We hardly want to say it lest we will it into action, but the summer holidays are drawing to a close. We know, we know. But, there’s no time to mourn, as Parisian museums have been beavering away while the rest of the world has been frolicking in the sunshine.
The fruits of their labour are a raft of unmissable exhibitions taking place over the autumn-winter 2025/2026 season. Don’t just take our word for it: the stellar line-up includes Nina Chanel Abney, Gerhard Richter, Tyler Otobong Nkanga and Vassily Kandinsky. Without further ado, here’s a round-up of the best Parisian exhibitions to keep you occupied on gloomy afternoons.
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‘Exposition Générale de la Collection’ at the Fondation Cartier
A new space for a new chapter. On October 25, the Fondation Cartier will show off its brand-new 8,500-square-metre home, designed by Jean Nouvel, inside the former Louvre des Antiquaires on Place du Palais-Royal. To mark the occasion, the curators are going big: a sprawling group retrospective bringing together 600 works (across every medium and style) from more than a hundred artists who have shaped the Fondation’s 40-plus years of programming. Adding an extra layer of meaning, the exhibition nods to the historic fairs of objects and garments once held on this very site in the 19th century.
🗓️ October 25, 2025 – August 23, 2026
‘Nina Chanel Abney’ at Galerie Perrotin
A new collab and a comeback. To celebrate signing with French art tycoon Emmanuel Perrotin, American artist Nina Chanel Abney has announced her first solo show in Paris since 2018 at Perrotin’s Rue de Turenne outpost. This exhibition will retrace almost twenty years of Abney’s career, during which she made her mark with bold, large-scale canvases bursting with colour and geometric forms, tackling race, gender, and the myths (and pitfalls) of the American dream.
🗓️ September 6 – October 11, 2025
‘Paname, Bilal Hamdad’ at Petit Palais
Bilal Hamdad is an illusionist. Trained at the Fine Arts of Sidi Bel Abbes and Paris, the Algerian artist makes us question what we’re seeing: is it photography? Is it a painting? In fact, it’s a bit of both. To truly appreciate Hamdad’s masterful brushwork, which blurs the line between photography and hyperrealistic oil paintings, you must closely examine his artworks. From October 17, 2025, to February 8, 2026, you can do so at the Petit Palais, which is showcasing around twenty of his works (including two never-before-seen pieces), depicting Parisian landscapes.
🗓️ October 17, 2025 – February 8, 2026
‘I Dreamt of You in Colours, Otobong Nkanga’ at the Museum of Modern Art
Otobong Nkanga’s art springs from both the depths of the Earth and of herself. Now showing at the Musée d’Art Moderne – her first solo exhibition in Paris – the Nigerian-born, Belgium-based artist has spent the past two decades crafting a singular, multidisciplinary practice that probes the interdependence of bodies and environments. Through installations, tapestries, and sculptures – often presented in cross-section, almost like a biology textbook – Nkanga explores mineral extraction in Africa, alongside the values and violences tied to environmental exploitation. The result is at once spiritual, organic, powerful, and breathtaking
🗓️ October 10, 2025 – February 22, 2026
‘Gerhard Richter’ at Fondation Louis Vuitton
Gerhard Richter is Fondation Louis Vuitton’s golden child. After featuring in several group shows here – including the inaugural one – the German painter finally gets his own full-scale retrospective, running October 17, 2025, to March 2, 2026. This blockbuster will unfold chronologically across every gallery in the Fondation, tracing nearly 70 years of artistic reinvention. Expect it all: the early photo-based paintings, his deep dives into abstraction, works grappling with German history, tributes to American avant-garde composer John Cage, his love-hate relationship with painting, plus ventures into sculpture, drawing, and photography. A career-spanning epic, Richter-style.
🗓️ October 17, 2025 – March 2, 2026
‘Wish this Was Real, Tyler Mitchell’ at Maison Européenne de la Photographie
Prodigy alert! For its final rotation of the year, the Marais photography hub is hosting the first French exhibition dedicated to American photographer Tyler Mitchell. Back in 2018, Mitchell made history (and dazzled the world) by shooting Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue US – becoming the magazine’s first-ever Black photographer cover star at just 23. Since then, he’s emerged as one of the leading voices of a new photographic generation, with prints that radiate a kind of militant grace. His images celebrate African American communities, reclaiming their history, daily life and – just as importantly – their dream.
