“The Idea of a City” by Shelby Jackson
Where: Lo Brutto Stahl
When: Through November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: Artists often acquire a substantial art collection, but how many art dealers become artists in their own right? After showing in group exhibitions over the past five years in Paris, New York, and Prague, Shelby Jackson, founder of 15 Orient, will have his first solo at Lo Brutto Stahl.
Know Before You Go: Jackson will show paintings, objects, and works on paper from the last five years. His work gives the illusion of candlelight—geometric scapes rendered in burnt oranges, luminous ochres, and dense greens. The worlds he fashions are oddly empty and the figures recall wooden manikins, oddly jointed and ready to be projected upon.
“IN ALIENS WE TRUST” by Rirkrit Tiravanija
Where: Galerie Chantal Crousel
When: Through November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: What does it mean to be alien? An extraterrestrial. Something unfamiliar. A person who is othered by the law. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s new installation inverts the official motto of the United States—implemented during the Eisenhower administration to bolster Americans in the fight against communism and “enemies from within”—to explore every facet of the word, from the uncanny to the socially alienated.
Know Before You Go: The installation includes a slew of new canvases full of images and text ripped from the headlines, but the centerpiece of the exhibition are two hairy, ape-like figures, like a pair of cavemen escaped from a Natural History Museum diorama. The sculptures, the artist’s rendering of himself and his friend Udomsak Krisanamis as humanity’s prehistoric ancestors, stare in wonder at a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade comb sculpture. What is familiar in one time can be alien in another; through art even the most ordinary object can once again be made surreal.
“At the Excavation Site” by Tomasz Kowalski
Where: Crèvecoeur
When: Through November 29
Why It’s Worth a Look: Tomasz Kowalski presents a static theater within his hazy, muted paintings. The viewer often finds themselves peering through doors left ajar, window slats, or the dreamlike lens of a camera. The result is a voyeuristic glimpse into the artist’s imagination.
Know Before You Go: In Kowalski’s figurations, the human body becomes a prop while the mind and all of its traumas, tics, and tendencies become the boundless stage for the dramas of human life.
“Reena Spauldings Fine Art Presents: The Family Guns”
Where: Galerie Hussenot
When: Through November 16
Why It’s Worth a Look: This eclectic group show features the work of Jacqueline Humphries, Marc Kokopeli, Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, SoiL Thornton, and more in a medium-spanning mix of abstraction, Pop, and conceptual work.
Know Before You Go: Reena Spaulings—an art collective from Carissa Rodriguez, John Kelsey, and Emily Sundblad—has produced everything from gallery shows to a novel. These days, the persona has been serving as a curatorial voice, pulling together shows at Galerie Hussenot and JUBG Space in Cologne, Germany.
“Les nuées sont des vagabonds qui dérivent” by Yann Stéphane Bisso
Where: Exo Exo
When: Through December 6
Why It’s Worth a Look: The sky is the central element in a new series of paintings presented by Yann Stéphane Bisso, who was born in Cameroon and lives in Geneva. Birds whirl together in great flocks while nebulous clouds amble by like “drifting vagabonds,” in this meditation on the “collective migratory adventure,” as Exo Exo co-founder Elisa Rigoulet describes it. After all, birds don’t travel alone.
Know Before You Go: In Bisso’s canvases, the ghosts of ancestors travel next to celestial bodies, suggesting the cyclical and transitory nature of all people and things.
“Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience”
Where: Gagosian Le Bourget
When: Through April 18, 2026
Why It’s Worth a Look: This Gagosian exhibition centers around the late Walter De Maria’s final sculpture, Truck Trilogy, which retrofitted three classic 1950s Chevrolet Advance Design 3100 pick-up trucks with glistening steel rods set in wood in each truck bed. The sculpture is visually and thematically echoed by additional rarely shown sculptures, drawings, and archival materials that similarly focus on sequential meaning and repetition.
Know Before You Go: This is the first time Truck Trilogy is being shown outside the United States, and only the second time it’s been exhibited ever. The other was at Dia Beacon, from 2017 to 2019.
“This Is Dedicated to the One I Love” by Jeffrey Gibson
Where: Hauser & Wirth
When: Through December 20
Why It’s Worth a Look: Renowned Choctaw-Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson invigorates his viewers with beads, sequins, jingle dresses, and technicolor dreamstuff. In Paris, he’ll debut three new groups of paintings alongside new works from his punching bag series and free-standing head sculptures inspired by Mississippi head pots, a form of pre-Columbian North American ceramics.
Know Before You Go: Gibson is hot off a 2024 showing at the Venice Biennale and installations mounted at the Met and the Kunsthaus Zürich. His soft-focus abstractions with beaded frames are explorations of what Gibson calls the “psycho-prismatic,” drawing from Indigenous motifs and 19th-century color studies.
“Right Body, Wrong Time“ by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
Where: Marcelle Alix
When: Through January 10, 2026
Why It’s Worth a Look: Artist duo Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz have always been intrigued by the political tensions of gendered performance. Whether it’s filming Werner Hirsch in a blonde beehive, reenacting an interview with transgressive gay writer Jean Genet, or clad in leather reciting a radical leftist Weather Underground text, they relish the collision of social constraint and political passion.
