Art Basel is in full bloom in Paris this October, drawing the international art world to the city’s most dynamic galleries. Across Gagosian and Galerie Max Hetzler, the expressionist abstractions of Albert Oehlen extend the pulse of summer into autumn, their bold gestures offering warmth as the season cools. At Galerie Crèvecœur, the spotlight turns to Emma Reyes in her first solo exhibition, an overdue celebration of the self-taught artist whose vivid visual language is rooted in indigenous memory, rural iconography, and anti-colonial thought.
This Whitewaller selection captures a season of dialogue, self-reflection, and redefined identity. Each exhibition pushes beyond the purely visual, urging us to confront what lies beneath perception and to reconsider our connections with others through the shared experience of art.
Laurie Simmons: “Black & White”
Almine Rech Matignon
8th Arrondissement
Laurie Simmons, “Woman Listening to Radio,” 1976, Silver gelatin print, 20.3 x 30.5 cm, © Laurie Simmons, courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Almine Rech presents “Laurie Simmons: Black & White,” an exhibition that bridges the artist’s formative early photographs with her latest multimedia explorations. On view at the gallery’s Matignon space, the show introduces new wall sculptures from her Deep Photos series, recent paintings from Autofiction, and a new video work, alongside silver gelatin prints from her seminal Early Black and White (1976–78). Together, these works trace Simmons’s enduring investigation into staged imagery, psychological narratives, and constructed realities, reaffirming her influential role in shaping contemporary photography and visual culture across nearly five decades.
What we love: Several photographs from Simmons’s early work in 1976 feature staged domestic scenes set inside a charming 1950s tin dollhouse.
Laurie Simmons at Almine Rech Matignon
October 18 – December 20, 2025
Christopher Le Brun: “Moon Rising in Daylight”
Almine Rech Matignon
3rd Arrondissement
Christopher Le Brun, “Moon Rising in Daylight III,” 2024, oil on canvas, 264.5 x 154 cm, © Christopher Le Brun, courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech, photo by Stephen White and Co.
Almine Rech presents “Moon Rising in Daylight,” a solo exhibition of new paintings by Christopher Le Brun. The British artist reflects on the idea of “pure painting” as an expansive field of imagination, where color, light, and movement unfold like a kind of pictorial music. Inspired by the shifting weather and limitless horizons of his coastal upbringing, Le Brun’s works embrace layering, changeability, and poise. Suggesting both stillness and imminence, his canvases invite viewers to experience perception anew—like discovering the moon faintly visible in daylight, a fleeting moment of beauty and revelation.
What we love: Christopher Le Brun’s artwork harnesses the white-cube space so the canvas leaps forward and feels bathed in light.
Christopher Le Brun at Almine Rech Turenne
October 18 – December 20, 2025
Gerhard Richter: “Gerhard Richter”
David Zwirner
3rd Arrondissement
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2001. Oil on alu dibond © Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025) Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2001. Oil on alu dibond © Gerhard Richter 2025 (20102025) Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
David Zwirner presents an exhibition of Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential living painters, at its Paris space on rue Vieille du Temple. Following major solo shows with the gallery in New York and London, this exhibition brings together new works on paper alongside key series from the 1990s to 2010s, including photo paintings, Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings), and reflective glass installations. Marked by wide-ranging techniques and approaches, the works reveal Richter’s relentless inquiry into the possibilities of painting. Coinciding with Gerhard Richter at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the exhibition underscores his enduring impact on contemporary art.
What we love: The space lets us follow Richter’s journey—from photo paintings to paper works and glass installations—and fully appreciate his creative genius as he carved his path through the art world.
Gerhard Richter at David Zwirner
October 20–December 20, 2025
Yann Stéphane Bisso: “Les nuées sont des vagabonds qui dérivent”
exo exo
10th Arrondissement
Yann Stéphane Bisso, “Orange Moon,” 2025, oil on linen, 180 x 185 cm, courtesy of the artist and exo exo.
Yann Stéphane Bisso, 2025 by Lanne Kenfack Kitio
exo exo presents “Les nuées sont des vagabonds qui dérivent,” the first Paris solo exhibition by Yann Stéphane Bisso (b. 1998, Sangmélima, Cameroon). Through a distinctive approach to landscape painting, Bisso investigates the historical memory of his dual identity, drawing on Édouard Glissant’s writings on diaspora and creolization. His works reimagine the classical genre as a poetic and political space, probing themes of absence, memory, and survival. Engaging with Rasheedah Phillips’s reflections on temporalities, Bisso positions traces—material, bodily, and mnemonic—as palimpsests that complicate linear history. The exhibition becomes an archaeology of fragments, where displacement and belonging converge in suspended, visionary geographies.
