Virgil Abloh: The Codes
Grand Palais
September 30 – October 10, 2025

The first European survey dedicated solely to Virgil Abloh unveils nearly twenty years of the designer’s multidisciplinary practice through a 20,000-piece archive of prototypes, sketches, objects and personal ephemera. Curators Chloé and Mahfuz Sultan trace the “codes” that structure Abloh’s thinking—formal rules that migrate effortlessly between fashion, footwear, architecture, graphic design and music. The presentation expands the 2022 Chicago edition of The Codes, foregrounding Abloh’s collaborations with artists, athletes and global brands while emphasising his belief in creativity as a collective, open-source enterprise. Workshops, performances and screenings extend the dialogue beyond the galleries, offering an immersive introduction to one of the 21st century’s most influential cultural figures.

Meriem Bennani - Sole Crushing
Lafayette Anticipations
October 22, 2025 – February 8, 2026

For her largest Paris installation to date, Meriem Bennani transforms the foundation’s four-storey void into a resonant sound box where more than a hundred flip-flops and slides behave like autonomous percussionists. Animated by motors and synced to a new score by producer Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner), the footwear strikes surrounding surfaces in rhythms that swing between collective pulse and solo riff. The work evokes crowds in protest, stadiums or ritual gatherings, asking how simple gestures can fuse individuals into a single, vibrating body. Playful yet politically charged, Sole Crushing reimagines public space as an orchestra in which every participant leaves a sonic trace.

Steffani Jemison - ciel clair / eaux troubles
Lafayette Anticipations
October 22, 2025 – February 8, 2026

Steffani Jemison’s new commission pairs a gravity-defying sculpture with a film shot during her Paris residency, probing the invisible forces that pin us to the ground—or propel us into new itineraries. Mapping entanglements of violence and liberation across shifting geographies, the artist invites visitors to navigate an atmospheric field rather than a static display. Subtle currents of sound, light and text ask us to rethink orientation itself: movement need not follow prescribed axes, and stillness can hide latent momentum. The exhibition becomes a laboratory for improvising presence, where each step redraws the coordinates of freedom.

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

Occupying every gallery of the Fondation, this unprecedented retrospective assembles 270 works spanning 1962-2024- oil paintings, glass and steel sculptures, watercolours, drawings and over-painted photographs - to chart Richter’s restless interrogation of image and abstraction. The exhibition traces his flight from East Germany, his dialogue with photographic truth, and his persistent testing of painting’s limits, from blurred family snapshots to luminous colour charts and austere grey monochromes. Together the works reveal an artist who treats uncertainty as both subject and method, eternally renewing the medium he calls “pure possibility.”

Kandinsky: La musique des couleurs
Philharmonie de Paris (in partnership with Centre Pompidou)
October 15, 2025 – February 1, 2026

Rarely has music played so decisive a role in a painter’s imagination. Bringing together some 200 works and studio objects, this exhibition places Kandinsky’s journey from Russian landscapes to radical abstraction within the sonic ferment of his era—from Wagnerian epiphany to Bauhaus stage experiments. An immersive headphone parcours pairs paintings and scores, while a “cabinet of a music-lover” displays beloved records, scores and folk songs alongside his colour-sound studies. The result is a polyphonic portrait of an artist who sought nothing less than a total synthesis of the arts.

George Condo
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
October 10, 2025 – February 8, 2026

Conceived with the artist, this landmark survey gathers roughly 80 paintings, 110 drawings and twenty sculptures to map four decades of Condo’s exuberant practice. Eschewing strict chronology, the display unfolds in thematic cycles—dialogues with art history, psychological portraiture and incursions into abstraction—highlighting Condo’s concept of “Artificial Realism” and his relentless remixing of Old Master technique with pop, graffiti and cartoon vernaculars. As the final chapter in the museum’s New York trilogy after Basquiat and Haring, the show underscores Condo’s singular survivalist reinvention of figurative painting.

Minimal
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
October 8, 2025 – January 19, 2026

Gathering masterpieces from the Pinault Collection alongside key loans, this exhibition surveys the global flowering of Minimal art from the 1960s to today. Seven thematic constellations—Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, Materialism—reveal how artists across Asia, Europe and the Americas stripped form to essentials while inviting direct, bodily encounter with space and matter. Works by Judd, Lee Ufan, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse and their peers demonstrate Minimalism’s plurality, challenging the movement’s American-centred narrative and foregrounding its enduring influence on contemporary practice.

Sargent: The Paris Years (1874–1884)
Musée d’Orsay
September 23, 2025 – January 11, 2026

The first French monographic exhibition devoted to John Singer Sargent reunites over ninety paintings, watercolours and sketches—including Madame X on rare Parisian loan—to illuminate the formative decade the American master spent in the French capital. From his training with Carolus-Duran to the scandal that propelled him to London, the show traces Sargent’s meteoric rise amid the salons, cafés and cosmopolitan circles of 1870s Paris. Dazzling portraits of friends, patrons and fellow artists sit alongside luminous travel studies, revealing a painter whose technical bravura and psychological acuity matched the restless modernity of his age.

3 September 2025 | Exhibitions