The Exhibitions Not to Miss in Paris This Autumn

As Art Basel Paris takes over the French capital, Ocula’s editors have hand-picked the exhibitions not to miss, from an Alexander Calder sculpture not exhibited for seven decades to a monumental Stan Douglas show.

Alexander Calder, François Premier (until 19 December 2026) at Hauser & Wirth, Rue François 1er 

The child of peripatetic artist parents, Alexander Calder grew up between Philadelphia, Arizona and California, studied in New York City and Paris, set up home in Connecticut with his wife and in 1953, returned to France. Settling down in the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence, and then in the town of Saché in the Loire Valley, led to the beginning of one of Calder’s most fruitful creative periods. From his rural abodes, he began to experiment, chalking forms directly on to steel plates instead of working from maquettes. This freer way of working yielded a new series of large mobiles, two of which are on show at Hauser & Wirth. One of these sculptures, Les Granettes (1953), a freestanding white form with two sprigs of dangling geometric shapes held in perfect balance, one red and one black, is being exhibited for the first time in 72 years. It will be shown alongside a series of ink and gouache paintings made around the same time in which you can see the forms of the sculptures echoed.—Baya Simons 

Tacita Dean and Bruce Nauman (until 19 December 2026) at Marian Goodman Gallery, Rue du Temple

Key figures in the history of moving image art, Bruce Nauman and Tacita Dean embrace uncertainty and experimentation as central parts of their practices. In the early 2000s, moreover, Dean’s Berlin studio neighboured Nauman’s permanent on-site installation Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care (1984/2010) at Hamburger Bahnhof. When the artists met for the first time in 2025, they found further common ground in their drawing practice, silverpoint in particular, a technique in which a silver instrument is used to make marks on a prepared surface. Drawing Blind Drawing (2026) grew out of this encounter, taking the form of a collaborative drawing session documented on 35mm film. Created as a seven-metre-long diptych, the film centres on the artists’ hands as they draw simultaneously: one draws without looking at what they’re doing, while the other assists them. The process foregrounds chance and the unexpected, reflecting both artists’ disavowal of perfection in favour of what Dean calls “the unintended act”. The exhibition is accompanied by a screening programme of Dean’s 16mm films—an exceptionally rare opportunity given that, as fans will know, the artist insists that her films be shown in their original format.—Maja Renfer 

Yu Nishimura, Towards a Sea (21 October 2026–03 January 2027) at Lafayette Anticipations, Rue du Plâtre  

When looking out of the window of a moving train, I have often found myself noticing suddenly that the passing landscape is briefly framed by my own reflection, as the sunlight illuminates not only the exterior views but the interior of the carriage. It is a fleeting moment of self-revelation, a reminder of one’s own mundane presence in the world. In the evocative oil and tempera paintings of Japanese artist Yu Nishimura, these introspective glimpses, hovering somewhere between hazy perception and sharp reality, are conjured upon the canvas. In the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in France, staged at the post-industrial Rem Koolhaas-designed Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, figures and faces are layered with trees, animals and other people, like half-formed memories. Titled Towards a Sea, the exhibition explores the sea as a constant presence in Nishimura’s life; the artist was born and continues to work in Kanagawa Prefecture, a coastal region south of Tokyo. There is a filmic quality to Nishimura’s work, as if these vignettes were scenes that begin and end beyond the confines of the painting.—Louise Benson

Archives des Invisibles (until 9 January 2027) at Kadist, Rue des Trois Frères 

The final, cinema-ready cut of a good film can make all the choices behind its production seem inevitable. The discarded scenes, however, could be just as seductive, suggesting what else was possible: images that disrupted a narrative, fell outside a filmmaker’s aesthetic, or could not be shown because of censorship. In this exhibition at Kadist, a group of filmmakers revisits those decisions, revealing the doubts, attachments and pressures that can disappear behind the coherence of a finished work. The first chapter centres on Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia, alongside contributions from France, directing attention towards the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores. Makers include Zineb Sedira, Bouchra Khalili and Elia Suleiman; among the cut clips is a film of a Palestinian wedding in Galilee in 1993, shared by French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem. The project begins as an archive intended to grow across other periods and geographies, allowing these fragments to circulate beyond the works for which they were once intended.—Shanyu Zhong 

Ibrahim Mahama, The Harvest Season (22 October 2026–28 February 2027) at Fondation Cartier, Place du Palais-Royal 

The press materials for Ibrahim Mahama’s first major exhibition in Paris describe it as a “living entity”. The Harvest Season consists of vast site-specific works, created in collaboration with nine associate artists and collectives, alongside new iterations of Mahama’s previous installations, all presented in conversation with the art centres Mahama has founded in Tamale, Ghana. The show was formed in response to the ways in which the country’s psychic and physical infrastructure is haunted by the long history of European colonialisation; Mahama’s works, which will include discarded materials such as thousands of green glass bottles and old terracotta pots, look to the notion of “repair”—a practice that Mahama describes as an opportunity to redefine the conceptual frameworks in which the future is organised. By returning to the ruins or fragments of historic movements for liberation, the artist ensures the transmission of liberatory potential—an act, perhaps, of continual harvesting.—Nell Whittaker

