some of most frequented sites—the Petit Palais and Place Vendôme among them—alongside a few deep cuts and less-touristed gems. At the Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, for example, the artist Ali Cherri presents Triumph of the Limp (2022), a show of sculptures that examines the colonial subtext of European museums. Other highlights include a project by Jean-Charles de Quillacq at the 17th-century Beaux-Arts de Paris-Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, and at Place Vendôme, a new monumental Carsten Höller sculpture intriguingly titled Giant Triple Mushroom (2024).
James Turrell at Gagosian Le Bourget
James Turrell, Key Lime, 1994.
Since the 1960s, living legend James Turrell has performed a kind of sorcery, creating art that bends light into sculpture, or transforms ordinary architecture into an infinite void. You can experience both at Gagosian’s Le Bourget location, located just an hour from the center of Paris, where the gallery presents two brand-new immersive installations that will disorient, confound, and delight. As a bonus for Turrell fans, Almine Rech will also have a show of his wall-mounted works in Paris proper, alongside Passageways, an introductory film on his practice.
Tina Barney, “Family Ties” at Jeu de Paume
Tina Barney, The Daughters, 2002.
The domestic scenes Tina Barney portrays in her family portraits resonate with the simmering tensions of the American upper-class home. The magic behind these blisteringly realistic family portraits is that they’re not actually real—just miraculous bits of stagecraft and world-building on the artist’s part. At Jeu de Paume, Paris’s premiere institution for photography, “Family Ties” presents a 40-year retrospective of the artist’s work, much of which is being shown in Europe for the first time.
Martine Syms, “Total,” at Lafayette Anticipations
Martine Syms, Meditation, 2021.
Martine Syms’s creativity knows no bounds, satirizing intersecting themes of Black femininity and popular culture across video, graphic design, collage, and more. “Total,” her takeover of Lafayette Anticipations, is meta to say the least, recreating physical elements of her L.A. studio as both a film set and retail space. It’s a meditation on the performative consumption of social media and various other existential questions, among them: “What if we were all actors in a film in perpetual production?”
“Surréalisme” at the Centre Pompidou
René Magritte, Les valeurs personnelles, 1957.
Spanning more than 500 works, this sprawling, maze-like exhibition is an in-depth look at the beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy of Surrealism, a movement that was officially coined by poet André Breton in 1924 but resonated with artists well before and after. Alongside paintings by Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, and other iconic Surrealists, the show also includes the uncanny works of Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, and Lewis Carroll, emphasizing Surrealism as more than a genre of painting, but a philosophy committed to the fantastical, illogical creations of the subconscious mind.
“Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &…” at Fondation Louis Vuitton
Frank Bowling, Cover Girl, 1966.
The museum, a Frank Gehry-designed building of unexpected literal twists and turns, is worth seeing for the architecture alone. Also on view is an expansive exhibition on the past and future of Pop Art, with the late Tom Wesselman’s merging of art historical traditions with pop cultural iconography as its central focus. More than 175 of his paintings, sculpture, and installations appear alongside the work of his predecessors and peers, as well new commissions by the Pop artists of our time, Derrick Adams and Mickalene Thomas among them.
Olga de Amaral at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain
Looking back to more than five decades of work, the Cartier Foundation presents nearly 80 pieces by Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral. Since the 1960s, her experiments in various natural materials combined with an array of paints and metallic elements produced textiles that took on the elements of sculpture. Some are light and diaphanous, like her Brumas series, while others are solid and weighty, like her Estelas.
