Must-See Exhibitions in Paris This Autumn

From the Surrealism centenary exhibition at Centre Pompidou to Tom Wesselmann’s Pop survey at Fondation Louis Vuitton, here are the shows to see during Art Basel Paris and through autumn.

Museum Exhibitions in Paris

In celebration of the centenary of the famed movement, Surrealism is now on view at Centre Pompidou (4 September 2024–13 January 2025). Expect works by all the canonical figures—including André Breton, who published the movement’s founding manifesto in 1924, Leonora Carrington, and Max Ernst—as well as lesser-known artists who contributed to its development, such as Tatsuo Ikeda and Edith Rimmington. The exhibition’s design is oriented around a maze-like construction, allowing for fittingly non-linear navigation and discovery.

Also at Centre Pompidou is a group exhibition of 21 contemporary Chinese artists co-organised with the West Bund Museum. 目 China: A new generation of artists (9 October 2024–3 February 2025) spotlights the work of the generation born from the late 1970s through to the early 90s, during China’s economic boom and societal upheavals. Highlights include an animated film from Lu Yang‘s ‘DOKU’ series (The Self, 2024), which follows an avatar through a parallel digital universe, and a Super 8 film by Shen Xin (Solar Wheels, 2024) that explores the migration of wild horses in the Elegasi Qayus preserve in Canada and the Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China.

In Bois de Boulogne park, Fondation Louis Vuitton presents Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann &... (17 October 2024–24 February 2025), a sprawling survey dedicated to the 20th-century movement. Centred around the late American artist Tom Wesselmann, the show features 150 of his paintings and mixed-media pieces alongside 70 works by 35 other artists—including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lauren Halsey, Marisol, Mickalene Thomas, and Ai Weiwei—in a comprehensive overview of the Pop spirit, from its Dadaist roots to contemporary interpretations.

Also showing in Gallery 8 as part of the Foundation’s ‘Open Space’ series—a dedicated programme for emerging artists to present solo exhibitions of new works—is a suite of dreamlike abstractions by Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera. (Entry is included with Pop Forever tickets.)

Head to the heart of the Marais in the 4th arrondissement to see two concurrent solo shows at the Rem Koolhaas-designed Lafayette Anticipations. Lebanese artist and filmmaker Mohamad Abdouni presents Soft Skills (16 October–17 November 2024), an introspective exhibition primarily of photography that reflects on personal archives and histories and the artist’s homeland, the Bekaa region of Lebanon—recently under intense Israeli airstrikes—as well as queer desire and normative conceptions of masculinity.

In her show, Total, Martine Syms transforms the Lafayette space into a hybrid shopfront-studio-gallery (16 October 2024–9 February 2025), an all-consuming, quasi-theatrical experience that includes reconstructions of parts of the artist’s L.A. studio. As Syms has noted, ‘In all exhibitions, I like to try and use the way someone’s moving through [the theatre of the gallery], almost in a cinematic way, and think about how to script it.’ The result is a reconstruction of reality as experienced through images, or a meditation on the idea of consumption as performance—or the performance of consumption.

A group exhibition jointly organised and hosted by KADIST (12 October 2024–5 January 2025), Palais de Tokyo (17 October 2024–5 January 2025), and the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius presents different works by 11 artists and collectives across each venue. Its title, Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai, references a line from Luba Jurgenson’s 2023 essay, ‘When we woke up. The Night of 24 February 2022: Invasion of Ukraine’: ‘Borders are nocturnal animals, they move while we sleep. We should always be vigilant.’

KADIST is also staging a group show concerning the implications of generative AI, Apophenia, Interruptions: Artists and Artificial Intelligence at Work, at Centre Pompidou until 6 January 2025, as part of a three-year collaboration between the institutions.

At Petit Palais, VANITAS (16–20 October 2024) by Turner Prize-winning artist Jesse Darling is on view for a limited time as part of the Art Basel Paris programme.

Paris Gallery Exhibitions

Galleries put their best shows forward during Art Basel Paris, and there’s plenty to see, especially for lovers of painting. White Cube is hosting a solo presentation of ten large-scale paintings by Sylvia Snowden (15 October–16 November 2024) from her ‘M Street’ series (1978–97), titled after the road in Shaw, Washington D.C., where the artist has lived since the late 1970s. Each work depicts a figure from Snowden’s community in a warped, emotive style, built up from topographical layers of acrylic paint and oil pastel.

At Modern Art, Scottish painter Andrew Cranston presents his first solo show in Paris. Thoughts from under the floorboards (13 October–16 November 2024) features a suite of oil paintings on hardback book covers, dense with details of figures, interiors, and cityscapes in unexpected colour combinations. For this new series, Cranston draws from his own memories as well as from the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Caillebotte, whose canvases are on view in the exhibition Painting men at Musée d’Orsay until 19 January 2025.

New York-based painter Dana Schutz presents The Sea and All Its Subjects (14 October–16 November 2024) at David Zwirner. Schutz, whose work was the subject of a survey at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris last year, here brings unsettling compositions that play with allegory and imagination with a cast of fantastical characters that, in various scenes, mourn an octopus, pick apples, ride horses, and pluck out one another’s eyeballs.

Marian Goodman Gallery is showing Daniel Boyd‘s solo Dream Time (12 October–21 December 2024) with a new series of the artist’s signature dot paintings that distort landscapes, portraits, and abstractions that offer a pluralistic view of Indigenous Australian histories. Nearby, Galerie Chantal Crousel presents Mimosa Echard‘s exhibition Lies (15 October–16 November 2024), comprising oxidised metallic tableaus and a new photographic series shot in the 1920s Arcades des Champs Élysées. Showing concurrently is Roberto Cuoghi‘s PEPSIS—uncanny, stylised paintings that probe the image-recognition technology of Google Lens. —[O]

Main image: Lu Yang, DOKU, The Self (2022) (still). HD video with colour, sound. 36 mins. © Lu Yang. Courtesy the artist and Société, Berlin.