Seven Paris Exhibitions Worth Seeing After Art Week
From Barbara Kruger’s text-covered rotunda to Ibrahim Mahama’s reconstruction of cultural infrastructure, these seven Paris exhibitions remain open afte...
By Weston Deboer
October 27, 2026 · 4 min read
Barbara Kruger, The History of Tears, Bourse de Commerce, 2026. Courtesy artist, Sprüth Magers, David Zwirner and Pinault Collection. Photo: Florent Michel.
Art Week may concentrate attention into a few overloaded days, but its most consequential exhibitions rarely obey the fair calendar. With the Grand Palais and temporary satellites now closed, seven museum and gallery shows remain open across Paris. Together, they form a more durable map of the week’s central concerns: who controls language, how histories are preserved, and where representation becomes power.
Barbara Kruger: The History of Tears
At the Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger has transformed the rotunda and its display cases into an architecture of address. Text, video, and image spread across the circular floor and walls, placing the visitor inside the visual language of command, persuasion, fear, and desire that Kruger has interrogated for decades.
The scale matters. Phrases normally encountered as private screens or public slogans become a total environment beneath the building’s historic dome. The exhibition remains open through January 25, 2027.
Ibrahim Mahama: The Harvest Season
Ibrahim Mahama’s first major Paris exhibition fills the new Fondation Cartier space with site-specific works and reconfigured installations. Mahama is joined by nine artists and collectives whose practices connect with his research, pedagogy, and institution-building in Tamale, Ghana.
The exhibition treats discarded materials, industrial remains, archives, and architecture as evidence of colonial and postcolonial systems, but also as raw material for futures that were deferred or never realized. The Harvest Season continues through February 28, 2027.
Jenny Holzer: J’AI VU
For J’AI VU at the Musée d’Orsay, Jenny Holzer selected more than 750 texts from 424 sources by 73 authors. Drawn from the museum’s archives and the period represented by its collection, the writing appears through electronic signs, projected light, engraved stone benches, marble columns, and metal paintings.
The opening-week projections on the museum’s Seine facade have ended, but the interior exhibition remains on view through February 21, 2027. Holzer’s intervention makes the museum’s own documentary record speak in public again, placing historical voices beside present conflicts without pretending the distance between them has disappeared.
Yu Nishimura: Towards a Sea
Yu Nishimura’s first institutional solo exhibition in France is also his largest to date. Lafayette Anticipations brings together roughly 50 drawings and paintings from the past decade, including works made for the exhibition.
Nishimura approaches the sea as an unstable edge between observation and memory. Faces, animals, bicycles, vegetation, and weather soften into one another through blur and layered color, making ordinary scenes feel both recognized and newly strange. Admission is free, and the show runs through January 3, 2027.
Rafael Pavarotti: Photographer
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs gathers more than 200 prints by Brazilian photographer Rafael Pavarotti, placing fashion editorials, campaigns, covers, and portraits beside photographs from the museum’s collection. His saturated color and sculptural posing are rooted in memories of Pará, the Amazon landscape, and the strong women of his family.
The survey also asks who fashion photography makes visible and how a highly constructed image can still communicate identity and belonging. It remains open through May 2, 2027.
Sylvia Ken: Land and Sky
At Cassandra Bird, Pitjantjatjara artist Sylvia Ken presents her first Paris solo exhibition and first show outside Australia. Her paintings map the Seven Sisters story through fields of dots that operate simultaneously as stars, paths, rockholes, and ancestral memory.
The exhibition refuses a division between landscape and cosmology. Country extends into the sky, while ancestral time remains active in the present. Land and Sky continues through January 17, 2027.
Estampes choisies at Galerie Lelong
The most compact stop in this guide is a three-artist print exhibition at Galerie Lelong. Mamma Andersson, Nalini Malani, and Alison Saar arrive from different graphic traditions, yet each uses the human figure to test memory, mythology, identity, and the body’s relationship to history.
The exhibition closes first, on November 14, 2026, making it the most time-sensitive of the seven. Gallery and museum schedules can change, so check each official venue page before visiting. This selection updates an earlier Hypebeast guide to Paris Art Week; OFFSCREEN Paris, included in that roundup, closed on October 25 and is therefore not listed here.
