10 Must-See Shows at Paris Gallery Weekend 2023
Sherrie Levine, Rectangle Paintings 1–12, 2023. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
Paris in spring is an art lover’s paradise, making this year’s Paris Gallery Weekend, which runs from May 26th to 28th, the proverbial cherry on top of the cake. The annual art extravaganza, spread across several neighborhoods of the French capital, brings together a vibrant tapestry of contemporary art and culture, with shows opening across 101 galleries.
As one of the most anticipated events on the global art calendar, this year’s edition promises to captivate art enthusiasts and collectors alike with a strong showing of non-Western artists who negotiate the increasingly narrow East-West divide through their use of photography and textile. From prestigious galleries to unconventional art spaces, the city’s galleries become a playground for artistic expression, showcasing a diverse range of mediums and styles.
Here, we round up the 10 standout shows of this year’s Paris Gallery Weekend.
“Grisaille Vertigo”
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
May 14–July 1
Ecole italienne, Nature morte d’objets scientifiques, 17th century. Photo by François Doury. Courtesy of Galerie Jocelyn Wolff.
Miriam Cahn, grisaille 11.6.07, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff.
Who would have thought that an exhibition about grayscale could be so full of color? “Grisaille Vertigo,” curated by one of France’s most talented and versatile art historians, François-René Martin, brings together approximately 40 works of art spanning the 16th to the 21st centuries. Works by the likes of Jan van Scorel (Two figures in grisaille, 16th century), Miriam Cahn (grisaille 11.6.07, 2007), and Achim Reichert (Grisaille Vertigo, 2023) all have one thing in common: the innovative use of the color gray.
More precisely, grisaille refers to a technique developed during the Renaissance in close connection to the Catholic holiday Lent, during which painters would give up using color. It soon grew into a painterly practice quite literally on the margins of the medium, consigned to the exterior panels of altarpieces where the monochrome shades created the illusion of sculpted relief. “Grisaille Vertigo” shows how the practice continued unabated throughout the 19th century, growing into a sort of test of a painter’s illusionistic abilities. What really makes “Grisaille Vertigo” interesting, however, is the conceptual bridge that the exhibition makes to 20th-century image-making techniques like photography and to 21st-century contemporary art.
Karyn Lyons, Madonna of the Rocks, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Stems Gallery.
Karyn Lyons, The Evening of the Day, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Stems Gallery.
Karyn Lyons presents 12 paintings in various sizes. They all depict a young woman, alone in an interior or in the embrace of her lover. In one, the two passionately make love in a grassy, floral field. The image is tender rather than titillating. In another, the couple embrace passionately against a backdrop of Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks(1491–99 and 1506–09). Once again, this substitution is tender and surreal rather than transgressive. The work displays the uncanny stillness of Magritte, combined with the rugged fracture of Manet. The young female protagonist, when she is not in the embrace of her lover, seems introspective, as if cultivating the capacious silence of the interiors that she occupies.
Sherrie Levine, Repetition and Difference, 2002. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.
A key member of the Pictures Generation in late 1970s and early ’80s New York, Sherrie Levine is known for pioneering work that challenged the creation of mass-produced imagery. Now, more than 30 years since her last show in Paris, Levine presents new and recent paintings, photographs, and sculpture. Her fifth solo exhibition with David Zwirner, the show continues Levine’s explorations into ideas of originality and agency, as well as the art historical canon.
Levine’s sculpture Repetition and Difference (2002) consists of a pair of gnomes, one a dwarf from Disney’s Snow White, the other of the more common garden-store variety. It is her most interesting work on display, not because of craftsmanship (after all, these are found objects) but rather in the way that it embodies Levine’s impressive ability to make objects speak to each other, creating dialogues across time, space, and culture.
For his first solo exhibition with Galerie Droste, André Wendland, a young German graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, presents several paintings of sports figures in a bright, bold, and colorful aesthetic influenced by cartoons and popular culture.
There is something delightfully whimsical about the goofy figures, like the female protagonist of Pumping Pippi (2023) with her red braids, which droop along with her nose and breasts to the floor, where she has bent over to deadlift a thin, teal barbell; or the male protagonist in Dirty Dog (2023) who smokes a cigarette as he performs a glute bridge exercise. The artist uses washes of oil paint to give the radioactive colors and the simplified geometry of the works a colored-marker-like texture, accentuating their playful nature.
Thomas Andréa Barbey, Forêt tropicale, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Françoise Livinec.
The thick foliage of a rainforest stands out against a deep and dark blue sky. It is dusk in Vietnam. Thomas Andréa Barbey’s fascination with the country began in 2019, when he was awarded a public commission for the decoration of Lycée Alexandre Yersin in Hanoi.
