Over the next nine days, Paris Fashion Week will draw the usual crowds to see sartorial heavyweights unveil their latest collections. For those looking to take a break from the commotion, there’s always the city’s galleries and museums. The crop of shows on view around Paris this March promise to transport you everywhere from Joseph Cornell’s home-studio (by way of Wes Anderson’s mind) to a high-octane tour through our warming world via the caustic lens of the late Martin Parr.
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“Recent Paintings” by Martial Raysse
Where: Templon
When: Through March 14
Why It’s Worth a Look: In his first show for Templon, the reclusive 89-year-old legend of French post-war art will display nearly 30 works from the last decade. This includes his monumental pair of canvases La Peur (Fear) and La Paix (Peace), both completed in 2023. La Peur, with its leaden hues and fire-and-brimstone subject matter recalls his childhood in which the Gestapo targeted his father, a member of the French Resistance during Nazi occupation. (Upon its completion, Raysse dedicated the painting to those affected by the war in Ukraine.)
Know Before You Go: Templon, which recently expanded with its first gallery in New York, was founded in 1966, the same year that Raysse was chosen to represent France at the Venice Biennale.
“Diving Divine” by Bettina Samson
Where: Sultana
When: Through March 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: What do lesbian feminist philosopher Monique Wittig, English Romantic poet William Blake, and Italian novelist Goliarda Sapienza all have in common? Their influence on Bettina Samson’s chamotte ceramic sculptures. Earthenware in texture, the abstractions take on tensile shapes evoking viscera, ribs, and cavities, ossified into masks, hands, and alien forms.
Know Before You Go: Inspired by Samson’s own experiences with chronic illness and invasive medical procedures, the sculptures invoke the mutability of the body, always opening and changing. The material, terra cotta that bubbles and warps, only underscores this porousness.
“Chnops” by Dove Allouche
Where: Peter Freeman, Inc.
When: Through April 4
Why It’s Worth a Look: How to visualize the primal units of life has been up for artistic and scientific interpretation ever since the Greek philosopher Democritus proposed that all things were made of minuscule particles called “atoms” back in 400 BCE. During an artist’s residency supported by Villa Albertine and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Texas in 2021, Dove Allouche took his own stab at it with his 96-photo series “Tableau Périodique.” On display here are the six elements essential for all life on Earth: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur.
Know Before You Go: At Peter Freeman, Allouche will also unveil a new photo series, “Halley,” 2024-25. Named for Edmund Halley, who helped demystify the arcs of comets in the night sky, the series explores the comet as another elemental presence in the cosmos, made from some of the oldest matter in the universe.
“Résurrectine” by Giangiacomo Rossetti
Where: Mendes Wood DM
When: Through March 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: Rossetti’s show gleans its name from the 1914 Raymond Roussel novel Locus Solus in which the main character uses two elixirs of life (one of them called “résurrectine”) to reanimate the dead and have them perform moments from their past lives. Just as Roussel was preoccupied with “lost histories,” Rossetti plucks figures from other chapters in art for another spin around the white cube.
Know Before You Go: Rossetti has established himself as a keen student of Classical and Renaissance art history. It won’t hurt to brush up on your art history before the show—keep an eye out for references to Renoir’s The Umbrellas, 1880-86; Francesco Hayez’s Mary Magdalene as a Hermit, 1833; Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, 1489-91; the 18th-century French artist Jean-Siméon Chardin; and—oh you get the idea.
“All is Portraiture” by Barkley L. Hendricks
Where: Marian Goodman
When: Through April 4
Why It’s Worth a Look: Barkley L. Hendricks’s life-sized portraits reinvented representations of Black Americans in Modern art with their rich attention to personality, specificity, and style. But Hendricks worked in a wide variety of mediums. He crafted works on paper inspired by solar eclipses and astrological events. In the ’60s and ’70s, he created a series of geometric paintings devoted to basketball. And in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he painted landscapes inspired by Jamaica. This exhibition delves into these lesser-known sides of Hendricks’s practice.