🗓️ October 15, 2025 – January 25, 2026
‘1925-2025. Cent ans d’art déco’ at Musée des Arts Décoratifs
A few weeks ago, rounded up the world’s most stunning Art Deco buildings to mark 100 years of a movement that infused every layer of art and craft with its signature blend of elegance, precision, and geometry. That centennial will be celebrated at the end of the year with a monumental exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The catalogue promises over 1,000 pieces spanning diverse forms – from Yves Saint Laurent outfits and Pierre Chareau’s desk-library to a Raymond Templier brooch and a full-scale Orient-Express model – tracing the movement’s lineages, its many facets, and influences, all the way through to contemporary interpretations.
🗓️ October 22, 2025 – April 26, 2026
‘POLARAKI, mille Polaroid’ at Musée Guimet
Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography career began on his honeymoon in the 1970s when he took pictures of his wife, Yoko. He rose to fame the following decade by capturing, without censorship, the dazzling and gritty spectacle of Tokyo’s red-light district, Shinjuku. Since then, his work has constantly swung between a fascination with death – especially after Yoko’s passing in 1993 – and eroticism, a drive he often channels through his ever-present Polaroid camera.
The Musée Guimet, which dedicated an exhibition in 2016 to his ‘bindings’ (Araki is a master in the art of kinbaku, Japanese bondage), recovered last May a collection of these Polaroids held by the collector Stéphane André. These photos will be displayed in ‘43 columns of 9 frames arranged edge-to-edge from floor to ceiling,’ mirroring the layout in André’s apartment. This immersive setup offers a dual perspective: on Araki’s art and the collector’s gaze – plus, of course, our own.
🗓️ October 1, 2025 – January 12, 2026
‘Minimal’ at the Bourse de Commerce
For its final exhibition of the year, the Bourse de Commerce is giving minimal art free rein across its galleries. Emerging in the 1960s, this movement rethought the very place of the artwork – both in form, how it’s presented to the public, and in content, with simplicity and economy at its core. Featuring around 100 works by some 40 artists, Minimal will explore the movement’s global currents and local variations, with a particular spotlight on its first two decades. Highlights include a gallery devoted to the French debut of ‘weaver’ artist Lygia Pape and another dedicated to Mono-ha, the raw Japanese branch of minimal art.
🗓️ October 8, 2025 – January 18, 2026
‘Val Souza – Vênus’ at Maison Européenne de la Photographie
As part of the France-Brazil Season, the Maison européenne de la Photographie hands over its Studio to Carioca photographer Val Souza to deconstruct photography and the representation of Black female bodies in Brazil and beyond. To fuel her exploration, Souza has assembled a corpus of over 800 images spanning eras and formats: self-portraits, portraits of Nina Simone and Kim Kardashian, magazine spreads, snapshots of unknown women, ethnographic material, and a focus on Saartjie Baartman – the ‘Hottentote Venus’- who was enslaved and exhibited in the early nineteenth century.
🗓️ September 3 – September 28, 2025
‘Migrations et Climat. Comment habiter notre monde?’ at Palais de la Porte Dorée
Millions – even billions, according to some studies – of people have had to, must or will have to migrate because of climate change. It is this reality that the Palais de la Porte Dorée has chosen to analyse and question in its next exhibition, which, for the first time, will take over the entire palace. It is a subject that the curators wanted to address, far from the fantasies of television sets, by surrounding themselves with a panel of scientists, activists and of course, artists. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works (installations, photographs, infographics, testimonies, etc.) created by artists from all over the world, many of whom come from the areas directly impacted.
🗓️ October 17, 2025 – April 5, 2026
‘My Name Is Orson Welles’ at Cinémathèque Française
Do you know of any other Orson Welles films besides Citizen Kane? Often voted the ‘best film of all time’, the movie can overshadow the career of an artist, who, in his era, embodied the figure of an auteur filmmaker against the Hollywood studio system’s Taylorism.
