Just before the Parisians decamp to the countryside for summer, the city’s gallery scene springs to life. This year, Paris Gallery Weekend falls on May 23rd through 25th and brings together 74 galleries across the capital for vernissages, performances, exhibition walkthroughs, and artist talks. Now in its second decade, the initiative was founded to spotlight the richness of Paris’s contemporary art landscape. Offering a counterpoint to the growing dominance of the art fair circuit, the weekend has become a fixture on the city’s cultural calendar.
“Paris’s art scene has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years, and continues to flourish as new contemporary galleries, museums, artists, collectives, and art fairs establish themselves here, and the city reclaims its historic place as the capital of the fine arts,” explained Alexandra Weinress, founder of the Seen Paris, which offers bespoke art tours of galleries and other cultural spaces across the city.
As Weinress notes, many of this year’s exhibitions lean heavily on figurative painting and craft, including a notable emphasis on textile-based work. Solo presentations are also predominating over group shows. Meanwhile, beyond the galleries, there are major institutional exhibitions to be seen. The sweeping David Hockney retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the expansive group show “Corps et âmes” at the Bourse de Commerce are not to be missed. At the Musée Carnavalet, a new Agnès Varda exhibition links her photographic practice with the influence of her Montparnasse atelier.
Here are our picks of the gallery shows to see during Paris Gallery Weekend 2025.
Through May 24
When French conceptual artist, photographer, and video artist Sophie Calle staged her exhibition “À toi de faire ma mignonne” across the entirety of the Picasso Museum in Paris in 2023, she excavated all her half-finished work. All those lingering incomplete projects, hidden away in drawers, were displayed: a bold act of finishing the unfinished. Titled Catalogue raisonné de l’inachevé (2023), the project was staged across the museum’s fourth floor, though the artist felt it didn’t receive its due at the time. Thus, the artist presents it again here—another project made whole by way of a revisit, where errors and failures are celebrated as they are made complete. While many of Calle’s pieces are conceptual—not bound to a physical object—traces of them, in photographs, newspapers, and letters, hang politely on the wall in frames.
Calle’s unfinished potential projects include: saying yes to everything for one month, collaging herself into racy illustrated covers of a Mexican magazine bearing her surname, or wearing camera glasses to record her every passing thought at the request of Wim Wenders. Relics of these projects are hung like the work of a detective in chronological order, where each partial work is accompanied by framed fragments of text indicating why they never came to fruition.
Over the years, Calle was plagued by the thought of what would happen to her unfinished projects, which, without a roadmap from the artist, would be seen as failures in the hands of those who would find them. Some, she decided, are bad ideas; others too time-consuming; others no good for reasons beyond her control, like censorship or death. The declarations of the abandonments are stamped in capitalized red text like case files in a film noir. In staging this show, Calle comes face-to-face with these abandoned projects, and celebrates their transformation into their final forms.
May 17–June 21
This is the first solo show in France for Turner Prize–winning multidisciplinary British artist Tai Shani. Her work, from installations awash in pink tones to illuminated sculptures of glass breasts, questions the arbitrary nature of the gendered and hierarchical structures upon which society is built. As part of Paris Gallery Weekend, curator Camille Bréchiagnac was given a carte blanche to program the Project Room at tastemaking Parisian gallery Suzanne Tarasieve, and selected Shani’s work for its strong use of fiction as a method for reimagining our social and political structures.
On view are grotesque, kitschy, surrealistic sculptures and paintings, accompanied by sound. The human body is central to Shani’s work: She aims to evoke sensory engagement. She also pushes the female form beyond expectations, creating figures that do not adhere to traditional gender norms and, instead, lean heavily on an otherworldly aesthetic.
Through July 19
Centered around metamorphosis, this new body of work by French textile artist Jeanne Vicerial is the result of two years of exploration. A rapidly ascending talent (and one to watch), Vicerial is best known for her “presences,” sinewy sculptural forms made of thick, black woven thread. In “Nymphose,” she takes this series further, with new sculptures whose silhouettes are an ode to chrysalises, and the extreme vulnerability and biological restructuring that takes place within them.
The works, in part, pay homage to French painter, printmaker, and sculptor Pierre Soulages and his signature “Outrenoir” technique, which uses black as a color, a surface, and a way of manipulating light. Vicerial has long been influenced by Soulages’s work, investigating the way that the repetition of black crocheted forms that cascade towards the floor, woven with repetitive gestures, could awaken the material anew. These corporeal beings suggest whispers of a human form within, though they’re abstracted enough to raise questions as to whether it might be a man or woman, a human or a spirit, contained by the structure.
Through June 21
Each person, 2025
Pieter Jennes
Semiose
“Untitled”, 2025
Pieter Jennes
Semiose
For his first-ever exhibition in France, Flemish artist Pieter Jennes brings his playfully unsettling paintings to Semiose for “Le Bouquet manquant,” which lifts its name from the central work in the show. The painting depicts a boy in the middle of collecting flowers, presumably for a romantic interest, distracted by the sight of a butterfly: Expectations and the best of intentions have fallen short, for reasons unknown.
