Beyond Art Basel: Five Paris Exhibitions to Explore

Paris comes into its own in October, when Art Basel returns to the Grand Palais from 23 to 25 October and the city’s cultural calendar gathers pace around it. Across museums and galleries, the week offers an unusually rich mix: from Gustav Fayet’s singular vision and Cézanne’s enduring influence to four decades of fashion, Lee Krasner’s charged abstractions and Elmgreen & Dragset’s wry interventions. Here are five exhibitions to seek out while in Paris this Art Basel week.

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889. Oil on canvas

Gustave Fayet, Fondation Louis Vuitton
9 October 2026–8 March 2027

The name may be less familiar than the artists he collected. Gustave Fayet was an early champion of Van Gogh, a devoted supporter of Odilon Redon and a collector whose holdings of Gauguin amounted to a private museum in their own right. At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gustave Fayet, Collectionneur – Créateur reunites more than 250 works from his dispersed collection, revealing an eye that recognised modern art while much of his own world was still catching up.

Give yourself time for Fayet’s own creations, too. Paintings, ceramics, carpets and textile designs reveal how freely his imagination moved between collecting and making. His connections to Paul Poiret, Jacques Doucet and Jeanne Lanvin add another dimension to a life in which art extended well beyond the picture frame.

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, c. 1887. Oil on canvas. 

Cézanne et nous, Grand Palais
23 September 2026–17 January 2027

A mountain, a group of bathers, the arrangement of objects on a table: Cézanne’s subjects continue to offer painters somewhere to begin. Cézanne et nous follows that influence across more than a century, placing his work alongside artists including Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley and Peter Doig.

With nearly 180 works, the exhibition traces how successive generations have taken his ideas apart and made something of their own. The pleasure is in those shifts: a familiar composition acquiring a different rhythm, or a landscape opening towards abstraction. During a week devoted to what comes next, it offers a chance to reconsider the painter to whom so much keeps returning.

Installation view of LOOK: 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 2026. Photo: Christophe Dellière. Courtesy Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

Look! 40 Years of Fashion at the Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs
30 September 2026–4 April 2027.

On rue de Rivoli, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs turns its attention to what happens before a garment reaches the runway, and long after it leaves. Celebrating forty years since the Musée des Arts de la Mode opened within its walls, Look! brings together forty emblematic outfits with a view into the work that gives fashion its lasting presence.

Sketches, patterns and fashion imagery sit alongside the less visible processes of conservation, restoration and display. It is a satisfying change of scale from a week of looking at paintings: an invitation to consider a seam, a silhouette and the decisions that allow clothes to become part of cultural memory.

Lee Krasner, Comet, 1966–70. Oil on canvas, 70 × 86 in. © 2026 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Christopher Stach.

Lee Krasner at Gagosian
19 October–18 December 2026

For all the renewed attention to Lee Krasner, this is her first solo exhibition in France. Gagosian’s rue de Ponthieu gallery concentrates on paintings and works on paper from the 1960s, a pivotal decade in which her gestural abstractions became increasingly vibrant and her distinctive artistic voice gained recognition.

The focused selection gives that period room to speak, with colour and gesture at the centre of the encounter. Opening just ahead of the fair, it is a particularly timely stop for anyone following the wider reassessment of Krasner’s place in postwar painting.

Elmgreen & Dragset, The Examiner, Fig. 3 (Black Bronze), 2025. Bronze and patina, 152.3 × 51.4 × 94 cm. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Max Hetzler. 

Elmgreen & Dragset at Galerie Max Hetzler
19 October–16 December 2026

Finish in the Marais, where things become stranger. For Les Fous d’En Face, Elmgreen & Dragset occupy Max Hetzler’s two spaces on rue du Temple with three new installations: an exhausted young boxer with no opponent in sight, an enormous steel clown nose accompanied by recorded applause, and a monumental figure strapped to the roof of a vintage Fiat 500.

The absurdity draws you in; the unease takes longer to settle. Details from the artists’ own histories run through these scenes, lending a personal edge to questions of ambition, performance and vulnerability. Across the two galleries, the story remains tantalisingly unresolved. Leave a little time to cross the street and look again.

Keep Paris on your cultural calendar long after the fair closes. Members will find more to see and do in the app, while those curious about joining can discover our memberships for a closer connection to art, in Paris and around the world.