8 Must-See Institutional Shows in Paris over Autumn 2023
Ron Mueck during installation; Mass (2017). Exhibition view: Ron Mueck, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (8 June–5 November 2023). Mixed media. Variable dimensions. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest (2018). Photo: © Michel Slomka / MYOP / Lumento.
Paris+ par Art Basel returns to the Grand Palais Éphémère for its second year, shortly before the building closes ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics. Alongside Brexit regulations, this has prompted discussions around Paris as the new European art market capital.
Asia NOW's 9th edition is held at Monnaie de Paris from 20 to 22 October. This year, it is curated by Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars, who will bring together artists from Central Asia.
Around the city, the historical meets the contemporary. From surveys of modernists Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Mark Rothko to later paintings by Hermann Nitsch and monumental sculptures by Ron Mueck, we share eight must-see exhibitions around Paris.
Amedeo Modigliani: A painter and his dealer
Musée de l'Orangerie, Jardin des Tuileries
20 September 2023–15 January 2024
Expect: a dive into the relationship between the painter and his dealer, and their portrayal of one another on canvas and in writing.
Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906 at age 21 with aspirations to become a painter. Living amid artistic influences such as Pablo Picasso and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, his prolific output led to his first exhibition at the Salon des Indépendants within two years.
The influence of Constantin Brâncuși, whom Modigliani met in 1909, is evident in his clean lines and simple but evocative shapes. Modigliani later became known for his elegant depiction of women with elongated features and almond-shaped eyes. They appear decisive even when unclothed—a radical gesture at the time. Among the most expensive paintings ever to be sold at auction, Modigliani's Nu couché (Reclining Nude) (1917–1918) presents a nude woman spread along a crimson duvet with visible underarm hair and a content expression on her face.
Modigliani was noticed by the young dealer Paul Guillaume, who shared Modigliani's interest in avant-garde and African art. Guillaume would deal over 150 of Modigliani's works after the artist's death. The artist, however, died almost penniless.
Mark Rothko
Fondation Louis Vuitton, 8 Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
18 October 2023–2 April 2024
Expect: a monumental survey of more than 100 works, from early figurative paintings to later large-scale canvases manifesting the sublime.
Fondation Louis Vuitton presents the first exhibition in France dedicated to painter Mark Rothko since his 1999 exhibition held at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The comprehensive survey traces the course of the artist's career in chronological sequence.
Rothko sought to express basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, and pain—in his work. His paintings became emblematic of a time of collapse and regeneration, where art was called to step in for religion amid disillusionment with the violence of war.
There were his expansive luminous canvases of the 1950s, which overtook the figurative compositions and landscapes from his early career. His later compositions of the late 1950s and 60s engulfed viewers in dark chromatic fields that sought to evoke the sublime.
As the artist has said: 'My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes.' Rothko had a strong dislike for interpretation, believing that silence was more accurate. Indeed, his paintings, which often communicate through scale, really do need to be seen in person.
Van Gogh at Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months
Musée d'Orsay, Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
3 October 2023–4 February 2024
Expect: a chronological presentation dedicated to the last two months of the painter's life, with some 40 paintings and 20 drawings.
Discharged from the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Vincent van Gogh arrived at Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890 seeking new creative energy. Over two months, he produced 74 paintings and 33 drawings capturing the village, local residents, still lifes, and nearby landscapes.
Among them is Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet (1890), the physician consulted by the artist to treat his melancholia. Himself an engraver, Gachet knew many impressionists such as Renoir and Manet. Against a cool blue backdrop, the doctor appears rather dejected. He wears 'the desolate expression of our time,' as van Gogh wrote.
While the bright table before Gachet and the foxglove in his hand hint at hope, the doctor's treatments did not diminish the artist's anguish, and van Gogh ended his life on 29 July that same year.
Chagall At Work: Drawings, Ceramics and Sculptures 1945–1970
Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou
4 October 2023–26 February 2024
Expect: insight into the artist's studio practice from the 1950s to 1970s across over a hundred drawings, ceramics, sculptures, fresco sketches, and stage designs.
Marc Chagall was born into a difficult environment in Liozna, a small city in the western Russian Empire. His father did hard labour for a local herring merchant, but found comfort in his Jewish faith. This emphasis on religion would permeate Chagall's later work.
Chagall studied painting in the studio of a local realist painter, Yehuda Pen, initially developing a style that echoed his sombre environments. A yellow sky overlooks a grave along a black road in The Death (1908), where a rooftop fiddler plays and a woman laments.