Know Before You Go: The pair will display new video works including All The Things She Said, 2025, featuring government whistle-blower Chelsea Manning DJing at an empty Berlin nightclub. The piece’s title riffs on the breakthrough hit single of Russian teen pop duo t.A.T.u (who notoriously pretended to be lesbians as a publicity stunt), further needling at notions of gender, performance, and queer liberation. Yes, it’s also the Red Scare theme song.
“Paul Sietsema”
Where: Marian Goodman
When: Through December 20
Why It’s Worth a Look: The life of an object is a hard one. Most are designed to be used and eventually discarded. Even the ones that don’t fall into disrepair may become obsolete—a landline, a typewriter—and instead be elevated to the status of symbol without function. In seven new works, Paul Sietsema toys with the actual and symbolic value of objects by making sculptures of useless technology and painting on the backsides of Jackson Pollock works.
Know Before You Go: The show will also display a selection of Sietsema’s past works from 2000-09, including two 16mm films, the artist’s first medium. There’s also a cheeky sculpture made of coat check tags collected for garments never retrieved, another nod to the eventual disposal of all things.
“Door to the Cosmos”
Where: Mariane Ibrahim
When: Through December 13
Why It’s Worth a Look: The night sky was one of the first repositories for human imagination. Constellations became the canvas upon which ancient humans projected cosmic dramas, from epic battles between heroes and gods to monsters and cunning tricksters. This group show uses the heavens as a jumping off point for work from Nick Cave, Michi Meko, Zohra Opoku, and George Clinton (yes, of Parliament-Funkadelic fame.)
Know Before You Go: Cave takes on gun violence with a piece based on the tumultuous brain scans of young Black men living with PTSD. Opoku uses traditional West African indigo dye to create a monumental painting inspired by ancient Egyptian mythology and the Book of the Dead. Meko puts the night sky, street art, and fishing into compelling conversation. And Clinton, in the first European showing of his work, takes over a whole room with paintings and sculptures all rooted in his pioneering Afrofuturist vision.
“Pearl Lines Paris” by Walter Price
Where: Modern Art
When: Through November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: Can an abstraction teach us something new about the current moment? Walter Price thinks so. With his latest series of blue paintings, Price meditates on an era when truth and the search for it has all but been abandoned.
Know Before You Go: Price distills the confusion, social alienation, and misinformation of the day into basic visual elements. A dotted line comes to signify the fragmented social and political worlds we live in, where algorithms keep us in echo chambers that confirm our preexisting biases. A deep cobalt color palette conveys the malaise of a disconnected world but also simmering rage, like the hottest point of a flame.
“It’s important to have ur fangs out at the end of the world” by Precious Okoyomon
Where: Mendes Wood DM
When: Through January 17, 2026
Why It’s Worth a Look: Who remembers the photo of a dog sitting in a room on fire and blithely declaring, “This is fine.” Precious Okoyomon takes things one step further. A cute, cuddly bear sits in the middle of a bucolic field in flames; she lifts her legs and starts playing. Through wallpaper, drawings, and sickeningly adorable bear sculptures, their eyes aglow with apocalyptic fire, Okoyomon explores vulnerability, pleasure, and soft-core abandon in the time of climate polycrisis.
Know Before You Go: Okoyomon’s work largely centers around ecology, the natural world, colonization, and race, a practice that they extended as gardens editor for the upcoming issue of CULTURED at Home.
“Dash Snow: Carrion”
Where: Morán Morán
When: October 21 – November 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: The inaugural show at the gallery’s Paris pop-up location in the Marais will focus on the Polaroid photographs of graffiti artist, zine-maker, and photographer Dash Snow. The artist captured the delirium of the post-9/11, pre-social media era. His was a world of slackers, skaters, hipsters, and squatters, all in the face of rampant consumerism, jingoism, and a celebrity culture gone mad.
Know Before You Go: A downtown figure, Snow was a bit of art world royalty, born into the de Menil family. He died of a drug overdose in 2009 at just 27 years old.
“TRAP”
Where: Derouillon
When: Through November 22
Why It’s Worth a Look: Is all art infused with political commentary a “trap,” or is there the possibility of pushing further into something real and revolutionary? Here, curator Simon Gerard tries to identify the root cause of the art world’s tepid response to global affairs. “Is it because of oversharing artists? Simping curators? Lazy critics?” he asks. Head to Derouillon to find out.
Know Before You Go: The show features work from Lutz Bacher, Martine Syms, Christelle Oyiri, and more. Prepare yourself for cast toilets and gilded angels quietly judging from above.
“Un jour” by Helene Appel
Where: Semiose
When: Through November 15
Why It’s Worth a Look: Helene Appel renders everyday objects with a surgeon’s precision. While the trend of hyper-realistic, painted scenes has largely fallen out of vogue, Appel drills into the distinct textural specificities of objects: racks of lamb, sandy footprints, a well-loved envelope. Her taken-from-life subjects take on an outsized importance, capturing the tranquility of soapy water, a freshly dried duvet, and nestled cobblestones.
Know Before You Go: Appel’s show title reflects the simplicity of her artistic outlook: “a day.” It’s observational, almost objective, although there’s no hint of showing off as she captures an object or a space. Instead, Appel is interested in the endless variety of everyday life.
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