9 Essential Museum Exhibitions to Visit in Paris
From historical surveys of Mary Cassatt and Claude Monet to overviews of the work of contemporary artists, including Florian Krewer, Kennedy Yanko, and Yu Nishimura
With Art Basel Paris returning to the remarkable Grand Palais for the third year since its full renovation, and numerous other art and design fairs taking place in the City of Light this week, Paris is the place to be. Along with London and New York, the French capital is one of the international art hotspots right now, and the city’s institutions are presenting some of their best shows during the October fairs.
From an expansive photography exhibition spanning historical to contemporary images from the Pinault Collection—celebrating the bicentenary of the invention of photography—at the Bourse de Commerce, to historical surveys of works by Mary Cassatt at the Musée d’Orsay and by Claude Monet at the Musée de l’Orangerie, to overviews of the work of contemporary artists including Florian Krewer at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Kennedy Yanko at Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Yu Nishimura at Lafayette Anticipations, and Prune Nourry at the Petit Palais, Galerie has rounded up the top institutional shows to visit during your stay in Paris.
1. Remember Me | Bourse de Commerce
Spanning historical photographs to contemporary images, from Eugène Atgetto, Annie Leibovitz, and from Claude Cahun to Tyler Mitchell, via Man Ray—whose iconic 1926 Surrealist photograph Noire et Blanche (Black and White) contrasts an African mask with the legendary artist’s model and singer Kiki de Montparnasse—and Francesca Woodman, the Pinault Collection embraces the full history of photography.
Entitled “Remember Me,” after a work by Barbara Kruger—who is also presenting a striking installation in the museum’s Rotunda—the exhibition pays tribute to the medium by presenting the collection on the bicentenary of photography’s invention. Conceived as a free-ranging journey without chronological order, it brings together unexpected correspondences and dialogues across genres and eras, offering viewers an open, sensory experience of photography’s history.
Through January 18
2. Florian Krewer | Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
Born in Germany and based in New York, Florian Krewer is known for his emotionally charged, large-scale, figurative paintings. After studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a master’s student under Peter Doig, he moved to New York in 2020 and established a studio in the South Bronx, which has strongly shaped his recent work. Recognized for exploring vulnerability, desire, isolation, masculinity, and hidden identities, Krewer creates monumental, expressionistic oil paintings with vibrant palettes that delve into the raw energy and psychological complexity of contemporary urban life.
The artist’s first solo exhibition in France, “Woven Thin,” brings together 16 large-scale paintings from the museum’s collection, including several works shown for the first time. Arranged in a dense, carefully conceived display, the paintings create a rich pictorial panorama that reflects the intensity of the artist’s practice and immerses viewers in his dreamlike world. Drawing on both lived experience and fantasy, he populates his ethereal landscapes and interiors with a wide-ranging cast of characters, stripped of context and left to assume lives of their own.
Through January 4
3. Kennedy Yanko | Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine
American sculptor, painter, and installation artist Kennedy Yanko creates monumental, abstract sculptures that blur the line between painting and industrial form, making heavy industrial materials appear fluid, weightless, and organic. Her practice centers on transforming rigid, heavy materials into soft, textile-like arrangements by combining poured paint skins with salvaged-metal armatures. Draping lush, colorful paint skins over crushed steel, Yanko creates massive, expressive structures that seem suspended mid-flight.
The artist’s first major presentation in Paris, “Ce qui nous rassemble” (What brings us together), places a new body of Yanko’s sculptures throughout the institution’s sweeping galleries. Her signature salvaged metal and paint skins appear alongside full-scale casts of historic French architecture, with the Eiffel Tower visible through the museum’s windows. Following Yanko’s presentation in “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, this exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of creation, femininity, sexuality, and the interplay of masculine and feminine energies. At its center is what Yanko calls a magnetizing force—the generative energy produced by attraction and union, and the creative potential that emerges when seemingly opposing forces relate.
Through January 4
4. Mary Cassatt | Musée d’Orsay
Mary Cassatt was a pioneering American painter and printmaker who became the only American artist—and one of only a few women—to officially join the French Impressionist movement and exhibit with it in Paris. Born in Pennsylvania, she spent most of her adult life in France, where her close friend Edgar Degas invited her to exhibit alongside avant-garde masters, including Claude Monet. Cassatt is celebrated for challenging traditional artistic boundaries, portraying women’s inner autonomy, and serving as a vital link between French Impressionism and wealthy American art collectors.
Marking the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s death, the museum is presenting a survey exhibition spanning her entire career. Organized in collaboration with London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition features nearly 80 paintings, pastels, and prints, offering fresh perspectives on her work through unpublished letters and previously untapped sources. Rarely seen works from European public and private collections are shown alongside paintings and pastels from American collections that are seldom exhibited outside the United States.
Through January 31
5. Louise Bourgeois | Bibliothèque nationale de France – Site Richelieu
A highly influential French-American artist and sculptor known for her deeply psychological, confessional, and avant-garde work, Louise Bourgeois grew up helping her family restore antique tapestries before studying art. Born in Paris, she moved to New York in 1938, where she used art therapy to work through childhood trauma, anxiety, and complex family dynamics. Although her work explored female sexuality, motherhood, and domesticity in depth, she strongly resisted being confined to tidy categories such as feminist art or being linked to specific movements.
