Inside Paris’s Fall Museum Season: From Gerhard Richter to George Condo

As Paris enters the fall art season, its museums unveil an extraordinary lineup of exhibitions that bridge eras, disciplines, and continents. The Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce presents “Lygia Pape: Weaving Space,” France’s first solo show dedicated to the Brazilian avant-garde visionary. Across the Seine, the Musée d’Art Moderne spotlights George Condo’s psychological figuration and Otobong Nkanga’s ecological poetics, while the Palais de Tokyo and Jeu de Paume trace global resonances of theory, politics, and image-making.

At the Fondation Cartier’s new home in the Palais-Royal, “Exposition Générale” celebrates forty years of contemporary creation through six hundred works. Meanwhile, the Fondation Louis Vuitton honors Gerhard Richter with a sweeping retrospective of more than six decades. And at Lafayette Anticipations, Meriem Bennani fills the foundation’s vertical space with the kinetic energy of Sole Crushing, a playful and subversive sonic installation that turns rhythm into resistance. Together, these exhibitions affirm Paris as a radiant nexus of art and reflection.

Bourse de Commerce

Lygia Pape: “Weaving Space” 

1st Arrondissement

The Pinault Collection presents “Lygia Pape: Weaving Space,” the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to the pioneering Brazilian artist. A central figure of the Brazilian avant-garde, Pape (1927–2004) created works that merge art, politics, and social engagement, redefining the relationship between artwork and viewer. The exhibition is anchored by her iconic light installation Ttéia 1, C (2001–2007), an immersive constellation of copper wires that transforms with light and movement, embodying her radical concept of “weaving space.” Alongside engravings, films, and her Livro Noite e Dia III, the exhibition traces her exploration of art as sensory and collective experience. Extending beyond the gallery, a reenactment of her seminal performance Divisor will unfold in the streets of Paris on September 12, 2025.

What we love: How Pape’s ethereal use of copper wire turns geometry into choreography—her “weaving” becomes an act of radical intimacy, dissolving boundaries between viewer, artwork, and light itself.

Lygia Pape: “Weaving Space” at Bourse de Commerce
September 10, 2025–January 26, 2026

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

Exposition Générale

1st Arrondissement

The Fondation Cartier inaugurates its new home at 2 Place du Palais-Royal with “Exposition Générale,” a landmark presentation of nearly six hundred works by more than one hundred artists from its Collection. Spanning four decades of contemporary creation, the exhibition highlights the institution’s enduring commitments to art, architecture, living worlds, technology, and science. Conceived as a public space for experimentation and exchange, the show revisits themes from past exhibitions while echoing the 19th-century “Expositions Générales” once hosted in the building, bridging Paris’s history of modernity with today’s global artistic dialogues.

What we love: The show’s democratic sprawl feels like a living archive—where masterpieces mingle with unexpected experiments, revealing the institution’s pulse as both collector and catalyst of creative ecosystems.

Exposition Générale at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
October 25, 2025–August 30, 2026

Fondation Louis Vuitton

“Gerhard Richter”

16th Arrondissement

The Fondation Louis Vuitton presents a landmark retrospective of Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential contemporary artists. Spanning more than six decades of practice, the exhibition brings together over 270 works created between 1962 and 2024, including oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and overpainted photographs. Richter’s ceaseless experimentation with technique and genre—ranging from photo-based realism to abstraction—reveals a singular vision that defies categorization. Organized chronologically, the presentation traces his evolution from early figurative works to his final abstractions, offering an unprecedented view of an oeuvre that has profoundly shaped the language of painting.

What we love: Richter’s restrained emotionalism—his quiet, shimmering tension between photography and abstraction—reminds us that the history of painting is also the history of seeing itself evolve.

“Gerhard Richter” at Fondation Louis Vuitton
October 17, 2025–March 2, 2026

Palais de Tokyo

“Echo Delay Reverb: American Art and Francophone Thought”


16th Arrondissement


The Palais de Tokyo presents “Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophone Thought,” a landmark group exhibition tracing the transatlantic circulation of forms and ideas. Featuring works by over sixty artists, it highlights how U.S. art from the 1970s to today absorbed revolutionary energies from Francophone thinkers, poets, and activists such as Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Simone de Beauvoir. Historic figures like Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Cindy Sherman, and Glenn Ligon appear alongside younger artists including Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Kameelah Janan Rasheed. With new commissions, archival material, and a scholarly publication, the exhibition maps how theory reshaped artistic practices and challenged social structures.

