9 Must-See Shows at Paris Gallery Weekend
Interior view of Marion Verboom’s studio, 2024. © Nicolas Brasseur. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
Paris may be teeming with Olympics fanfare—as the games loom in late July and the city hurriedly scrambles to accommodate them—but the capital’s Gallery Weekend is a blissful reprieve from all that nervous anticipation. Taking place between May 24th and 26th, the event marks its 10th anniversary this year and encompasses 93 art galleries, featuring 250 artists and 90 solo shows.
Complementary events include talks along with thematic and geographical routes (Marais, Belleville-to-Romainville, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and Matignon) that thread through various corners of the Île-de-France. Gallery hoppers can expect to see, among other things, “Distant Cities,” a solo by Kelly Beeman (who’s been seeing major auction appeal recently) at Perrotin Matignon, and Ekene Stanley Emecheta’s debut at 193 Gallery.
Here, we pick the nine most notable shows from this year’s Paris Gallery Weekend.
Hernan Bas, The last museum guard at the last museum on Earth, 2024. Photo by Silvia Ros.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Hernan Bas, The last screening, 2024
Photo by Silvia Ros. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Miami-based artist Hernan Bas is inspired by decadent late 19th-century art and the enigmatic sensuality of the androgynous dandy. His cast of beautifully boyish characters inhabit paintings and works on paper, many of which center around the lightly devious act of carving one’s name into surfaces: on a school desk in pencil in Making poor marks (2024), into cacti in The tourist tree (presence-identifying) (2024), or inscribed in public space on the ceiling of a bar in Leaving his mark (The Eagle Pub, Cambridge UK) (2024). These graffiti-lite moments are interspersed with young men casually sipping absinthe, watching movie screenings with 3D glasses on, or riskily partaking in a knife-throwing act.
The artist refers to the universe depicted in his paintings as “fag limbo,” a queer intermediary space that is partly plausible and partly fantasy. Bas’s works are very much his own, but in one prominent painting visible right as one enters the gallery, he goes beyond his own world to depict Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in the large painting The Last Museum Guard at the Last Museum on Earth (2024).
Barcelona-based artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s works address both the beauty of nature and human intervention. “La pensée férale” includes living materials like delicate, found branches bisected down the middle and leaves—but show evidence of the artist’s hand, blurring the line between organic and aesthetic.
Elsewhere in the show, an unnervingly real-seeming eyeball is set within several scallops of wood—and this peering oculus follows the visitor uneasily up the stairs of the elegant hôtel particulier. Upstairs, a series of small-scale holographic works create trippy tableaux in which leaves take on sudden hallucinatory qualities. In the last room, a new video work shows an image of an eye sunken underwater as tadpoles scuttle over it, accompanied by a soundtrack by cellist Franziska Aigner.
A second solo exhibition by the artist is taking place in Paris concurrently, with the same title, at Esther Schipper, showcasing a series of seven photographs taken at the Tijuca National Park (a rainforest in Rio de Janeiro) and elegantly suspended branches.
Carlos Cruz-Diez (who died in 2019) wondered, in a text from 2011: “How am I going to get people involved in projects where the human form is not represented?” The French Venezuelan artist’s solution was to create a chromatic perceptual thrill in his body of work, based upon three conditions of “color behavior”: subtractive, additive, and reflective. Optical-kinetic art developed in the mid-1950s and combined the ambitions of optical art (or Op Art) to excite the retina, and kinetic art’s passion for movement.
Cruz-Diez’s research focused on color. In the late 1950s, he designed pieces intended to exalt the phenomenon of color itself, generating unstable perceptual situations in which changing the viewing angles alters the light intensity and gives rise to multiple optical mixtures of colors. Here, Induction Chromatique à double fréquence (2018), on the long wall of the corridor, is one of the more monumental works: The chromatic changes unfurl as one walks past it. A retrospective of Cruz-Diez’s practice, consisting of around 30 works and entitled “El color en movimiento,” is on view at the Centre Pompidou Málaga currently through September.