Presented by the Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, this exhibition brings together the institutions’ collections for the first time to celebrate Bourgeois’s graphic work. After moving to New York, she discovered printmaking, which became central to her work alongside drawing and sculpture. The exhibition begins with a 1942 self-portrait and her earliest prints, including a landmark portfolio pairing text and images. It continues with tangled, nerve- and muscle-like drawings, then moves to works that merge anatomy, plants, architecture, and organic forms, while a central series on large sheets explores aging, pain, and existential anxiety. The exhibition concludes with red-ink and fabric-dyed works evoking flesh, blood, and motherhood, including pregnant figures that could be male or female, blurring gender boundaries.
Through February 21
6. Irving Penn | MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie
Irving Penn was one of the 20th century’s most influential American photographers, known for bridging commercial fashion, editorial portraiture, and fine art. Working primarily for Vogue for nearly 70 years, he transformed modern photography by replacing elaborate, stiff sets with stark, minimalist elegance, precise compositions, and a distinctive graphic simplicity. Penn reshaped the genre by placing high-fashion models against simple gray or white backdrops, highlighting the clothing’s lines and shapes, and elevating ordinary, overlooked objects into high art.
Produced in close collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation and the Nicola Erni Collection, “Penn & Fashion” traces his career chronologically, from 1947 to 2008. It opens with his legendary photographs of 1950s Parisian haute couture, including collections by Dior and Balenciaga, modeled by some of the era’s greatest stars. In the 1970s, Penn turned his lens to the designs of Ungaro and Courrèges, followed in the next decade by those of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. The exhibition also features his groundbreaking collaboration with Japanese designer Issey Miyake, whose sculptural garments perfectly complemented Penn’s minimalist photographic style.
Through January 17
7. Yu Nishimura | Lafayette Anticipations
A contemporary Japanese artist known for ethereal, dreamlike works that explore memory, time, and the poetry of everyday life, Yu Nishimura creates multilayered oil and tempera paintings and delicate works on paper that blur the line between portraiture and landscape. His work captures the atmosphere of everyday domestic life, featuring friends, family, pets, domestic interiors, quiet suburban settings, urban woods, and the sea—a recurring subject that profoundly influenced him in childhood.
The artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in France, “Towards a Sea,” brings together approximately 50 works created over the past decade, including some made specifically for the exhibition. Conceived as a meditative stroll, the exhibition weaves together human and animal figures with plant and mineral motifs, all intertwined with the marine element. In his works, as in our memories, imagination merges with reality in enigmatic representations, where places permeate and haunt the figures. Each work reveals the artist’s focus on the beauty of the ordinary and the minute, as well as the mysterious, complex nature of beings and things—speaking to the transience of what surrounds and passes through us while capturing a world held in suspension.
Through January 3
8. Claude Monet | Musée de l’Orangerie
Claude Monet was a pioneering French painter and co-founder of the Impressionist movement, helping coin the term “Impressionism.” Known for his radical approach to art, he rejected the Paris Salon’s rigid academic traditions and painted en plein air. Using quick, visible brushstrokes and a vibrant, unadulterated palette, Monet captured the fleeting sensory impressions of a moment—especially the changing effects of light, color, and atmosphere. Rather than depicting a subject as static, he revisited the same locations in his celebrated series paintings, capturing them at different times of day, in different seasons, and under varying weather conditions.
Marking the centenary of the painter’s death, the exhibition “Painting Time” examines how his body of work engages with time. In the 1870s, he was regarded as the quintessential Impressionist, despite participating in only five group exhibitions. His work became synonymous with the “new painting,” embodying the movement’s defining qualities: outdoor settings, rapid brushstrokes, and clear harmonies that captured fleeting impressions. This approach led to one of Impressionism’s most remarkable extensions. In the 1890s, series ranging from The Cathedrals to The Poplars seemed to dissect time. The Water Lilies series, his final testament and part of the museum’s collection, resolved fragmentation by merging it into a continuum.
Through January 25
9. Prune Nourry | Petit Palais
An acclaimed French multidisciplinary artist, Prune Nourry explores the intersections of science, anthropology, and feminism through immersive, long-term conceptual projects. Working between Paris and New York, she is renowned for large-scale, thought-provoking installations, performances, films, and sculptures that interrogate bioethics, gender selection, the artificial evolution of humankind, and the female body’s relationship to healing and resilience. For one of her most famous works—inspired by China’s ancient Terracotta Army—she sculpted a life-sized army of 108 clay schoolgirls to confront China’s demographic imbalance and cultural preference for sons over daughters.
For her “Visionaries” exhibition, Nourry presents a selection of little-known female sculptors, including those overlooked by art history. At her request, three art historians spent a year researching the writings and photographic portraits of eighteen female sculptors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The group includes Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Sarah Bernhardt, and others. Inspired by their artistic quality and commitment, Nourry sculpted portraits of all eighteen “visionary” women, which are displayed in the Petit Palais’s collections, on the museum’s outer esplanade, and in its gardens.
Through January 24