What we love: The exhibition’s conversational energy—its fusion of visual art and revolutionary text—feels less like a survey than a symposium in motion, where ideas reverberate across generations and geographies.

“Echo Delay Reverb: American Art and Francophone Thought” at Palais de Tokyo
October 22, 2025–February 15, 2026

Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris


“George Condo”


16th Arrondissement


The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents the most comprehensive exhibition to date of George Condo, organized in close collaboration with the artist. Bringing together over four decades of his practice, the exhibition spans painting, drawing, and sculpture, highlighting the distinctive approach to figurative art and abstraction by George Condo. Approximately 80 paintings, 110 works on paper, and 20 sculptures are on view, with loans from major American and European institutions. Structured around themes rather than chronology, the show explores a dialogue with art history by George Condo, his exploration of the human psyche, and his ongoing innovations in abstraction.

What we love: The fractured figures of George Condo seem to channel the entire spectrum of human emotion at once—hysteria, humor, and heartbreak rendered with a virtuosity that’s both unsettling and exhilarating.

“George Condo”
 at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

 October 10, 2025–February 8, 2026

Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

Otobong Nkanga: “I dreamt of you in colours”


16th Arrondissement

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris presents “I dreamt of you in colours,” the first major monographic exhibition in Paris devoted to Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Kano, Nigeria). Known for her multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, installation, performance, tapestry, and poetry, Nkanga explores the entangled relationships between body, land, and resources. The exhibition spans her career, featuring early drawings, emblematic installations, and recent works, many drawn from international collections. Central to the presentation is her investigation of extraction, memory, and ecological repair, offering poetic networks of exchange between humans and landscapes.

What we love: Nkanga’s lyrical approach to materiality—thread, pigment, soil—invites viewers to imagine repair not as restoration, but as transformation, where healing unfolds through shared memory and making.

Otobong Nkanga: “I dreamt of you in colours”
 at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
October 10, 2025–February 22, 2026

Jeu de Paume

Luc Delahaye: “Le bruit du monde”

1st Arrondissement

Jeu de Paume presents “Le bruit du monde,” a major retrospective of French photographer Luc Delahaye (b.1962), tracing his production from 2001 to 2025. A former war photojournalist and Magnum member, Delahaye shifted toward large-scale, color works that bridge documentary practice and contemporary art. The exhibition brings together forty monumental prints—including recent and previously unseen works—alongside a long-term video project on Syria and a new large-scale installation. Exploring conflicts from Iraq to Ukraine and global arenas like the UN and COP, Delahaye’s images reflect on the tumult of the early twenty-first century with both detachment and profound human resonance.

What we love: Delahaye’s monumental photographs command both stillness and urgency, confronting us with history’s quiet violence and the haunting beauty of bearing witness.

Luc Delahaye: “Le bruit du monde” at Jeu de Paume
October 10, 2025–January 4, 2026

Lafayette Anticipations

Meriem Bennani: “Sole Crushing”


4th Arrondissement


For her first solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Meriem Bennani transforms the foundation into a vast sound chamber with “Sole Crushing.” Spanning the height of the building, the installation animates more than one hundred flip-flops and slides that strike different surfaces, producing a pulsating composition somewhere between a symphony and a collective uprising. At once playful and political, the work explores notions of togetherness and individuality, evoking crowds in protest, celebration, or ritual. This reimagined version of the piece—originally shown at Fondazione Prada—features a new soundtrack by Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner).

What we love: Bennani’s exuberant orchestration of sound and motion transforms everyday footwear into instruments of rebellion—an ode to collective rhythm, joy, and resistance in the face of conformity.

Meriem Bennani: “Sole Crushing”
 at Lafayette Anticipations
October 22, 2025–February 8, 2026