Chagall left for Paris in 1910, where he met writers and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Fernand Léger. Mythology and surrealism would find their way into his later paintings and prints, which became renowned for depicting religious scenes in bright palettes.
Attesting to the artist's diverse output, which included stage design, Biblical etchings, and stained-glass windows, the exhibition at Centre Pompidou presents preparatory sketches for costumes and curtains for Igor Stravinsky's ballet 'The Firebird' and sketches for frescos commissioned for the Paris Opera House ceiling in 1962.
Also showing at Centre Pompidou is the 23rd Marcel Duchamp Prize exhibition, until 8 January 2024. The four nominees this year are Bertille Bak, Bouchra Khalili, Tarik Kiswanson, and Massinissa Selmani.
Hermann Nitsch: Hommage
Musée de l'Orangerie, Jardin des Tuileries
11 October 2023–12 February 2024
Expect: paintings and graphic works made shortly before the death of a key figure from the Viennese Actionism movement.
A leading artist of the Austrian avant-garde, Hermann Nitsch spent a great part of his life trying to extract art from representation. Notably, he staged radical performances—in one, he skinned a lamb and displayed its entrails—and painted with blood.
In the 1950s, Nitsch created the six-day production The Orgies Mysteries Theatre, which included painting, music, poetry, and liturgical and religious elements. To stimulate the senses, he used vinegar, wine, blood, and meat. Nitsch described the play as his life's work.
Among the artist's influences were Monet's 'Water Lilies', which he paid tribute to upon visiting Paris. Their influences found their way into the artist's paintings in his later years, which exhibit bright bursts of the same ecstatic colours known to the French impressionist and will be shown near his seminal paintings on the museum's ground floor.
Victor Burgin: That
Jeu de Paume, 1 Place de la Concorde
10 October 2023–28 January 2024
Expect: a 50-year survey of a key artist in photo-conceptualism with black-and-white photographs from the 1970s and 80s and recent video works.
The conceptual artist and theorist Victor Burgin is perhaps best known for his Photopath (1967–1969) installation, first conceived in 1967 on the wooden floors of a friend's apartment in Nottingham. It has since been replicated at galleries and institutions worldwide.
It was a simple, near-inconspicuous work that put into question the function of representation. An instruction card dictates to photograph a path of 1 x 21 units along the floor and to cover the same area with the images printed to exact scale. The change in daylight alone points to the presence of images covering the ground.
In recent decades, the artist has worked with video to express similar concerns for representation, perception, and memory. Among works on view, Island Flight (2022) is a 3D reconstruction of a Mediterranean island based on the artist's photographs and notes, weaving the island's memory with stories from Goethe's life and the plot of a Händel opera.
A Convening of Civic Poets
KADIST, 21 Rue des Trois Frères
6 October 2023–4 February 2024
Expect: an attempted revival of the poet as public figure with civic responsibilities across a series of artist-led conversations, screenings, and a workshop.
Artists pay homage to civic poets throughout time with reference to Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's articulation of the poet as a public voice with an ethical responsibility toward the world and its difficulties.
A diverse range of intercontinental voices and causes come into view. Activist Angela Davis discusses freedom in Manthia Diawara's film, while the radical allyship of French writer Jean Genet is explored in Bouchra Khalili's film and installation.
Hajra Waheed focuses on songs by activists and artists supporting transnational solidarity, while Radio Alhara & Learning Palestine Group present a mixtape on Palestine's past, present, and future. Also in the exhibition is Hajer Ben Boubaker's podcast, which addresses North African migrant movements in Paris.
Ron Mueck
Fondation Cartier, 261 Boulevard Raspail
8 June–5 November 2023
Expect: a walk through the valley of death with 100 large skulls piled around the gallery and other hyperrealistic sculptures.
The Australian sculptor Ron Mueck was born into a family business of puppetry and doll-making. He worked as a creative director for children's television in Australia before turning to the realistic sculptures he would make on a monumental scale.
Dead Dad, a portrait of the artist's nude father laying on the ground, was commissioned by Mueck's mother-in-law Paula Rego for the Hayward Gallery in London in 1996, rendered at half-scale. The sculpture was later shown in a 1997 group exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, cementing the artist's reputation.
At the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, the artist's Boy (1999) presented a five-metre-tall glass sculpture of a crouching youth with arms raised in front of him, bearing a vigilant expression. These figurative works would later give way to more sombre, symbolic contemplations such as Mass (2017).
At Fondation Cartier, the pile of bone-white skulls is joined by other hyperrealistic sculptures prompting existential reflections such as Dead Weight (2021)—a cast-iron skull weighing in at 1700 kilograms. —[O]