Inspired by nature, landscapes, and waterways, as well as by the local tradition of Vietnamese lacquer painting, his works for “Retour d’Hô Chi Minh” are dark, sober, monochrome saturations in deep red, blue, and green. They present bodies of water and vegetation as if they were being viewed through the granular fluting of an old cathode-ray television set. They have a haunting, spectral presence, which, combined with the exhibition title (“The Return of Ho Chi Minh”), suggests the terror the invisible resistance fighters were able to inspire in the hearts of their French and American oppressors.
Jagdeep Raina, Inderjeet, stay with her, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Anne Barrault.
Jagdeep Raina, Traces of soft east London, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Anne Barrault.
In his debut solo exhibition in France, Canadian artist Jagdeep Raina showcases his fascination with diverse textile techniques including Punjabi embroidery, or phulkari. Through his remarkable skill of painting images with colored threads, Raina aims to preserve endangered ancestral crafts, challenge gender stereotypes in textile art, and confront France’s colonial and orientalist history—a rare endeavor in French institutions.
The Kashmir shawl, a recurring garment, symbolizes the opulence of 19th-century French elites after Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt. Featuring predominantly women, Raina’s textiles blur the boundaries between painting and fashion, as seen in Adorned in her Mango shaped choga (2023) and Kashmiri Birds (2020), which, despite woven threads, exude a painterly enchantment.
Nathalie Elemento, “Inconsolable”
Galerie Maubert
May 27–Aug. 31
Nathalie Elemento, Et puis s’en vont, from the series “Consolations,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Maubert.
In the beautiful crypt-like space of Galerie Maubert, Nathalie Elemento showcases a series of sculptures evocative of collapsed cardboard boxes and furniture. Some are made of paper and wood, while others use metal and resin. These pieces evoke both domestic and psychological interiors. The collapsed cardboards resemble Lygia Clark’s “Bichos” sculptures from the 1960s, encouraging viewer manipulation.
Elemento’s sculptures cannot be touched, but they interact with surfaces, like in Gilbert (state of sleep) (2022). Her furniture pieces, like Inconsolable, Consolations (2023), echo the work of Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. Elemento cuts and splices tables, incorporating mirrors for an enchanting and illusionistic effect, joyfully contrasting with Salcedo’s more macabre style.
Eric Manigaud, Prisonniers regardant le drapeau étoilé à N. A., Gustin, 1902, 2021. Photo by Lise Traino. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Sator.
If beauty is your thing, this might not be the exhibition for you. Eric Manigaud presents 12 drawings based on archival photographs and postcards from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. The collection ranges from innocent nature shots to graphic images exposing the brutal aspects of Belgian colonialism in the Congo under King Leopold II.
Colonial soldiers forced villagers into slave labor, collecting severed hands to justify every bullet fired. These photographs became tools for anticolonial groups, exposing the brutality and marshaling public opinion against the king. Even in their execution, these images are rough and hard to look at. Manigaud’s graphite drawings faithfully replicate the images, including notes and numbers. Drawing from a source image implies close looking, as well as penance, given the images’ difficult subject matter. They do, however, undeniably have a power, illustrating the exploitation that operates behind the scenes of the consumer products of bourgeois life.
Seydou Keïta, Untitled (00260), 1948–54. Courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
The exhibition of Seydou Keïta at Galerie Nathalie Obadia is a mesmerizing celebration of the iconic Malian photographer’s work. Keïta’s captivating black-and-white portraits beautifully capture the essence of West African culture and identity during the mid-20th century. His masterful use of light and composition effortlessly brings out the personality and humanity of his subjects, showcasing their style, elegance, and inner strength.
The gallery’s presentation is impeccable, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in Keïta’s world. With each photograph, the exhibition offers a glimpse into a bygone era, while simultaneously reminding us of the timeless beauty and resilience of the people it portrays. One fine example is an untitled work numbered 06878 (1952–55), depicting a young woman who stares fearlessly into the camera, her arms folded under her chin. There is something uncanny about the way that she stares directly at the viewer, with her frank and honest gaze. It is perhaps the photograph which best illustrates Keïta’s special ability to capture his sitter’s natural essence.
Charles Fréger’s interest in human expression through costume has taken him all around the world. The series “Wilder Mann” (2010–present) is a traversé across Europe. “Yokainoshima” (2013–15) and “Cimarron” (2014–18) are analogous explorations of traditional folk and ritual costume in Japan and South America, respectively. For his most recent exhibition, “Aam Aastha,” Fréger turns his camera to the traditional folk costume of India in a series of the same name, made between 2019 and 2022.
The images are brightly colored and surreal. They depict different individuals dressed as Hindu divinities for various festival and ritual dances, like in Hanuma, Kulasai Dussehra or Krishna (both 2019–22). There is a structuring tension at the heart of these photographs: Do they exoticize and mystify their subjects with a colonial gaze or is there a sincere desire to study, know, and appreciate the diversity and richness of another culture so as to better protect and conserve this cultural heritage? Undoubtedly, there is a little of both impulses; however, the seductive visual impact of these images speak for themselves.
