ART CITIES: Paris Gallery Weekend 2025
Since 2021, the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art (CPGA) has been organising Paris Gallery Weekend, which celebrates the essential role of galleries and highlights Paris’ revival on the international art scene. Paris Gallery Weekend is an annual event celebrating contemporary art, usually taking place in late May or early June. It involves a coordinated opening of numerous art galleries across Paris, offering free access to exhibitions, artist talks, performances, and special events.
By Efi Michalarou
This year, more than 70 galleries are taking part in Paris Gallery Weekend. Paris Gallery Weekend is the must-attend event for art lovers and collectors. For three days, explore a unique route through the galleries of Paris, discover exceptional exhibitions, attend exclusive events and be surprised by inspiring artistic encounters. The Key Features are: Open Galleries: Dozens of contemporary art galleries across Paris open their doors, showcasing both emerging and established artists. Guided Tours: There are often curated routes or guided tours by neighborhood (like Marais, Saint-Germain, or Belleville) and Meet-the-Artist Opportunities: Some galleries host artist meet-and-greets or discussions.
15 Beautreillis presents Amy Todman, Afaf Zurayk in the exhibition “Light Enters”, both artists with painting and poetry in a distinct yet complementary manner. While Zurayk works in abstraction, allowing only the merest hint of form to emerge from her minimal canvases, Todman’s style is closer to figuration, a dreamscape enfolding element of the real and the unreal tethered by the structure of three-dimensional space. Their practices connect in the feeling of their work and in the liminal space between word and image, speaking a language that seeks to move in the stillness of time.
For his first monographic exhibition in Paris at the 193 Gallery, Rafael Domenech draws a new space within that of the gallery, creating entirely different possibilities in an otherwise generic white cube. Planting the seeds for a new story and context, he divides the space with wooden walls that act like folding screens – an object which traditionally holds an important place in art history. Like floating paintings in space, the architectural device is both a work of art in itself, and a recipient for other works mounted on its walls as well as contained inside it, in the manner of a Russian Doll.
Air de Paris presents the first solo exhibition in France of French-Swiss artist Mona Filleul. A form of intimacy emerges from Mona Filleul’s works, which are adorned with biographical elements and draw from various sources of inspiration, from Instagram stories to Soundcloud profile covers. For her exhibition at Air de Paris, the artist presents a new body of work within a specific scenography that responds to the gallery space. For the opening and during Paris Gallery Weekend, Filleul invites five transfem artists from the local scene to intervene directly in the exhibition, thereby pushing back the boundaries of the solo exhibition in order to turn it into a collective space.
Thomas Paquet’s new solo exhibition “Oh Lumière!” at Bigaignon gallery, explores the nature of light, revealing all its nuances through the artist’s various experiments with the traditional tools of the darkroom. Thomas Paquet created the “De la chambre noire” series as part of the Picto Lab /”expérimenter l’image” residency, of which he was the 2023 winner. In Picto’s film laboratory, the nature of light was the object of his experimentation, and he decided to use the traditional tools of the darkroom to reveal all the nuances of working with light.
“Unhome” by Martin Boyce marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with Esther Schipper, and his first presentation in our Parisian gallery. This exhibition introduces an uncertainty in the perception of the intimate and the domestic space. In our Place Vendôme space, Martin Boyce will unveil, among other works, a new photographic series and a monumental sculpture in steel and hand-blown glass. These new works are part of a scenography that evokes both dilapidation and renovation, as a reflection on the passage of time.
The Anne Barrault Gallery presents the first solo exhibition of Lalitha Lajmi in France. Born in 1932 in Kolkata, India, her works are part of the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay, the British Museum, and the CSMVS Museum. A self-taught artist, she combines watercolor and psychoanalysis, using her dreams as creative material to depict a face through repeated self-portraits: a smooth, round face, with a slightly raised chin, large eyes with heavy eyelids. Her body moves from one painting to another, sometimes observing the scene or organizing it, always with the same mischievous little smile, a grimace on her lips. Exploring narcissism and introspection, she transforms her inner world into a reflection on the construction of modern identity and a quest for meaning in a complex context.
A tribute to the recently deceased South African-born artist Vivian Van Blerk is on show in Galerie Dominique Fiat. His work combines ceramic sculptures, installations and photographs. Vivian Van Blerk was assiduously preparing her next solo show at the gallery on the theme of Archipelagos, which combine Memento Mori and nature’s resilience in the face of human destruction. They conceal unique inner worlds and question the environment in a post-human future dominated by the rebirth of nature.
