The Best Shows to See in Paris

Kai Althoff | Tramps | 10 September – 7 December 

A transatlantic transplant from New York’s Lower East Side, the exhibition space Tramps, founded by Parinaz Mogadassi, has opened a new location in the Passage du Caire, Paris’s oldest covered shopping arcade. The move is being marked with a solo by Kai Althoff, the artiste provocateur whose work it has steadfastly mounted since 2011. Three recent paintings (all Untitled, 2025) depict the movement of bodies in both homely and nondescript urban settings. Their frames are off-kilter, as if the paintings themselves were still wobbly from a late night out. A maze of partition walls in grey and green stucco is hung with drawings as well as photos of Althoff’s work – fleeting moments captured in his house and studios – by artist and psychoanalyst Yair Oelbaum, a close collaborator of the artist. The whole is spun into a kind of daydream scenario in which works come together in drunken reverie.

Gerhard Richter | Fondation Louis Vuitton | 17 October 2025 – 2 March 2026

More than sixty years of art-making, ‘condensed’ into 275 works: this retrospective calls for stamina from the get-go. From photorealism that veers towards self-erasure – or even U-turns into abstraction – to strict greyscale palettes that metamorphose into explosions of pure colour, via barely-there brushstrokes that make way for a hard-to-ignore gestural presence, there is little, if anything, that Gerhard Richter hasn’t done when it comes to painting. Yet what transpires is a consistent awareness of the weight of history and the responsibility of representation that comes with it. Table (1962), the earliest painting on view, depicts the titular object half concealed by a big smudge of grey across the canvas, while one of his latest series, ‘Birkenau’ (2014), deals with the impossibility of giving form to the unspeakable.

Dean Sameshima | Good or Trash | 17 October – 15 November 

What is a portrait if the subject – or figure – is nowhere to be found? At recently opened gallery Good or Trash, founded by artist Kévin Blinderman, Dean Sameshima shows a selection of his ‘Anonymous Portrait’ series (2018–ongoing): monochrome canvases, each one screen-printed with a different signifier (‘Homosexual’, ‘Torso’, ‘Perfect Moment’), each time prefixed by the same adjective: ‘Anonymous’. The compositions carry their own distinct colour field and font, but the cloak of anonymity remains a constant. Like Sameshima’s earlier documentation of porn cinemas teetering on the brink of extinction and photographs of glory holes, or the concert ticket stubs and flyers that he has collected over the years and posts regularly on his Instagram, these are queer portraits that can just as easily be seen as attuned to an individual as to a wider community.

‘Sorry Sun’ | Fondation Pernod Ricard | 16 September – 31 October

Despite the title, there’s little warmth to be found in ‘Sorry Sun’, where guest curator Liberty Adrien has chosen to use the impersonal, corporate nature of the Fondation Pernod Ricard building and its neighbourhood as a conceptual – and literal – frame for works by Saodat Ismailova, Alexandre Khondji and Hélène Yamba-Guimbi. All of the artists undertake excavations of spaces and places; in Khondji’s case (Triple Insert, 2025), it is an actual endoscopy of the foundation’s architecture – cables, pipes and all – streamed on flat-screen monitors. Nearby, the red velvet mattresses in Ismailova’s film installation 18,000 Worlds (2023) are a welcome invitation for weary bodies, my own included. The work is a descent into a mise en abyme of sorts: the title refers to a Persian and Central Asian concept that sees this world nestled within 18,000 other existing universes.

Jo Spence | Treize | 17 October – 23 November

Beginning in 1980 and continuing until her death in 1992, Jo Spence amassed cheap, shop-bought notebooks, using them to jot down diaristic notes and ruminations; sketches for projects and works in progress; snapshots of friends, family and photo-therapy models; as well as news clippings and advertisements documenting the reality of being working-class, female, an artist and a cancer patient in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – all annotated in her signature sardonic style. Forty pieces from this rich archive, which seamlessly blend all aspects of the artist and photographer’s life and practice – the intimate with the public-facing, therapy with pedagogy – are held in the Pompidou Centre’s Bibliothèque Kandinsky. Too fragile to be handled, they have never been shown to the public until now, where they form the basis of curator Georgia René-Worms’s research-oriented exhibition at Treize, which stays faithful to the warmth, frustration, anger and dark humour of Spence’s work.

Melvin Edwards | Palais de Tokyo | 22 October 2025 – 15 February 2026

How to inject violence, the visceral, musicality and rhythm into the cold, modernist aesthetic of formalist abstraction? In their title and materiality, Melvin Edwards’s ‘Lynch Fragments’ (1963–2016) – small assemblages of welded metal objects and industrial materials, including spikes, chains and scissors – suggest the charge of history and the pain inflicted on non-white bodies, simultaneously evoking memories of slavery and police brutality. Equally mesmerizing are Edwards’s barbed-wire sculptures – tender and threatening all at once, imperceptible until it’s almost too late – and the pieces made in homage to, or in collaboration with, his late wife, the poet and performer Jayne Cortez. His resolute, quiet works cast a critical eye on cultural and socio-economic realities, specifically in the US, as well as the lacunae of its historical memory.

‘Reason Roulette’ | ESSAIS | 19 October – 29 November 

It’s refreshing to stumble occasionally upon an exhibition that doesn’t pretend to solve the world’s problems or address this or that issue-of-the-moment. ‘Reason Roulette’ is just the ticket. Through the work of eight artists currently or recently based in New York, the exhibition is a mixed portrait of the city, or the idea behind it: a contradictory amalgam of urban neuroses, calm oases and cut-throat figures just trying to make do. Sam Anderson’s creepy doll figure (Waxy Yellow Buildup, 2025), Georgia Gardner Gray’s drawing of a pinstripe-suited boss lady (Madonna, 2025), Coco Young’s Monet-esque painting of a Central Park bridge (Bow Bridge, 2025) and Sadaf H. Nava’s ink rendering of distorted, voluptuous bodies towering above and bleeding into a typical skyscraper horizon (New York New York, 2023): the show evokes the distant memory of a New York that I love and miss.

Lenard Giller | Petrine | 20 October – 20 December 

To inaugurate Petrine’s new space – just down the street from its original, in the 10th arrondissement – Lenard Giller has made it deliberately hard to navigate. A large tree fragment, lying on its side, takes up most of the basement, while a smaller one is wedged into the storage room (It remains where it falls, unless otherwise agreed upon with the municipality, 2025). In a subtle play on the transitional and transactional nature of commercial galleries, the artist includes standard-size cardboard boxes filled with 25 kilograms of brass-shavings collected from workshops in Rome (Buying Brass, 2025), having paid the market price for the metal according to its weight. Systems of measurement and standardization, the tug of war between originals and facsimiles, raw materials and their processed counterparts: all rear their heads through framed photographs, drawings and sculptural objects subtly positioned around the space.

^{Main image: Gerhard Richter, Kerze (Candle), 1982, oil on canvas, 95 × 90 cm. Courtesy: Collection Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes and © Gerhard Richter 2025}