Paris Line Up: 2023 Exhibitions you Can’t Miss

Paris promises a plethora of remarkable exhibitions lined up for this year from historical staples to innovative experimental installations. Here’s a quick look at three must-see openings that are worth traveling to.

“Avant l’orage” presented by the Pinault Collection throughout the spaces of the Bourse de Commerce.

February 8th through September 11th, 2023

From February to September, from winter to autumn, the cycle of exhibitions presented by the Pinault Collection entitled Avant l’orage, invites visitors on a journey from shadow to light, through installations and works, some iconic, others new, by some fifteen artists, throughout the spaces of the Bourse de Commerce. 

Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, in the urgency of the present, before the storm breaks again, the artists in the exhibition invent unusual ecosystems that contain new seasons.

Whereas ancestral calendars were conditioned by cosmic movements, our frantic race for progress and abundance has irrevocably transformed our environment. Its disruption forces us to adapt in turn. Formerly the granary of Paris, the Bourse de Commerce building has been both a witness to and an agent in the global acceleration of predatory trade since 1889, resulting from colonisation and the intensive exploitation of the planet’s resources. The building embodies this new, desynchronised cycle of time. In the iron, glass, stone, and concrete architecture of the Bourse de Commerce, which could be that of a greenhouse, a series of fleeting and contradictory temporalities appear, including the landscape imagined by Danh Vo for the Rotunda.

“Matisse. Cahiers d’art, le tournant des années 30” at the Musée de l’Orangerie.

March 1st through May 29th, 2023

In 1930, Matisse left France and traveled to Tahiti, so deliberately taking a break from creation, and reaching a turning point in his career. The “Matisse. Cahiers d’art, le tournant des années 1930” exhibition revisits this decisive decade. It is through the prism of Cahiers d’art, the great avant-garde magazine created by Christian Zervos in 1926, that the exhibition will be presenting Matisse’s work in the 1930s. The mouthpiece for international modernism and the aesthetic trends of its day, the magazine reported on the artist’s production throughout the interwar period.

 

The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the decade with a view to understanding their major concerns. Largely excluded from the art scene during the 1920s, the painter’s work once again became a subject for the era’s debates on ideas and reflections, due to regular publications in Cahiers d’Art, highlighting his pre-1916 paintings – the most radical among them in particular – and reporting on his production underway. Articles and reproductions of Matisse’s works helped relaunch his competition with Picasso. In successive issues of the magazine, Matisse featured alongside the artists of his time: Georges Braque, Juan Miro, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Marcel Duchamp. 

“From February to September, from winter to autumn, the cycle of exhibitions presented by the Pinault Collection entitled Avant l’orage, invites visitors on a journey from shadow to light, through installations and works, some iconic, others new, by some fifteen artists, throughout the spaces of the Bourse de Commerce. ”

“Basquiat x Warhol, à quatre mains”, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.

April 5th through August 28th, 2023

After the “Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition in 2018, the Foundation continues its exploration of the artist’s work, this time revealing his collaboration with Andy Warhol.

From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) produced around 160 canvases together, “four-handed”, some of which were among the greatest of their respective careers. Witness to their friendship and this common production, Keith Haring (1958-1990) will speak of a ” conversation occurring through painting, instead of words” , and of two minds merging to create a “third, separate and unique » . 

“Basquiat x Warhol, four-handed”, the largest exhibition ever devoted to this unique work, will bring together more than three hundred works and documents, including eighty jointly signed canvases; Individual works by each artist will also be presented, as well as a group of works by Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Michael Halsband… in order to restore the artistic scene of downtown New York in the 1980s.

Written by Lo Sampadian