Stan Douglas, Parallax (until 10 January 2027) at Jeu de Paume, Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuilleries  

Stan Douglas’ largest exhibition in France in more than 30 years, Parallax at Jeu de Paume, spans nearly four decades of photography, film and installation. I would go for Hors-Champs (1992) alone. In the video, four American musicians who lived in France perform free jazz, filmed in the style of 1960s French music television. On one side of a suspended screen, an edited performance unfolds; the other shows the musicians left out of the frame. Elsewhere, Overture (1986) pairs railway footage with Proust, and Birth of a Nation (2025) brings together clips from DW Griffith’s white supremacist 1915 silent fiction movie The Birth of a Nation with a modified version, scripted by Douglas, in a piece exploring racial perception and misidentification. Douglas shows us that framing is political and where we stand changes what, and whom, we see.—Zian Chen 

Rose Lowder, La Source de la Loire et Autres Films (The Source of the Loire and Other Films) (21 October 2026–14 February 2027) Palais de Tokyo, Avenue du Président Wilson 

There is something hypnotic about Rose Lowder’s films. Working with her 16mm Bolex camera, the filmmaker composes her works frame-by-frame inside the camera itself, resulting in superimpositions of up to 1,440 images in a single one-minute film. One can do little but stare, mesmerised by the flickering impressions, while trying to remain hyperattentive to the detail of the images. The Source of the Loire and Other Films, brings together a selection of 20 of these one-minute-long films, each shot in the landscapes of Italy and France, alongside a longer-form work titled The Source of the Loire (2019–2021). For the latter, Lowder travelled to Mont Gerbier de Jonc, the source of Paris’ signature river, for three years in a row, capturing the tranquil motion of the small stream. Marking the French-Peruvian filmmaker’s first institutional solo exhibition in France, the exhibition extends an approach to eco-cinema that Lowder has been developing since the 1970s—one that compels us to perceive up close, in a slow and sustained manner, that which is perishing.—Maja Renfer 

Lee Bae, Attending (until 19 December 2026) at Perrotin, Rue de Turenne 

Lee Bae is widely recognised for his commitment to the colour black. His wall-based drawings are black; his paintings, that spill down gallery walls and across floors, are black; and his sculptures, sometimes 60 metres high, black. However, his practice is not concerned with exploring the colour’s many shades, but with digging further into its depths in search of ever-greater intensity. Until the early 2000s, Bae worked exclusively with raw charcoal, creating minimal, mosaic-like assemblages from charred shards of wood, as well as larger sculptural arrangements of carbonised tree trunks. These works reflected his introspective, labour-intensive process, which demands he engage closely with raw materials and repeatedly complete precise physical tasks. Though the artist now embraces other mediums and tools—including carbon black, a substance close to soot—in Attending, patience remains an essential quality. Through large-scale sculptures, an in-situ installation and a performance video, Bae explores being fully present in the moment, while waiting in anticipation of something or someone you deeply care about. All, of course, in black.—Philippa Kelly 

Magnanrama: Media, technologies, identities and networks around Nathalie Magnan (until 12 December 2026) at Bétonsalon, Esplanade Pierre-Vidal-Naquet 

Magnanrama is a panorama of filmmaker, cyberfeminist and teacher Nathalie Magnan’s life and work. Her films and archives appear alongside works by Shu Lea Cheang, Barbara Hammer, Guerrilla Girls and VNS Matrix, placing her in the context of a wider feminist history. Magnan’s Lesborama (1995), a 30-minute movie exploring the idea of lesbian culture, made for French television channel Canal+’s first “Nuit Gay”, offers one way into that history: she made television a space for lesbian representation. I’m curious to see what happens when these images move from broadcast into the gallery, where the networks behind their making can come into view.—Zian Chen 

Rosana Paulino, Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight (until 19 December 2026) at Mendes Wood DM, Places des Vosges 

Plantas de poder—Portuguese for “plants of power”—take over an exhibition of new drawings and paintings by Rosana Paulino at Mendes Wood DM. Growing out of eyes, limbs and breasts, the plants sprawl across Paulino’s nude female figures, branching into muscular roots and blossoming flowers, seeming to draw power from their human hosts while also threatening to overwhelm them. This tension is central to the artist’s practice, rooted in Afro-Brazilian customs and spirituality. Paulino’s plantas de poder are widely used in cleansing rituals, worn as protective amulets or valued for their medicinal properties. Yet the artist also foregrounds their capacity to harm. In Comigo ninguém pode, a series titled after the dieffenbachia/“dumb cane” plant—whose Portuguese name translates as “Don’t mess with me”—highly toxic leaves seem to force the depicted figure into a submissive crouch. Paulino’s first solo exhibition in Paris extends her influential series Senhora das plantas (Lady of the Plants) while probing the absence of Black women in representations of Afro-Brazilian mysticism. “If she doesn’t exist,” the artist asks. “What will happen if we create her? If we bring her into being?”—Maja Renfer 

Main image: Stan Douglas, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955 (2008). © Stan Douglas. Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.