What we love: Rather than freezing a single moment, Yann Stéphane Bisso’s paintings flow through time—the figures and natural forms move in harmony, embodying the shifting temporality of the writing that fuels his vision.
Yann Stéphane Bisso at exo exo
October 9 – December 6, 2025
Albert Oehlen: “Endless Summer”
Gagosian & Galerie Max Hetzler
8th & 3rd Arrondissements
Albert Oehlen, “Untitled,” 2025, acrylic, oil and lacquer on canvas, 274.3 x 228.6 cm, © Albert Oehlen, photo by Simon Vogel, courtesy
the artist and Gagosian.
Albert Oehlen, “Untitled,” 2024, oil on canvas, 190 x 128 cm, © Albert Oehlen, photo by Simon Vogel, courtesy the artist and Gagosian
This autumn, Gagosian (rue de Ponthieu) and Galerie Max Hetzler (rue du Temple) present “Endless Summer,” a sweeping exhibition of new and recent paintings by Albert Oehlen (b. 1954). Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist methodology, and self-conscious amateurism Oehlen engages with the history of abstract painting, pushing the basic components of abstraction to new extremes. The paintings in “Endless Summer” explore the theme of the bather, a motif deeply embedded in French art history that captivated such artists as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso. (Gagosian, 4 rue de Ponthieu and Galerie Max Hetzler, 46 & 57 rue du Temple.)
What we love: Spanning two galleries, the exhibition mirrors the spirit of an “Endless Summer,” allowing us to relive its warmth and energy anew.
Albert Oehlen at Gagosian & Galerie Max Hetzler
October 20 – December 20, 2025
Gabriel Orozco: “Partituras”
Galerie Chantal Crousel
3rd Arrondissement
Gabriel Orozco, 2025, 58.5 × 46.5 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo by GLR Estudio.
Galerie Chantal Crousel presents Gabriel Orozco’s “Partituras,” a series unfolding from the artist’s piano improvisations into transcribed notations, drawings, and tempera paintings. Each piece becomes its own musical score, blurring the line between sound and image. Constantly moving between Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, and New York, Orozco infuses his practice with the circumstantial poetry of daily life, exploring the porous relationship between art and place. His works dissolve the boundaries between object and environment, geometry and organic form, creating visual rhythms that echo chance, paradox, and the circulatory nature of movement and perception.
What we love: Across each canvas, sound, color, and shape move in harmony. Orozco finds inspiration not just in a city’s look but in its pulse, the everyday sounds echoing from block to block.
Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel
October 20–November 22, 2025
Rirkrit Tiravanija at “In Aliens We Trust”
Galerie Chantal Crousel
3rd Arrondissement
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2024 (the continuum of insidiousness, Bangkok post, may 16, 2023), 2024, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo by Jiayun Deng.
Galerie Chantal Crousel presents “In Aliens We Trust,” a new solo exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija. Known for redefining the boundaries of the exhibition space, Tiravanija explores ideas of community and otherness through sculptures, layered canvases, silver-leaf works, and photography. For more than three decades, his practice has transformed galleries into places of social exchange, where conviviality, reciprocity, and hospitality reimagine art’s role in society. In this presentation, Tiravanija continues to blur the line between object and encounter, creating environments that challenge the limitations of the “white cube” and invite audiences into critical dialogues on connection and belonging.
What we love: Among the highlights are canvases layered with newspaper and silver-leaf, where the shimmering metal recalls the ritual of gilding and turns ephemeral print into luminous presence.
Rirkrit Tiravanija at Galerie Chantal Crousel
October 20–November 22, 2025
Tomasz Kowalski: “Tomasz Kowalski”
Crèvecœur
7th Arrondissement
Tomasz Kowalski, untitled, 2025, oil on canvas,165 x 116 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Crèvecœur, Paris, photo by Alex Kostromin.
Tomasz Kowalski, Staircase, 2025, oil on linen,140 x 100 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Crèvecœur, Paris, photo by Alex Kostromin.
Crèvecœur inaugurates its new Rue de Beaune space with the first Paris solo exhibition of Tomasz Kowalski (b. 1984, Szczebrzeszyn, Poland). His compositions unfold within staged interiors—subway cars, mirrored corridors, theater sets—spaces of waiting and projection where orientation falters and vision slips. Fragmented architecture, reflections, and sudden spatial ruptures slow perception, while stylized figures recall Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus geometries. Drawing also from postwar Polish Surrealism, Kowalski employs a restrained palette and flattened logic to create rhythmic, psychologically charged scenes. Each work is at once schematic and unsettling, balancing abstraction and narrative to probe the boundaries of space, vision, and form.
What we love: In Staircase, Kowalski renders figures that almost merge with the surrounding architecture, creating a subtle dissolution of individual identity within built space and evoking a sense of post-war psychological dislocation.