This exhibition features two Dutch artists: Katinka Lampe, showing for the seventh time at the gallery, and her guest, emerging artist Janine van Oene. While the former’s work is figurative and the latter’s is abstract, their palettes are decorously resonant. Working from photos of models posing according to her instructions, Lampe creates a depiction of femininity that is delicate without ever feeling flimsy: There are portraits of pastel-pink-haired girls with dark purple lips, women with their heads thrown back in poses of release, feminine figures featuring the gleam and sparkle of ornamental accessories. By contrast, Janine van Oene’s work is gestural, with winding thick lines like lush wavy strands of hair, lively and vibrant: at times evoking whirlwinds, at others fanciful flora.
Paul Aïzpiri’s painting practice straddles Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, and this exhibition highlights a range of works from the 1950s to his most recent creations, before his death in 2016. Aïzpiri was the son of a Basque sculptor, and himself studied at Ecole Boulle in Paris. His post-war paintings were in dark colors and thick blacks. He became a notable figure of the École de Paris and Montparnasse, mixing with Tsuguharu Foujita, Chaïm Soutine, Kees van Dongen, and Maurice Utrillo; he also represented France at the 1951 Venice Biennale. Picasso personally advised Aïzpiri on his approach, suggesting he simplify his forms and invigorate his palette. His canvases here highlight jaunty and bright subjects from a bouquet in a blue-and-white vase (La Tulipe Jaune, year unknown) to portraits of a mother and child against a vivid blue background (Maïa, 2006).
Marion Verboom’s hybrid sculptures bring together diverse materials to create fresh forms. She was previously selected for the LVMH Métiers d’Art residency for her intrepid use of acetate, which she liquified and molded into silicone containers. For her first exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co., she is presenting four works from “Achronies” (or “Anachronisms”). In this ongoing series, she stacks varied shapes, colors, and materials that rise up in columns and are meant to evoke “cores,” cylindrical soil samples of the Earth’s strata. Here, the archeological-style totems, cropped and remixed, are crafted out of resin, concrete, jesmonite, brass powder, and aluminum. These stand in contrast with her new small-scale pieces that reference traditional depictions of the Madonna—such as Madone 6 (2024), a multihued seated figure in glazed ceramic crystal—and also nod to the work of Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol.
Marcel Bascoulard, Pose 4, 13 sept 72, 1972. Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard.
Marcel Bascoulard, who died in 1978, was a self-taught artist, photographer, and poet from Bourges, France, whose strangeness banished him to the fringes of society as a vagrant. His backstory is the stuff of seamy TV thrillers: His mother killed his father, and he himself was found murdered in a field.
Bascoulard’s small photographic prints, singed at the sides, are full-length self-portraits that directly address the camera. Bascoulard flouted norms, setting a precedent for gender-bending queer work like that of Pierre Molinier: Bascoulard staged himself wearing long dresses that he himself designed and had made by seamstresses. While he lived on the margins in mid-20th-century France, it seems fitting to see his work in the Marais today, where his outfits would have been embraced.
In this group show, four American photographers document the quotidian lives of those closest to them. Series by Peggy Levison Nolan, Shelby Lee Adams, Meryl Meisler, and Marianna Rothen bring together tableaux of kinship. The scenes depicted are a varied bunch: seven children living in social housing in Miami, dancing and lounging happily; an Appalachian community in rural Kentucky lingering on front porches and leaning against Yamaha bikes; an extended Jewish family on Long Island celebrating weddings and bar mitzvahs; and women cinematically posed in mid-20th-century domestic settings. Whether one relates to being part of a nuclear family or chosen family, these groupings highlight the feeling of belonging with other people.
Alex Katz, Blue Hat, 2003 - 2004. Photo by Paul Takeuchi. © Alex Katz / 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul
In the mid-1960s, when Pop Art’s bandwidth broadened to include mechanical reproduction and rendering techniques, Alex Katz began experimenting with these techniques, too. At first, the artist often portrayed figures from the New York social world, such as artists, poets, choreographers, and dancers. More recently, his large-scale black-and-white silkscreens and linoleum cuts have been inspired by crowds of shoppers.
Dedicated to 60 years of the American artist’s career, this is the first exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac dedicated to Katz’s printmaking practice. The show ranges from early landscapes—such as Luna Park 1, his first print made with a print house in 1965—to recent, monochrome portraits. “60 Years of Printmaking” is taking place in tandem with an exhibition of Katz’s recent paintings on view at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.
