Yet again, Art Basel Paris threatens to overtake its namesake’s eminence as the most important fair on the global art calendar thanks to its environs: the City of Light in October—and the top-tier exhibitions—seem to inspire institutions big and small. So while there is much to see among the fair booths under the dome of the Grand Palais, there is even more still scattered throughout the spiraling capital. We rounded up a few that cannot be missed—and you may notice a trend among them. We did. France devotes its main platforms to voices from elsewhere, so Paris might be the best place in the world to see your favorite artist from back home, anew.
Barbara Kruger @ Bourse de Commerce
Barbara Kruger is a prime example. Her preoccupations with exchange, commerce, and language rhyme so perfectly with the Bourse de Commerce’s rich history and dramatic architecture that their collision gives her new commission, The History of Tears, the feeling of automatic canon. Kruger, who first came to public attention with the Pictures Generation provocateurs who turned television and advertisement on their head in the 1970s, has been able through the decades to maintain the near-impossible dual reputation of fashion darling and devout intellectual, through her cutthroat incisiveness and that signature of black, white, and red, which continues to cut through the noise.
Kruger’s command of scale is evident at the Bourse de Commerce, which the artist has submitted to her bidding despite its mammoth dome. Over the years, more and more people and institutions have taken to large wall vinyls—but here, Kruger reasserts her dominance in the medium. The floor is a giant one. It immortalizes a quote from 1984, George Orwell’s genre-defining, apocalyptic novel: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”
Rita Ackermann @ Galerie Allen
Rita Ackermann’s paintings evade didactic categorizations: they straddle the universal or the personal, sometimes they lean abstract—but there always seems to be figures waiting in the wings. They are image-forward, yet suggest a narrative within. It is this quality that gives her work—which is laden with fairy tales, big brush strokes, and the outlines of young women—a kind of effervescent and infinite potential that attracts a cultlike following among her admirers. Those already indoctrinated into Ackermann’s world will know the paintings, the cadence of her squiggles, the confidence of her contours, but they may not be familiar with her performances, her 2000s girl band, Angelblood, nor her 1996 puppet show based on Jean Luc-Godard’s Vivre sa vie, which she is presenting this fall at Galerie Allen. Ackermann has made a new sculpture for the occasion, a custom theater for the television screen which loops the original.
Yu Nishimura @ Lafayette Anticipations
Lafayette Anticipations is usually a place to go see ambitious, larger sculptures and installations by your favorite names on the rise, but our recommendation to drop by might surprise you in its simplicity. Towards a Sea is a sober and straightforward painting show. It is also the first French presentation of Japanese painter Yu Nishimura’s work. The exhibition feels right on time both for Nishimura, who has had a meteoric couple of years, and the city whose love affair with Japanese culture has reached a fever pitch. The show takes the seascape as its focus point and extrapolates from there, covering the first decade of Nishimura’s output. It is the largest presentation of his work to date, and thus a brilliant introduction to a once regional voice who in recent years has made it to the center of the global conversation. The seascape also offers a very personal place to start with the work, as Nishimura’s own upbringing in Kanagawa was so informed by the bond between a community and the body of water it lives on. Water, which is such a technical feat for hyperrealists, under Nishimura’s brush becomes a vehicle for mood. And sometimes a mood is all you need.
Dan Flavin @ Gagosian Le Bourget
Many people know Dan Flavin through his permanently installed work, from Dia’s Bridgehampton outpost to the Menil and Marfa, but rarely does one get treated to a temporary show. This fall, Flavin completists are in for a treat. Starting with Gagosian’s presentation of the artist’s appealingly named European Couples series, which unites all nine works for the third time in Gagosian’s former factory near the Le Bourget airport. Previously described by the artist as “autobiographical,” the European Couples series hides its key in the works list, where each piece is listed as named for some of the most influential people in Flavin’s life. This rare autobiographical glimpse into Flavin’s influences offers a lens with which to reapproach the austere entirety of the minimalist’s neon-lit oeuvre, which people will get the chance to do soon enough thanks to a forthcoming retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao curated by the fabulous Lauren Hinkson. Think of European Couples as the preface to a much larger conversation.
