designboom LIVE · paris art week 2026 · 19 to 23 october
paris art week 2026
Anchored by the highly anticipated Art Basel Paris and Design Miami.Paris, Paris Art Week takes over the French capital from October 19 to 25, 2026. Join designboom on the ground as our editors track the pulse of the city in real time. Follow our live feed as we move in and out of the major fairs, intimate gallery openings, museum exhibitions, and exclusive events, bringing you quick snaps and direct dispatches straight from the crowds.
last update – 48 posts
day 1 · Oct 19, 2026
at the musée d’orsay for jenny holzer’s J’AI VU
Last night we attended the opening of Jenny Holzer’s J’AI VU, an exhibition conceived for and with the Musée d’Orsay.
Holzer offers text fragments from the museum’s archive and the historical period covered by its collection, disseminated across her signature media: monumental installations, projections onto the former railway station’s historic facade, engravings on stone benches and columns in variegated marbles, and luminous electronic displays.
a visit at the louvre
1/2
On Sunday we spent a few hours roaming the halls of the Louvre (right on time because the museum shut down today as student and union protesters blocked its main entrances 👀).
highlights from zurbarán 1598–1664
1/4
A small selection of the works we loved at the Louvre’s Zurbarán 1598–1664 exhibition. The museum presents an ambitious selection of Francisco de Zurbarán’s finest paintings, one of the greatest Spanish painters of the 17th century. The exhibition places great importance on his monumental paintings, commissioned by Andalusian monasteries, on which Zurbarán’s fame was built, as well as portraits and still lifes. On view until January 25, 2027.
ibrahim mahama’s things fall apart (2026)
Contemporary art is not just meant to produce beautiful, fancy exhibitions – even if we’re dealing with aesthetics and beauty, it has to deeply reflect the times we live in, or the question of time itself.
– Ibrahim Mahama
Loved this velvet screenprint with handstitched brass tears by German-Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku at the Fondation Cartier.
Opoku uses brass, a material that is widely used in Ghana, which she embroiders here and there onto her textiles. Like shards of light, in this piece, golden tears are scattered across a screenprint of a photograph of the artist in profile, amid a backdrop of trees with bare branches, awaiting their spring-time renewal.
Light projections on the museum’s facade along the Seine take place during the show’s opening week, from 7 to 11 pm nightly, October 18–22.
ibrahim mahama at the fondation cartier pour l’art contemporain
1/5
At the preview of Ibrahim Mahama’s The Harvest Season at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, opening to the public this Thursday, October 22. For his first major exhibition in Paris, the artist has transformed the Fondation’s new space on place du Palais-Royal into a living entity in resonance with the art centers he has founded in Tamale, northern Ghana. Mahama has invited nine artists and collectives to join him in the exhibition: Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Gideon Appah, James Barnor, the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, Courage Dzidula Kpodo & Postbox Ghana, Zohra Opoku, Tjaša Rener, Feda Wardak.
gideon appah: selection of works at fondation cartier
1/4
The Harvest Season includes a selection of works by Ghanaian artist Gideon Appah, who studied painting at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi between 2008 and 2012, at the same time as Ibrahim Mahama.
His canvases run on a tawny palette and mix family memory with the era of Ghanaian independence, and since 2020 he has been drawing his figures from Ghanaian newspapers of the 1950s to the 1980s, along with the cinema, the nightlife and the beach leisure they recorded.
The Pandamous Scrolls by Dorothy Akpene Amenuke at Fondation Cartier combine textiles, handmade paper, papyrus, and embroideries which can be read like hieroglyphs.
THE DESIGNBOOM GUIDE
Navigating Paris Art Week is an art form in itself. From the heavyweight fairs and monumental museum exhibitions to independent interventions hidden inside unexpected venues, the city shifts into a high-speed cultural marathon. To help you cut through the noise, we have mapped out the definitive guide to the week. Discover our editors’ curated picks and use our interactive, neighborhood-by-neighborhood map to build your ultimate route through Paris.