Tomasz Kowalski at Crèvecœur
October 20 – December 6, 2025
Emma Reyes: “Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando”
Crèvecœur
7th Arrondissement
Emma Reyes, Untitled, 1987, oil on linen, 193 × 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Crèvecœur.
Emma Reyes, Untitled, 1986, acrylic on canvas paper, 72 × 89 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Crèvecœur.
Crèvecœur presents “Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando,” the first solo exhibition at the gallery devoted to Colombian artist Emma Reyes (1919–2003). Spanning nearly five decades, the show gathers emblematic works alongside archival materials across three gallery spaces, including 5 rue de Beaune—where Reyes exhibited in 1967. Largely self-taught, she transformed embroidery’s discipline, learned in a Bogotá orphanage, into a unique pictorial language of lush vegetal surfaces, hybrid figures, and mythic forms. Rooted in Indigenous references, rural iconographies, and anticolonial thought, Reyes’s practice challenges Western modernism. This rediscovery coincides with renewed institutional recognition, affirming her place as a singular voice in global art history.
What we love: Some of the canvases are significantly larger than the natural forms that inspired them, creating a striking contrast and inviting viewers to explore the beauty of the natural world on an expanded scale.
Emma Reyes at Crèvecœur
September 5 – November 29, 2025
Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, Kirill Savchenkov: “Props”
Galerie Derouillon
2nd Arrondissement
Diane Dal-Pra, Solo show ‘‘Remaining Parts,’’ 2022, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris © Grégory Copitet.
Derouillon presents “Props”, a group exhibition curated by Marion Coindeau with Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, and Kiril Savchenkov. “Props” approaches absence as a critical experience through which our everyday perceptions are reexamined, bringing to light fractures in the fabric of the world and exploring the in-between where the familiar slips into the uncanny, embracing the inevitability of what escapes our grasp. Moving beyond the humor or melancholy often tied to the eerie, the artists draw on its unsettling quality to reveal the forces of domination and the images that shape our daily lives. The exhibition is guided toward a more sensitive form of knowledge, opening a space for reflection, for questioning the obvious, and for embracing dissent.
What we love: The exhibition invites us to pause and reflect on the routines and images that shape our everyday lives, encouraging a deeper awareness of the unseen forces beneath the familiar.
Uri Aran, Diane Dal-Pra, Shuang Li, Liz Magor, Kirill Savchenkov at Galerie Derouillon
October 16 – November 29, 2025
Lutz Bacher, Christelle Oyiri, Martine Syms, Victor Unwin, Alan Vega: “Trap”
Galerie Derouillon
2nd Arrondissement
Victor Unwin, Trap, 2025, inkjet on glossy paper, aluminum frame, glass, courtesy of Victor Unwin.
Lutz Bacher, toilet, 2013, rubber, dust lafayette anticipations fonds de dotation famille moulin, courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
Derouillon presents ‘’Trap’’, a group exhibition curated by Simon Gerard with works by Lutz Bacher, Christelle Oyiri, Martine Syms, Victor Unwin, and Alan Vega. ‘’Trap’’ explores how artworks can act as conceptual traps, where apparent clarity and consensuality conceal deeper, more opaque meanings. As a reaction against some forms of “political” art and exhibitions which can be seen as a sort of “reality police,” the exhibition doesn’t “tackle problems” nor “address issues”—it seeks to trigger discussion, debate, doubt. When misinterpretation protects a work, the very difficulty of transmission sharpens the reward and gives it more meaning.
What we love: The dialogue transforms with each audience, shaped by the unique perspectives of those present at the show.
Lutz Bacher, Christelle Oyiri, Martine Syms, Victor Unwin, Alan Vega at Galerie Derouillon
October 9 – November 22, 2025
Jaume Plensa: “5 rêves, 5 désirs”
Galerie Lelong
8th Arrondissement
Jaume Plensa, “Balma VIII,” 2024, mixed media on paper, 63 × 153 cm © Jaume Plensa, courtesy of Galerie Lelong.
Galerie Lelong presents “5 rêves, 5 désirs,” a new exhibition by internationally renowned sculptor Jaume Plensa, staged across its two Paris spaces on rue de Téhéran and avenue Matignon. Bringing together recent works in alabaster, iron, bronze, and works on paper, the exhibition explores Plensa’s enduring fascination with dream and desire as poetic, corporeal, and spiritual forms. From alabaster faces emerging like waterlilies to monumental portraits in iron and ethereal white bronze, the sculptures evoke silence, introspection, and transcendence. Complemented by drawings that hover between presence and absence, the exhibition reaffirms Plensa’s singular ability to merge materiality and metaphor into meditations on humanity and being.
What we love: The sculptures invite viewers to move around them, offering a dynamic, three-dimensional experience from every angle.
Jaume Plensa at Galerie Lelong
September 12 – October 25, 2025