Stan Douglas @ Jeu de Paume
Stan Douglas is one of the few filmmakers that is able to also work as a fine artist. He is one of the best era jumpers out there; Douglas’s research and touch make his work have a time-traveling quality few others land. There’s also a meticulousness of his pieces which are conceptual from the ground up, each detail contributing to Douglas’s examination of storytelling’s boundaries and the mediums we use to do it. His explorations arrive as immersive installation, razor-sharp photography, and recombinant videos, which never tell the same story the same way twice. Since his rise to prominence in the late 1980s, Douglas has stayed on the neck of technology—using its acceleration for his own interests in getting to the essential truths of storytelling. Jeu de Paume is taking on the task of putting these last three decades in perspective with Parallax, the first survey of Douglas in France. It will focus on realizing the breadth of Douglas’s work and the careful case he’s built over the years for why no image can be neutral. Expect this show to disassemble your convictions rather than erect new ones.
Kurt Schwitters @ Musée Picasso
There are few artists in the world as prevalent to contemporary art practice as Kurt Schwitters, whose assemblage work broke new genres that artists continue to mine, sometimes none the wiser of their forefathers. A contemporary of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, Schwitters was just as influential to the formation of midcentury thought via his cavalcade of related activities, from painting and sculpture to advertisements and magazine-making. The Musée Picasso is paying tribute to Schwitters by hosting the first French retrospective of his work in 30 years, titled Kurt Schwitters. Le chaos-monde. 1918-1948, which translates to “the chaotic world”. It’s a fitting exhibition name for an artist who has been described as a “one-man band” for the way he avoided containment in the spaces he frequented (from Dadaist gatherings to painterly circles), and for the cacophony of inspirations that emanates from his assemblages. For those uninitiated to Schwitters’s oeuvre, Le chaos-monde promises to be an education, with over 300 works assembled for the purpose by its curators Cécile Godefroy of MoMA and Johan Popelard of the Musée Picasso. Here is hoping the show makes a stop in New York.
Leonard Baby @ Half Gallery
Half Gallery has long been a launch point for art-world darlings, especially the ones with a flair for the cinematic, and Leonard Baby has it. Vive Le Baby! fills the Hôtel Grand Amour with paintings that look lifted from films nobody has made yet. A boy in bed nuzzled by a horse, a lone torso turning away from you, a Tuscan valley titled Scenes That Make Me Cry. In Vivre. Rire. Aimer., a couple sprints hand in hand past David’s Madame Récamier, Godard’s Louvre dash from Bande à part with the trio cut down to two. Baby paints thin and dry, in olives and bone and dust, the light coming in flat as an afternoon you slept through. The men are rendered with frank appetite and the desire is never in question, yet nothing here is consummated. Call it neo-miserabilism: tender, a little funereal—we are romanticizing nobody quite getting what they want.
The Making of Marie Antoinette @ Versailles
On the anniversary year of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, there has been much fanfare in recounting the historic takeover of the legendary palace by the director and her merry gang (Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman). Some of it is also seemingly unplanned (for instance, The Strokes are touring again). Other drops have been very meticulously calibrated, from a new tome of Andrew Durham’s set photographs to the Victoria & Albert museum’s exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, which closed in March having borrowed the film’s screen-used costumes and Manolo Blahniks for a survey of the queen’s long afterlife in fashion. London got the clothes. Versailles gets the film itself, in a major exhibition about its making hosted at the Petit Trianon, the château originally designed for Madame du Pompadour that was repurposed by Marie Antoinette into her dream idyll. It is at this particular corner of the Versailles landscape that much of the movie took place, and it feels a fitting place for it to return to celebrate its birthday. Of course nothing will be as lavish as what the original proprietor put together, nor what Coppola managed with her fearless set designers, but you can at least have a taste of cake.