In the 1930s, Welles was a hit in the theatre and the talk of the town because of his pseudo-realistic radio broadcast of an alien invasion, War of the Worlds. It is all these stories, and more, that the Cinémathèque Française will tell in ‘My Name Is Orson Welles’ this autumn, described as ‘a gargantuan exhibition, the most exhaustive to date’ on the filmmaker. Of course his greatest films as a director will be shown, including Macbeth, Falstaff, Thirst for Evil, The Trial (and Citizen Kane, obviously), unfinished films like Don Quixote, around fifteen films as an actor (The Third Man, Moby Dick, etc) and a special selection curated by the Filmmuseum München, which is home to one of the most prominent Orson Welles collections in the world. Also expect essays, trailers, magic shows (yes, really) and talks.
🗓️ October 8, 2025 – January 11, 2026
‘Soulages, une autre lumière’ at Musée du Luxembourg
If Soulages works with darkness, it is paradoxically to find light. Throughout his career, one way he brought it to the surface was by painting on paper. This medium allows the master of abstraction to play with transparency, create palpable contrasts, and work with greater spontaneity than on canvas. Yet, his numerous works on paper – perhaps because they are more fragile – are rarely exhibited.
This autumn, the exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg fills this gap. From September 17, 2025, to January 11, 2026, it will showcase a large selection of some of Soulages’ 130 works, all created on paper.
Another notable aspect of this part of the artist’s work is that most of the paper pieces are painted with walnut stain, a natural colouring agent primarily used by cabinetmakers. Some pieces are also made with ink or gouache. In all of them, it is still the contrast between the dark pigments and the white of the canvas that fascinates Soulages. But there are also works dominated by blue, mostly created in the 1970s, before he devoted himself almost entirely to outrenoir, making light emerge from within the darkness in monochromatic canvases that play with reflections.
🗓️ September 17, 2025 – January 11, 2026
‘Les Gens de Paris, 1926-1936. Dans le miroir des recensements de population’ at Musée Carnavalet
Who were the Parisians between the wars? This is the question the Musée Carnavalet will try to answer in its exhibition Les Gens de Paris, 1926-1936, based on a unique resource: the population censuses carried out in 1926, 1931 and 1936 – the first in the city to list residents by name. These records allow a detailed look at different lives within a neighbourhood or even a single building, revealing migratory patterns, lifestyles and consumption, cultural practices (photography, radio), romantic relationships – many singletons had moved to Paris – and town planning. The exhibition features public figures, anonymous residents, photos, design pieces or even an interactive display that places the faces of contemporary shopkeepers onto postcards from the period.
🗓️ October 8, 2025 – February 8, 2026
‘Jacques-Louis David’ at the Louvre
In 1825, Jacques-Louis David died in exile in Brussels. 200 years later, from October 15, 2025, the Louvre (which has the largest collection of works by the neoclassical painter in the world) pays tribute to him through an unprecedented retrospective, bringing together around a hundred exceptional loans. It’s an exhibition that promises to highlight the unparalleled expressive power of his painting, but also to offer each visitor a true historical journey through France at the turn of the eighteenth century.
🗓️ October 15, 2025 – January 26, 2026
‘Kandinsky’ at Philharmonie
From disco to Kandinsky, the Philharmonie is taking an exciting leap in 2025. In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, the hall will dedicate an exhibition to painter Vassily Kandinsky’s relationship to music. A pioneer of modern abstraction – his untitled Watercolour (circa 1910) is said to be the first of its kind – Kandinsky always had a very special relationship with music, famously possessing the ability to see sounds as colours. This visceral bond inspired him throughout his life to merge music with his artistic practice, seeking an ambitious synthesis of the arts and exploring the notion of ‘pure sound’.
The Philharmonie will present around 100 paintings and drawings, including many borrowed from Beaubourg, alongside musical scores, photographs with his musician friends, his record collection, and engravings of folk songs. An immersive headphone experience will attempt to create a subtle interplay between music, forms and colours, offering visitors a glimpse into the deep passion of the king of abstraction.
🗓️ October 14, 2025 – February 1, 2026
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