Jennes’s work combines oil painting, crayon, and collage laced with metal staples to create narratives that poignantly trace the arc of romantic love—from the first blushes of romance to emotional unraveling. These paintings play with dizzying scale to incorporate leaves, apples, insects, mushrooms, and tiny trees. His subjects may be human, animal, or plant and often feel juxtaposed with their surroundings, as if on a theatrical set. Jennes’s technique has long been influenced by medieval Islamic miniatures and their flat perspectives, which give the subjects an orchestrated feel.
May 23–July 26
Glasgow-based sculptor, photographer, and installation artist Martin Boyce presents a new body of work that meditates on the passage of time and themes of aging and decay. A cornerstone of Boyce’s practice is the deconstruction and reimagining of iconic works of design, through which he investigates the blurred lines between public and private space. Among the new works presented in this show is a large-scale chandelier composed of 90 hand-blown pink segments. Both the chandelier and the pink glass elements are long-standing recurring motifs in Boyce’s artistic vocabulary. This luxury lighting rig hangs from a spider-like structure of black galvanized steel inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s famous Bottle Rack (1914).
Elsewhere in the show, Boyce presents a series of photographs of the door handles found in the artist’s home in Glasgow. These images of modern-day knobs are hung on either side of a door in the gallery that is dated to 1908. They contribute to the show’s broader themes of rendering the familiar, the everyday, into something unsettling.
Through May 31
Cuban American artist Rafael Domenech’s work is part sculpture, part architectural intervention, and part sharp critique of the contemporary exhibition model for viewing and experiencing art. At 193 Gallery, as part of Gallery Weekend Paris, Domenech has constructed wooden partitions, like folding screens, in his own configuration to circumvent the existing interior, which he views as part of “an active machine for production rather than a repository space.” Ultimately, it’s an attempt to physically reorient the gallery space, opening up other possibilities: Visitors can access the viewing space from different entrances and vantage points.
His mixed-media sculptures made of publishing materials—or “book paintings,” as he calls them—are affixed to wooden walls erected within the exhibition, which was curated by Jérôme Sans. These paintings are interactive, inviting viewers to partake in the process of folding and unfolding, just like perusing the pages of a published book. The partitions are also adorned with oversized, electric-colored graphic sculptures made of commercial vinyl, plywood, and inkjet prints on paper.
Through May 28
In her practice, Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova salvages materials like timber, concrete, and brick from the warzone rubble of her homeland. Since the outbreak of the war in 2022, the artist has chosen to remain in her home country to focus on making site-specific works that recount the terror and testimonies of her fellow Ukrainians. Accordingly, the show’s title, “Strategic Locations,” refers to the conflict zones, occupied territories, and shifting front lines of warfare.
The sculptures presented in this exhibition trace the military occupation in Ukraine, dating back to the 2014 annexation of Crimea through to today. In HOME (2014), a monumental sculpture that confronts viewers at the entrance to the show, a map of a fractured Ukraine is rendered in black-painted bricks. This is surrounded by fragments of building blocks, scattered haphazardly as if blasted by war, symbolizing the collapse of notions of “home.”
Sculptures of fragmented bricks symbolize the collapse of notions of “home,” while seashells, often collected by young children at the seaside, are placed as peepholes on fences that evoke separation and fear. These works illuminate the strength of the human spirit and the power of resistance in the shadows of Russian invasion, and bear unflinchingly honest witness to the fractured life of Ukrainian citizens under occupation.
May 22–June 25
Brazilian painter Paula Siebra’s paintings evoke a certain uncanniness, where one might suddenly slip into a dream. Her poignant still life scenes, rendered in warm, gauzy ochre hues, include carnival masks left atop overflowing dressers, or revolvers laying near a pair of black gloves and a single rose. It’s the mystery of detective fiction and ‘whodunits’ that Siebra, who was featured in the Artsy Vanguard 2023–24, equates to the act of painting. She hopes, in her work, to crystalize the grooves and contours of the world through investigation. The exhibition features a selection of these scenes in addition to a series of landscapes made with careful, painted precision and near-dry brushes. Her poetic, stylized figurative works draw inspiration from Brazilian artist Vincente do Rego Monteiro and Italian painter Antonio Donghi, as evidenced in Siebra’s lyrical, quietly still forms that seem perhaps frozen in time.
May 21– July 19
A legendary pioneer of the California Light and Space movement and a pivotal American artist, Robert Irwin recently passed away at the age of 95. This self-titled show that unfolds across White Cube’s Avenue Matignon space marks the final chapter of the artist’s career, as it is the final show he conceived of before his death. On view are a selection of Irwin’s sculptural and wall-based fluorescent works that were produced within the last decade, including #3 x 6′ D Four Fold (2016), with its vertically mounted light tubes in glowing shades of cool white and deep green. This work’s interplay of shadows give it a striking silhouette.
Also included are his freestanding columns of smooth acrylic polymer, where grey slates of the material are encompassed by transparent, cherry-red rectangular forms. With no electrical light source, the works are illuminated by the surrounding daylight, their transparency subtly shifting as the viewer moves around them. With these elegant, prismatic forms, made just years before his death, Irwin revisited his earlier experiments with acrylic polymer, this time using angled materials to allow for further interplay with light.