In Galerie Dutko, nature overflows in the work of Cristina Almodóvar. The limits between the organic and the inorganic, between drawing and sculpture, between two and three dimensions, are crossed by the author, who projects her thoughts on the beauty of Nature to recreate her particular universe. The ability to transform materials through her sculptural work establishes both a plastic and conceptual relationship with matter. A diverse work, in which nothing is what it seems at first glance. The apparent rock is cardboard. The branches are iron. The drawings escape from the paper to become sculptures. The fragile becomes solid, the opposites are always present in his work. Everything overflows its conceptual framework, as the pieces themselves, which are shown overflowing the physical framework that hosts it.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia presents “Le poids du ciel illumine la terre”, a solo exhibition by Joris Van de Moortel. Following his major exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent which recently closed in March 2025, Van de Moortel unveils new works in a contrasting setting: the space of the Parisian gallery, made of alcoves and arches, that the artist has adorned with stained glass. Transformed by his works, the gallery’s architecture evokes a place of worship: its high ceilings seem to bring heaven and earth together. A profusion of celestial fragments is inflected with profane detail, freely circulating across oil paintings, watercolors, sculptures, mirrors, neon works and a video. Here, light becomes faith: it moves between works, and sometimes flows through them, revealing the singular vision of Joris Van de Moortel—a vision of a world which, although tormented, is adorned with a thousand and one colors.
Valentin Rilliet is a Swiss-Chinese visual artist who predominantly works in oil painting and ink drawing. His artistic practice includes intercultural studies and the reinterpretation of mythologies, folklore, symbolism, and historical events. By exploring his mixed heritage, his works are filled with layered and ambiguous narratives often combined with ghostly anachronistic figures and motifs specific to the languages between a diverse set of art historical canons. For his first solo exhibition in France and his second with Galerie Peter Kilchmann, he presents works on paper and oil paintings on canvas. Some of his works were created during a three-month residency in Shanghai, China.
For the first time, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve brings together the works of Otto Dix and Anne Wenzel in a dialogue on representations of war and its consequences. Otto Dix’s drawings and engravings, created after his experience at the front during the First World War, offer a straightforward, frontal view of the ravages of the conflict. He recorded bruised bodies, scarred faces and destroyed landscapes, composing a powerful and lucid testimony to the brutality of his time. Echoing this, Anne Wenzel’s ceramic sculptures question the figure of the war hero. In her Damaged Goods, Silent Landscape and One Requiem of Heroism series, she presents broken busts, cracked monuments and silent landscapes that reflect the ambivalence between memory and erasure, glory and decline.
Participating Galleries: 15 Beautreillis, 193 Gallery, 22,48 M², Air De Paris, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Avant Galerie Vossen, Bigaignon, Ceysson & Bénétière, Dvir Gallery, Esther Schipper, Galerie 8+4, Galerie Alain Margaron, Galerie Alberta Pane, Galerie Anne Barrault, Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard, Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou, Galerie Arts D’australie – Stéphane Jacob, Galerie Ariane C-Y, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Galerie C, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Galerie Cipango, Galerie Claire Gastaud, Galleria Continua, Galerie D’art Maggiore G.A.M., Galerie Dominique Fiat, Galerie Droste, Galerie Dutko, Galerie Jean-François Cazeau, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Galerie La Forest Divonne, Galerie Larock-Granoff, Galerie Lelong, Galerie Lélia Mordoch, Galerie Maria Lund, Galerie Maubert, Galerie Max Hetzler, Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Galerie Papillon, Galerie Raphael Durazzo, Galerie Rx&Slag , Galerie Sabine Bayasli, Galerie Sator, Galerie Sit Down, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, Galerie Olivier Waltman, Galerie Taménaga, Galerie Xii Paris, Galerie Zlotowski, H Gallery, Hélène Bailly, In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc, La Galerie Rouge, Les Douches La Galerie, Marcelle Alix, Mendes Wood Dm, Michel Rein, Mor Charpentier, Pact, Perrotin, Pron, Rabouan Moussion, Ricardo Fernandes, Ségolène Brossette Galerie, Semiose, Templon, Paris-Bruxelles-Newyork, Thaddaeus Ropac, Traits Libres Gallery, White Cube, Zander Galerie Paris, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery
Info: Duration: 23-25/5/2025, https://parisgalleryweekend.com/