Know Before You Go: Before Hendricks was a painter, he was a professional photographer and continued to take photos over his entire five-decade career. He was especially interested in street scenes, and this exhibition presents an array of them from Southfield, Jamaica, to New London, Connecticut.
“Pharmakon”
Where: Galerie Chantal Crousel
When: Through March 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: Of all the colors, few have associations as varied and ambiguous as green. One moment it’s synonymous with health and nature, the next it’s sickly and rotted. Green is envious, abundant, wealthy, lucky, and inexperienced all at once. Much like the Greek word pharmakon, which can mean both poison and its cure, the hue’s ambivalence is what makes it so artistically activating. That quandary forms the backbone of this show.
Know Before You Go: The show brings together a suite of artists, living and dead, across generations to consider the color green. Expect to see works from the likes of Cosima von Bonin, Mimosa Echard, Pierre Huyghe, Brook Hsu, Felix González-Torres, Wade Guyton, and more.
“The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson”
Where: Gagosian
When: Through March 14
Why It’s Worth a Look: Conceived by curator Jasper Sharp, this installation utilizes Wes Anderson’s knack for meticulous mise-en-scène (along with the help of longtime collaborator and exhibition designer Cécile Degos) to recreate the studio of Joseph Cornell. The assemblage artist was obsessed with the ephemera of everyday life—feathers, buttons, maps, children’s toys, seashells, glasses, all of which were heavily featured in his shadow boxes. As he collected, his Queens, New York studio came to become a sort of hybrid between a toy store and a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Know Before You Go: So how does the “studio” of an artist who never left the United States end up in Paris? The European city loomed large in Cornell’s imagination. He dedicated dozens of works to Paris’s landmarks, iconic figures, and myths, and he collected postcards, guidebooks, and writings about the city.
“Damp Field” by Tornike Robakidze
Where: Lo Brutto Stahl
When: Through March 14
Why It’s Worth a Look: The second solo show at Lo Brutto Stahl from the Paris-based Georgian artist centers on a collection of muted memento mori paintings. On these nine canvases, skulls leer over bowls of fruit, watch over sleeping figures, and gaze upon fields of green.
Know Before You Go: Robakidze’s use of watercolors on densely textured canvases produces a sense of faintness, fading, and echoes, like a dream drifting away upon waking.
“Alain Guiraudie”
Where: Crèvecoeur
When: Through March 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: Alain Guiraudie’s new series has one foot in the world of photography and one in the world of fiction. The elements presented here—a lush forest, a stone cottage, a man in a priest’s cassock, a nude man beside him—hint at a larger story about desire, refuge, and redemption. It’s up to the viewer to put those pieces together.
Know Before You Go: Better known as a filmmaker, Guiraudie won the Queer Palm and Un Certain Regard prize for Best Director at Cannes in 2013 for the now-cult Strangers by the Lake. In 2024, he rose to further prominence in the States with Misericordia.
“Martin Parr: Global Warning”
Where: Jeu de Paume
When: Through May 24
Why It’s Worth a Look: In 2026, we know that global polycrisis means a lot more than the planet getting hotter. This selection of the late British photographer’s work illuminates the complex webs of interdependence, exploitation, and careless consumption that are depleting our planet’s resources.
Know Before You Go: There’s tourists crowded together on bucolic Mediterranean sailboats. There’s tractors huffing exhaust and biddies pushing shopping carts. There’s Las Vegas! Through it all, Parr’s layered wit and keen sense of just when to click the camera presents a satire that is equal parts tender and relentless.
“La trame de l’existence” by Magdalena Abakanowicz
Where: Musée Bourdelle
When: Through April 12
Why It’s Worth a Look: As a pioneering textile artist and one of the major Polish artists of the 20th century, this exhibition follows Abakanowicz’s career chronologically from her early years as a painter to her suspended textile sculptures of the ’60s to her focus on the human body in the ’70s and her Venice Biennale debut in the ’80s.
Know Before You Go: This is the first major exhibition of Abakanowicz’s work in France, traveling to the Musée Bourdelle after showing at the Tate Modern in London in 2023. The show is vast: 33 sculptural installations, 10 textile works, and dozens of drawings and photographs.
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